The Ferryman’s Song, by Fergus Laidlaw

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Mr Abernethy taught music in a room at the top of the school where the radiators had never worked, and he taught it in his overcoat. He was a small man with a large voice, and he kept a tuning fork in his breast pocket the way other masters kept a cane. He would strike it on the corner of the piano, hold it to his ear with his eyes shut, and forty boys would fall silent as if someone had died.

I had been in his class for three weeks without opening my mouth. In those days I could not get past the first letter of my own name, and I had learned that if I kept quiet enough for long enough, teachers stopped expecting anything of me. Mr Abernethy, it turned out, was not most teachers.

‘Gillespie,’ he said one Tuesday in November. ‘Stand up.’

Forty heads turned. I stood. My face was burning before he had said another word.

‘Read me the first line of the song on page forty.’

It was an old Scottish air about a ferryman, and the first word was ‘Bonnie’. I could see the B coming towards me like a wall. I tried. My jaw locked. Somebody at the back sniggered, and Mr Abernethy turned his head very slowly in that direction and kept it there until the sniggering stopped. Then he looked back at me, and when he spoke his voice was quite different, low and almost lazy.

‘Don’t say it,’ he said. ‘Sing it.’

He struck the fork, and the note hung in the cold air. I do not know why I obeyed him. Perhaps it was simply that he had not laughed. I opened my mouth and the word came out on the note, round and whole, and then the next word, and the next, until I had sung the entire line without a single catch.

Nobody sniggered. Mr Abernethy nodded once, as though I had handed him a parcel he had been expecting, and told me to sit down. He did not praise me. He did not mention it again that lesson, or the next.

But on Friday there was a sheet of manuscript paper waiting on my desk, with the words of the ferryman song copied out in his small, cramped hand, and underneath, in pencil: ‘Practise in the bath. The acoustics are excellent.’

I kept that sheet for thirty years.

What impressions does the writer create of Mr Abernethy? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.