When we first received the details of the school, with the conditions, the must haves and must dos, poor Betty was in a flat spin because of all the things to be provided. She was anxious to do the right thing, but expense was a big worry. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to acquire the name and address, 30mins walk away, of a boy, David Nicholson, who had started there the previous year. We visited him to ask about the rigidity or otherwise, of the various requirements.
One big worry was the uniform. According to the notes, Blazer, flannels, and cap were de rigeur. That outfit would eat up the money for a lot of equipment. Nicholson told us, however, that the rules on uniform were quite lax. That explains why, on the first morning, when we lined up against the yard wall, 90 odd boys were in regulation brown blazer and grey flannels, and I was in a sage green suit. It was a very smart suit, not new, but made to measure, double breasted, freshly pressed, stylish (think Micheal Hesseltine’s schooldays). But it was anything but uniform. It was unique. Thankfully there were no repercussions. It may have been the suit that alerted the headmaster to our strained circumstances.
The premises had once been part of the adjacent hospital, which had started its life as a workhouse. The staff room, having been the mortuary, still had the marble slabs, with their peripheral gutters, and it was at these slabs that the masters sat to mark homework. No wonder they were such a jolly crew. You will have gathered that we didn’t have teachers; we had masters. You could tell they were masters because they wore billowing, black, academic gowns. To be fair, not all the staff subscribed to this affectation. The more sport orientated preferred to swan around in tracksuits and plimsolls, to show what athletic lives they lead, even when they were teaching maths, geography, or R.E.- I’ve got all three of you buggers there, haven’t I? There appeared to be a small minority of normal dressed, rational human beings, but on closer inspection, most of them turned out to be just weirdos in civvies.
‘Spiv’ Sellars is a frinstance. He was a shorthouse, Malcolm Sargent look-a-like, in full ‘Flash’ mode, even to the hair over his collar. He would issue our geography books and tell us what to read, or which map to draw, then he’d borrow comics around the class- ‘Eagle’ was his favourite; he was an avid ‘Dan Dare’ fan. His feet would go up on the desk, and we wouldn’t hear a peep out of him for the rest of the lesson.
Only once did I ever see him show signs of life, outside of this pattern. Another geography master, Mr. Raines (nicknamed Claude- what else?) had a geography lesson in the next room, separated from us only by a top-glazed , wooden, full height screen. Now Claude had a discipline problem. He couldn’t do it. His lessons with the first year were usually mayhem. By the second year, boys realised that if you buggered about with Claude, you didn’t learn any geography, so they’d settle down to work. But it was a first form next door, and the mayhem was distracting from Spiv’s enjoyment of this week’s spanking of the Mekon’s gang. He walked to the back of the room, climbed on a desk, from where he could just squint through the top light. He watched the bear garden next door, for a minute, then muttered quietly ‘The damn’ fool!’, then climbed down and went back to his comic.
Charlie Smithson, French master, was quite rational, until stressed, then he’d mentally jump rails from France to Burma, and the bad old days in Changi, only this time, he was on the side with the clout. He’d call boys out to the front, for real, or imagined misdemeanours, and have them kneel down, heads bowed, in full decapitation mode.
Our resident sadist was Mr. Ardron. He carried a plimsoll in his waistcoat pocket. It was just the rubber sole, the upper having been stripped off, to facilitate stowage. He even gave it a name- Oscar. Its function? Well, Mr. Ardron just loved beating little boys on the botty with it. In fact, to get the maximum thrill, he wouldn’t just stand and swipe at you, he’d take a 6yd run at you! They have a term for people like him now, and its not ‘Maths Master’.
A master who will live long in my memory, will do so not for any peculiarity of his, but for the circumstances surrounding his departure. I don’t know whether ‘Basil’ was his first name, or a nickname; I don’t recall his surname. I only had him for one year, for chemistry, but in the 5th year, in the slack period between finishing exams and breaking up, Basil was detailed by the head, to undertake a very important mission. Due to leave at that term’s end, Basil usually taught chemistry, but was also qualified to teach biology, should anyone require it. So George, the head, decided to get an extra bit of mileage out of Basil, before he scarpered, by sending him on a tour of the upper school, with this One Off, Special Offer you can’t refuse, for a Limited Period, Only.
Which is why, one afternoon, as we were settling down with our books and chess sets (games of a cerebral nature, only- no games of chance, or random fortune) Basil burst into the room with-
“Right! Put your books and games away, because I’m going to tell you, because I think you’re old enough to know, how a woman has a baby!” Then he turned to the blackboard and, swiftly and deftly, drew out two very impressive diagrams of reproductive systems, one male, the other, female. Bear in mind that we were still in the process of putting our toys away, and sniggering like mad, but Basil ignored this, and started his pitch as soon as he had finished the drawings, and by the time we had cleared away, we were mesmerised. It was the most informative, interesting, fascinating lesson of my whole school life.
You must realise that, while we had swapped theories and rumours about the modus operandi (bearing in mind that in ’57 or ’58, and at 16 or 17, the actual business under discussion was still some way off) we knew virtually nothing about the precise nature and usage of the specialised equipment employed, or the complicated chemistry involved. To put it another way, we were ignorant, innocent virgins. It was the difference between, watching cars go by, at speed, then being able to stop one and look under the bonnet, then receiving a lecture on the combustion engine.
That evening, I went straight out from school, so didn’t arrive home until late. Jane was in bed when I arrived, fortunately, so Betty went solo with the ‘what have you been doing at school, today’. When I told her how and why the remarkable lesson had come about, she asked, earnestly-
"Well will you tell me, because I still don’t know. When I was pregnant with you, and I asked your Grandma, what the birth would be like, all I could get out of her was ‘It’s the worst pain, soonest forgotten’, and that’s all she said, over and over”.
Sadly, I can believe that. Jane would always settle for a sound bite, instead of using her brain to have a discussion. So I sat at the kitchen table until well after midnight, giving Betty a lesson she had waited nearly twenty years to hear. I wasn’t as good as Basil, but my class was every bit as appreciative.
The only one to compare with Basil, for panache, was Mr. Platts, nicknamed ‘Gus’ after some long forgotten film star, I believe. He taught history. In appearance, he was like Patrick Moore, on LSD. In delivery, he was more Churchillian.
The first time he came into a lesson, in the 1st yr, we were all busy creating the mild mayhem usually associated with 30odd boys without supervision, a mayhem which was usually ended by a gown blowing in and yelling QUIET! and following it with a long moan about little hooligans, and bear gardens. Not Gus. He came in and completely ignored us. He loped across to the desk, dumped an armful of books, then started clearing the blackboard, as if preparing for an officer’s inspection, the blackboard being a 5ft high strip, painted across an entire 20ft long wall. The task took him quite a while, still ignoring us.
By the time the board was clean, the mayhem was really losing steam, and finally we really expected the shit to hit the fan, but no; he still ignored us. He took up a diagram for reference, and starting at the extreme left, he started to divide the board into sections, by vertical, white chalk lines, incomprehensible to us, but not random, because he was measuring the intervals by lengths of the board duster. And at the top of each line, he would chalk a number, in millions.
By the time he was ¾ of the way across the board, the mayhem had died, shrivelled up, and blown away through the open window, and we were just sitting there in silence, trying to work out what he was doing. Finally, he swapped his white chalk for a stick of yellow, went to the right hand extremity, and put a single width, yellow chalk line into the very angle of the wall corner. He came back to his desk, dropped the chalk, and looked at us, for the first time since his arrival. Then he spoke-
“If the left hand end of the board is when the world was first created, in the big bang and the opposite, right hand end of the board is now, then the left edge of the yellow chalk line is when Homo Sapiens first appeared”. Gus wasn’t just a teacher. He was a showman. He was definitely value for money.
We didn’t have classes, but forms- three to a year- ABC. In the first year, dispersal was purely arbitrary. From the 2nd yr, we were streamed, with promotion and relegation prospects for the top and bottom three, in best sporting tradition.
In the 5th form, in an incomprehensible display of sensitivity, to avoid causing embarrassment to a youth out in high society, lord mayor’s banquet, mayhap, by him having to declare himself in form 5C, the ABC were replaced by PQR. Now wasn’t that considerate? I found it bizarre.
Then, in the 6th form, it got really eclectic. 6th and 7th weren’t labelled as such, but Lower 6th and Upper 6th. We aren’t done, yet. They were each sub-divided into Science- that was those taking- um- science subjects, and Modern- that was everydobby else. In spite of the combined hoards of Upper and Lower 6th never being more than a couple of dozen, between them, they enjoyed the benefits of two form rooms, two common rooms and two form masters, the sole function of each of these latter, was to call the register, unless they detailed a pupil to do it, which would give them time for another smoke, in the staff room.
Yes, numbers were low in the 6th, but with all those lovely labels going begging, it would have been a shame to waste them. They left out ‘Remove’. Happen they had nowhere to keep it?
I was quite bright, academically, but because I was neither capable of, nor inclined to sport, all through the school, I and my sort were regarded as ‘Untermenschen’. The annual swimming gala was when I was first weighed in the balance, rather in the manner of a puppy tied in a sack, with a brick.
One day, we were all told to report to our housemasters, at break time. We didn’t have teams, but houses- Conisborough, Peveril, Richmond and York. Castles, see? But houses. Our house, Conisborough, was blessed with a particularly narcissistic popinjay named Peter Belk. He was also our Maths master. He used to stand at the window, and stare at the pregnant women who, having attended the maternity clinic, at the hospital, opposite, were now queuing for the bus, across the road.
So we all presented ourselves, in an orderly queue, at his desk, where he sat with an open ledger. When I got to the head of the queue, and had been identified and located in the ledger, he started with-
“So we’ll put you in the two lengths freestyle, crawl, butterfly-“
“Excuse me; I can’t swim!” I interrupted. Even now, I don’t do swimming. At a push, I could do drowning, but only once, and I’d rather not.
“Oh, don’t worry about that! You’ll be all right.” And he continued to enter me in every event, regardless of my continued assertion regarding my total lack of ability to stay afloat in water taller than me.
That wasn’t the worst of it. I had to attend the public baths, on the day appointed for the in house preliminary heats, Jump in, on command, and set off for the deep end. Only when my feet refused to leave the bottom, and I was being vertically challenged by the water level, was I allowed to grab the broom handle being held out over me for that purpose, and so be hauled to safety, having verified, beyond doubt, allegations of my lack of buoyancy.
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| Drowning in Earnest |
But here’s the best bit. I had to repeat this life threatening exercise for every heat that I was entered in, just in case, in the intervening 5 or 10 minutes, I had sneakily learned to swim, and was keeping it a secret! I’m glad Miss Davies won’t be reading this. It would break her heart.
I fared better with the annual, compulsory, whole school, cross-country run. After the first one, I made damned sure I had a pot on my leg, when it came round again. I ran the first, and I walked the last.
In the first, I stumbled and fell my length, on the black cinder path, in Eccleshall Woods, and I still have black grit, discernable, under the skin, on the underside of my forearms. My pot leg strategy saved me from all the rest, except the last one, but I recall David Cuckson and I making a very leisurely stroll of it, on a pleasant, autumn day. As we passed a mother and toddler, at an un-manned crossing in the paths (the stewards had long packed up by then) our pleasure was only slightly marred when we heard the child ask ‘Mummy, shouldn’t they be going that way?’
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| “..shouldn’t they be going that way?” |
Of course, having just walked past them, we couldn’t see which way the smart-arsed little shit was pointing.