Scottish Catholic Observer

By Kevin McKenna

ONE of Scotland’s most glorious churchyards was bathed in sunlight when Nan McCafferty was laid to rest there on a gorgeous morning in March. The gently sloping terraces of Campsie Cemetery in Lennoxtown gather round the village’s old High Church and the view from Nan’s graveside takes in the sweep of her beloved Campsie Hills. More fittingly perhaps it also lies in the shadow of St Machan’s Primary School where she taught for almost 20 years and where I and countless others were blessed to have her as our teacher. No one else, other than my own parents, did more to nurture in me a love for our Catholic Faith and which sustains me even in this, my Church’s darkest hour.

To describe Nan McCafferty as a good Catholic teacher does not even begin to do justice to her range of gifts. For, in an era mercifully free of ‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ she was also a social worker, artist and philosopher. Fortunately for the generations of children who encountered her she taught in an age when her talents were not constrained by the politically-correct, results-driven straitjacket that thwarts today’s generation of teachers.

That is not to infer that she was an unpredictable maverick who departed from the school curriculum; the academic achievements of many who passed through her classes testified to that. Looking back now it is clear that her own instincts and sound judgement played an equal role in forming her lessons. She had an abiding love of the arts and took every opportunity afforded by the curriculum to encourage all of us to paint, sing, write and play musical instruments. Every child has been born with a gift and she believed that it was simply her job to help bring it to fruition.

She also recognised that some of her pupils may have started life two goals down as it were and were experiencing social and family difficulties that most of the rest of us had been spared. Having been born and brought up in the community in which she taught, she had an intimate knowledge of every family whose children had been entrusted to her care for 30-odd hours a week. As such, she knew when compassion and love was required.

She taught me for three years and I never saw her once use the tawse, that leather instrument of terror that was commonplace in every school in Scotland until a decade or so after she retired. Her daughter, Kathleen Mary, told me last week how proud her mother was that she had never had recourse to corporal punishment. “If I can’t teach without using physical chastisement then I’ve failed,” her mum had said.

I remember too that, occasionally, she would choose a contemporary novel and read it to us in a weekly serialisation. One day in 1974 she treated us to the delights of Jaws, the blockbuster by Peter Benchley which had been published earlier that year. A few smart-alecs, including me, immediately bought the book and raced on ahead, noticing as we did so how many oaths and profanities were included in the dialogue. How would Mrs McCafferty handle these, we wondered? Nan though, simply edited it on the run. Thus, in her adaptation, police captain Brodie, the book’s hero, was turned into a devout Catholic with a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Brodie’s library of expletives was substituted by an assortment of more innocent exclamations such as ‘Sweet mother of Jesus’ or ‘Holy Mother of God’ or ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ and in this way she nimbly negotiated her way through the adult language.

Nan McCafferty was born in 1920 in Milton of Campsie, the sister village of Lennoxtown. Her dream had always been to teach but this was initially denied her. One of her older sisters was already studying at university and, in the days before grants became available, the family could only afford the tuition fees for one of its members. She worked as an accounts clerk at the local paper mill before deciding to fulfil her destiny by taking her teaching degree in her late 30s. By this time she was already a mother of five and her daughters vividly recall her rising at 4am to study before getting her children out to school. Before completing her teaching degree she would become pregnant with her sixth child.

The Catholic communities in Lennoxtown and Milton of Campsie are among the oldest in the west of Scotland and are built around an extended group of close-knit families. They all knew the value of having one of their own teaching future generations of their children and so there was a bed-rock of support to help Nan complete her studies.

Nan McCafferty was forced by health problems affecting her legs to retire from teaching at 58, otherwise she would have continued into her 70s. Yet she simply swapped one form of serving God for another by spending most of the rest her life cleaning and arranging the flowers in St Machan’s Church.

What made her special though, in my eyes, was the way she communicated to us her deep love for her Catholic Faith. This was a gift that had been bestowed upon her and she felt she had a duty to share it with her pupils. Nor was it an untested or sentimental and pious affectation. She had seen each of her two husbands die and, more recently, her son. She knew also that many of her charges would abandon it and lose it altogether. I believe though, that she probably never stopped praying that, for each of us, there would come a day when we would re-discover it. She told us too that, though the Church would encounter some terrible difficulties, the Faith would always prevail. Since I departed primary school, few weeks have passed when I haven’t thought of her.

Mercifully, she was spared the knowledge of the troubles that currently face our Church. But her words from long ago still resonate and I am strengthened by them. If she were teaching today she would be a beacon for anyone bewildered by all that has happened to the Church in Scotland.

Nan is survived by four daughters and a son. There are also ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. As a tribute to her memory, Nan’s daughters have given me permission to re-print one of her poems. I won’t presume to interpret it here, but I think the words speak for themselves:

Time goes by on leaden wing,

Since I said goodbye to you.

We did not know what fate would bring

When we took flight on silver wing.

One brief, sweet moment of our own,

Stolen perhaps,

Not ours to take;

His to give; his to take.

This sacrifice, dear Lord I make,

And when my eyes in heaven will open,

And earthly trammels from me break,

The severed link no longer broken.

You will wait, my hand to take.

—Kevin McKenna is former deputy editor of the Herald and former executive editor of the Daily Mail in Scotland. He is currently a columnist for the Guardian