School

Biographical notes - like these - are free to roam wherever they wish: or at least, that’s what I think. Expect some major omissions and forgive me if I loiter self-indulgently down memory’s less significant cul-de-sacs. However, school is such a major part of anyone’s early life that it would be quite impossible to miss it out completely. Here are some memories.

Like my sister before me, and my brother a year later, I went to St George’s Road School. It was - still is, I gather, a particularly grandiose example of the Victorian rush to build Elementary Schools in the wake of the 1870 Education Act. Towering red iron-brick gables fronted directly onto the street, which skirted the foot of the densely built-up sandstone bluff on which stood St Hilary’s Church; and to get there we had to walk up the long hill of Vyner Road, along the crest of the bluff on Claremount Road, then rapidly down the aptly named sweep of Broadway, directly under St Hilary’s. If we were late we would arrived panting just as whichever teacher was on duty rang the big handbell. Hastily shuffled into militarily straight lines, we were then marched in, class by class.

We wore, my brother and I, the uniform of our caste - short, grey worsted trousers that finished at the knee (the back of which they tickled); white or grey shirt with, in winter, a grey v-necked pullover; a curious straight-ended tie in wasp-like navy and gold stripes that could be stretched to near double its length; a navy blazer, and cap, each adorned with a fanciful woven badge depicting the Saint slaying a rococo sort of dragon; and, almost all year round, a navy gaberdine raincoat belted tightly at the waist. And these things comprised our only wardrobe, in or out of school.

Of our education there I recall little. Our classes, in those boom years after the war, were stuffed to bursting. Wedged in behind oak-topped desks on an iron frame, we were almost sixty to a room, and if - like me - you were minded to conform to the rules and keep your head down, you could pass your entire day un-noticed. Playtime was boisterous and perilous: the school had one narrow, paved yard that rose gently to a brick wall at the far end, and any game that did not involve standing still was a sure recipe for collision and tumble. Knees in those days always had scabs on.

I recall a red-haired youth called Billy Boyes whose “gang” would terrorise the crowded playground. A favourite - and completely forbidden - practice was for a small group to link arms and start to spin around the centre-pin (Billy, I guess). Others would catch hold of the outer arms, held out invitingly, and of course the longer the line, the faster newcomers had to run. In the end, if not stopped by a teacher, the centrifugal strain would loosen a grip somewhere along the line, and the broken outer group of runners would hurtle violently off into the crowd. Do I really recall one heap of fallen bodies being shaken by the audible crack of a leg-bone underneath it all?

Discipline was arbitrary but not over harsh - though even I who never strayed intentionally outside the frame of rules, can tell what a ruler across the palm, or a tweaked ear feels like. Miss Merrick, top class teacher, would regularly leave the whole class unattended on no better control mechanism than the dreaded question when she returned, “Hands up anyone who talked while I was out!”

And we did, of course. We reported ourselves, in those curious, distant days of the 1950’s when all society, it seemed, longed for order and peace, we policed ourselves.

Not that I often offended. My memory is of a disproportionate amount of time being spent with your reading book, and given a good book I was oblivious to anything outside its magical world. I remember, once, becoming aware of a more than usually quiet class, and looking up to find that everyone else had left the classroom for the dinner hour. No-one, it seemed, had noticed that I had not joined them.

It was assumed, at home, that my siblings and I would as a matter of course pass the 11+ exam and progress into grammar school without effort: so I did. I don’t recall ever doubting my progression through the upper echelons of the education system, until I reached GCE A level - but more of that later. In 1956 I went to Oldershaw Grammar school, distinctly the less prestigious of the town’s two grammar schools for boys, but chosen by my parents (children had no say in those days) as being more convenient for us to walk to and from. Indeed, the buildings - a 1920’s sprawl with a girls’ high school downstairs and a boys’ grammar on the first floor - were (if one hurried) a mere 7 minutes from home. So we came home for our dinner, thus missing out on at least half the possible social advantages of attendance.

What do I recall? Surprisingly little, given that I was a pupil there for seven years. Secondary education coincided, for me, with a period of my life when I withdrew wholly from the business of life and became instead a spectator. Some pretty heavy parental moral disapproval, not tempered with either love or understanding, persuaded me that I was not, in essence, a worthwhile person - and that if I wished to regain my place in society I would have to keep my head down, identify the codes of behaviour expected of me, and adhere to them. My sins were theft (things like other people’s sweets) and lying (glibly but obviously unsuccessfully!) to cover my tracks. Also, I strongly suspect, a certain insecure cockiness had to be knocked out of me. Which it was so effectively that I put living on hold for the duration and did not get round to it again until I left home. Not a good time.

Some memories, though. I discovered, thanks to a great little irish games master called Connors, that I was not the physical duffer I had been led to believe. Encouraged by him I became, at 11 or 12, both a good gymnast (owing more to the military than the Olympian!) a nifty sprinter, and a solid, ever-present member of the school rugby team. Oh, how I secretly basked in the reluctant male approval those activities brought me! I trained like a demon, I grabbed hasty food at home so I could rush back to the gym, and for a short while was happy with at least one part of myself. Sadly, all that was undone in the end by genetics. I was called out of class some time in my thirteenth year, my eyes tested, and told I needed glasses - “Tell your mother,” was the terse instruction. Also, I stopped growing, and soon I was no longer a meaty wing-forward, but a rather flimsy, myopic and peripheral figure. We were fast-tracked into the sixth form, my form and I, where I arrived at age 15 to be told that I was surplus to requirements in the school-team rugby department. Which taught me at least one valuable lesson: all the nonsense preached by team-games afficionados about team values and loyalty, is a lie. Loyalty goes one way only: don’t expect the team to care for you.

What else? Music, of course - but I covered that.  It was good, but extracurricular. Socially, school was a desert for me: I was (by choice, now) an isolate and spectator. And the classroom was generally simply a place for caged mice to turn their treadmills. I recall with some affection two fine language teachers, “Dicky” Sareen, who accepted that his adolescent male charges would never really grow fond of German so settled for rounding out our understanding of the way Europe was in those post-war years. And “Oscar” Astley, whose own love of French was - for me at any rate - irresistible. Inevitably (partly in any case because our fast-track curriculum obliged me to choose German over History at age 12) I became a sixth form linguist. My distaste for hard, systematic work, combined with a talent for language, meant that, in German particularly, I winged it. My modern languages were very good - except that I had no vocabulary and guessed at all the rules. In the end this had the great benefit of preventing my taking up a place at Birmingham University at age 17 (far too young) and obliging me to stick at school for a third year in the VIth.

Finally, the appalling threat of a job in the bank with my father produced an English pass just good enough for me to take up a place at York University in its first year, 1963 - and life, at last, began.