Inspiring and tough

“The tales of Tommy Steel, Jock McLure and Harris Academy in a recent edition rang a bell with me,” writes a Craigie regular.

“I too was taught – very well – by Jock McLure. Apart from being enthusiastic about his subject, he was the only one of my teachers who had the will, the drive and the ability to make his pupils work. But for him, this lazy specimen of the human race would never have passed his Highers and never sniffed university or a professional career.

“He was inspiring as well as tough. And I can’t remember his ever using the belt. My degree subjects? French and German, of course.

“Mention of the French for a shotgun interested me. I had always heard the word ‘fusil’, yet the father of the family I visited every year in Orleans went out hunting most weekends in the season.

“I looked it up to find ‘shotgun – fusil de chasse’ (hunting rifle). Jock was right in theory, but wrong in practice, for, as your correspondent pointed out (very unwisely) to Jock, a shotgun is the weapon to use when hunting pheasant.

“It was not a good idea to cross Jock, even if you were right and he was wrong!

“The same dictionary informed me that ‘shotgun marriage’ is ‘mariage forcé’ in French. There’s something very down-to-earth about our friends across the Channel. They call a spade a spade, if not a shotgun!”