Where Did It All Go Right? (10 page)

However, all this healthy walking didn’t last long. To help ensure that OPEC could hold the rest of the world to ransom for the rest of the decade, we ‘tinies’ soon fell into a rota of being driven to school with other kids from the estates. Quite unnecessary. What
were
we, crippled? Perhaps the paranoia-inducing public information films has started to bite, but I doubt that somehow, judging by the freedom we enjoyed the rest of the time. I put it down to the simple fact of
having cars
.
²

When it was Dad’s turn to drive us in, he would make us laugh by playing the game of ‘kangaroo petrol’, which involved him ‘bouncing’ the car up Abington Park Crescent using the accelerator. ‘We’ve got kangaroo petrol!’ Good old Dad. I don’t remember Mr Needham or Mrs Stenson providing in-car vaudeville entertainment.

The playground at Abington Vale Primary School was 76.75 metres long. I know this to be the case because on 15 June 1973,
see here
in my maths text book required me to measure the playground with one of those wheels you push along which clicks to register every metre. It clicked 76 times. This, as you will have noted, is the kind of evocative information you get from my diaries. In truth, entries for the primary school years are rarely that
helpful
. For instance, when I moved up to Class 6 in September I merely noted, ‘We have got the same teacher as the last class.’ Cheers, Samuel Pepys.

The unnamed teacher was, in fact, Mrs Munro; a raven-haired woman of even temperament – one of the ‘young’ teachers, by which I mean she didn’t look like someone’s nan – and she had a mentally and physically handicapped son called Steven whom she occasionally brought into school just to scare the life out of me. As I say, we’ll come to my childhood fear of the handicapped later …

I digress. Before we get to the relative safety of Mrs Munro, we must first pass through hell.

Now, looking back, I can see that I enjoyed primary school by and large. I had no reason not to. It was a bright, clean, well-stocked little one-storey establishment whose 76.75-metre playground came replete with hopscotch grid and climbing frame, and it had its own sports field up the back. There was the aforementioned Chip club, I made loads of friends and only shat my pants once.
³
Simon’s children have since passed through the very same school and Melissa’s eldest boys are there as I write (Simon even moved house to ensure his girls were in the catchment area). But I’m telling you now and I’m telling you this: Mum literally had to drag me through the gates when I first started, kicking and screaming. I didn’t know much at the age of five, but I knew I did not want to go to Abington Vale Primary School, or any other.

Mum had tried acclimatising me –
like other kids
– by putting me into a day nursery, or play school, but I wasn’t falling for that. It was obvious to me that whichever way you sliced it, school was a big place full of people I didn’t know with the huge disadvantage of not being home. Never mind that all you did there was paint pictures and listen to stories, you might as well have been packing me off to Treblinka.

We know that I was a little sod, pre-school. So imagine how
anxious
my poor mother must have been to offload me elsewhere for a few blessed hours a week after five years of my headbanging and mithering. I know I did spend some time at nursery school but these are dim memories of a dark, cavernous place with the whiff of carbolic soap about it. I think they had a slide there but I was probably too introspective and homesick to go down it. I discover now that my ill-visited play school was held in the hall of Victoria Road Congregational Church. I was suspicious of organised religion even then.

My first day of proper school, 1970, involved much wailing and gnashing of milk teeth, though I remember the surrender more vividly than the skirmish, when Mum finally handed me over to Mrs Carter and helper Mrs Sutton and I was truly off her hands. (I know I’m not unique in kicking up at this most stressful of times – Julie has since told me that she was so difficult to prise from her mother’s legs she clawed great holes in her tights.) I’m told that I gave it the full Tasmanian Devil on subsequent school mornings, but I must have settled down within a week or two. I remember the very first thing I did on that very first morning. Mrs Carter (one of the someone’s-nan teachers – she wore a mysterious support bandage under her tights the whole time) asked me what I wanted to do. I had the choice of anything – apart from going home – and, through my snivelling, I managed to convey to her that I wanted to draw a picture. So I was furnished with copious thumb-like wax crayons and a sheet of that cheap, shiny off-white school paper and I drew a picture. Of a man.

Playtime was a trauma all of its own. (Perhaps we’re getting somewhere.) We were
forced
to go outside and
play
in the playground. I know – it’s a good thing the European Court of Human Rights hadn’t been established. Not having any friends – can this be true? – I stood as close to the outside door of my classroom as physically possible without actually clinging pathetically to the handle, and I guess the scent of my victimhood was strong. A bigger boy (he must have been seven – practically shaving age) came up to me and methodically twisted both my ears and squeezed my nose, then walked nonchalantly away. Not a word was spoken. I was so shocked I didn’t even cry. Not quite being roasted over an open fire, Tom
Brown
style, but it taught me the rules of playground engagement.

Benevolent Mrs Carter let me forgo the next couple of playtimes (I sat in class on my own), but I was pretty soon out there again where all the
play
took place. In short, and to the disappointment of all psychologists looking in, I adapted to school and its rituals in no time – stacking the chairs up on our desks at the end of the afternoon (for the cleaners); recognising our coat hooks by the little pictures above them; sucking school milk through a red plastic straw and hating the last few drops, which were full of ‘bits’ due to the crate being left out in the warm; washing out the plastic paint palettes in the sink after art; recruiting for playground games by starting a ‘chain’ with other boys and marching up and down the quad with our arms round each other’s shoulders shouting ‘All in for Army!’ or ‘All in for Bulldogs!’ until the requisite quorum was acquired; dreading Welsh headmaster Mr Rees filling in for an absent teacher in class and jumping to it whenever he uttered his catch-phrase ‘Sharply!’; and standing still like statues when teacher blew the whistle for the end of playtime and
waiting
to be instructed indoors.

My first term went off without further incident. Though I wasn’t very impressed when Angela Leslie touched the back of my neck with a dried starfish from the nature table, but she did let me feel her hair, which was cool because she was the only black kid in our class.
⁴

* * *

A year later I was in Mrs Cox’s class (another nan), followed by Mrs Munro – who remained our class teacher for two years as if perhaps she was being held back a year – and finally Mrs Crutchley (nan), who eventually waved us off as fully formed ten-year-olds into the wider world. She even taught us some rudimentary French.
⁵
The key
difference
between this and middle school was that we stayed in one classroom for the whole day at primary: your class teacher taught you everything, including PE and ‘arts and crafts’ (with a few floating teachers in reserve like Miss Rowan and Mr Belford, no doubt fresh out of teacher training college at Loughborough or somesuch).

There were Peter and Jane books to read, featuring Pat the dog who had a ball and the ball was red, and then you moved up to a colour-coded series of pirate books: red, yellow, green and blue (but not necessarily in that order). We worked our way through reading books and maths books at our own steam and moved on when we were ready. This strikes me as a very even-handed system. Don’t you have to do exams the moment you’re through the door these days, and if one child fails to meet Ofsted targets for five-year-olds the entire school is closed down and sold to the private sector?

We recited the Lord’s Prayer
⁶
at the end of each afternoon by our stacked chairs, and we sang hymns at assembly, but the school wasn’t heavy on the religion. We were taught Bible stories as if they were historical fact, which some might see as indoctrination, but neither fire nor brimstone were involved. I wasn’t scared of God. He seemed alright – he gave us our daily bread, after all. Some of the bigger boys (aged ten, eligible to vote) devised a subversive accompaniment to the hymn ‘O Jesus I Have Promised’ in which they would ‘count’ the three beats between the first and second line with a slap on the thigh, a clap of the hands and a slap on the cheek with the mouth in an ‘O’ shape (which is enormous fun – I suggest you try it at the next boring wedding or church service you attend) and we all thought that was very cool, like singing that the shepherds washed their socks by night.

O Jesus I have promised … slap, clap, slap … to serve thee to the end …

It wasn’t a particularly naughty school. If Abington Vale had an equivalent of
Grange Hill
’s Gripper Stebson it was a boy called Nelly. His real name was Neil Harwood and he was obviously at the back of the queue when they handed out hard nicknames. But Nelly wasn’t a bully, just a respected bigger boy who had what you might call an attitude problem (it was he who led the slap-clap-slap chorus). There was no trouble here, nothing to see. If my diaries for 1971–74 are anything to go by, Abington Vale Primary was some kind of utopia: all I did was put on plays for the rest of the class, draw pictures of ‘spooks’ and hippos, clamber on the PE ‘apparatus’ (bars, ropes and ladders stored around the edges of the school hall) and make a twat of myself at sport. On this last point, we have these excerpts:

Today we went up the field to play rounders with Class 6. I only scored half a rounder but some scored six … [
make the most of that semi-rounder glory, Collins
] … We played rounders at school. Our team lost but Johnny got loads of people out because he is good at catching and I stood near him so that if he missed the ball I would try and catch it… [
note judicious use of the word ‘try’
] … Today we played rounders and we won with a great score of seven and a half rounders. I didn’t get a rounder but Matthew did and so did Mr Belford … [
we’re getting the picture now
] … We played soccer at school and I was in defence. I got filthy and we lost 1–5 … We played football. I was in rotten old defence again and we lost 3–2 … I did country dancing instead of football. We did the Flying Scotsman, Virginia Reel (my favourite), Ocean Wave and Red River Valley.
⁷

Not a future captain of the team then. No matter that I was King of the Field and Lord High Admiral of the Stream at home and spent more time up trees than on the ground, I was simply not cut
out
for the hand/foot/eye coordination of organised sport. (And never would be, notwithstanding a brief and unexplained flirtation with boys’ hockey at middle school.) Put me in a PE kit and I go to pieces. In the event of war I’m a fielder.

I was smaller than average for my age (1 metre 21 centimetres at eight according to the height chart circa Mrs Munro), but let’s be honest, it was never a major problem because less cachet was attached to sporting prowess at primary school. If you could do (my favourite) the Virginia Reel you were alright. There was no such thing as a poof then. I’ll bet there is today.

Unlike St Custard’s, this was a co-educational school. Country dancing meant holding girls’ hands. Cathy Knights’s hands in my case. She was a buck-toothed girl with long brown hair whose parents must have been well off – they lived in one of the big houses on Abington Park Crescent, which was a bit like overlooking Central Park in New York. I liked her, though I refuse to countenance the notion that there was any frisson in this hand-holding.

There was no talk of girlfriends or ‘going out with’ just yet. A brief craze for kiss-chase, certainly, but this was hardly loaded with confused self-discovery – you ran
away
from your fate after all. Could it be that it was all so simple then? No battle of the sexes. No male shame in choosing the do-si-do over the offside trap. No undercurrent of sexual tension to hand-holding or even, in the name of playground sport, kissing. A certain amount of whispering occurred in Class 6 when a girl called Caroline came in wearing a my-first-bra – and that’s a cross-your-heart to bear we boys will never fully appreciate – but again, it was the sheer novelty of the garment rather than any rum clues of physical development that aroused comment.

These were good years. Clearly not the best years of my life – they’re happening now, obviously – but nothing to write home about on ‘Sunda’.

* * *

In September 1975, to use Molesworthspeak, I became a new bug – at Abington Vale Middle School. Too young and shallow for sentimental farewells when I left Abington Vale Primary in July, the
changeover
was fairly blasé (there’s no mention of leaving in my diary – I came fourth in the sack race on Friday and went on holiday to Wales on Saturday, never to return to my alma mater). ‘I went back to school only it is a new middle school,’ shrugs the diary entry for 1 September.

Still, educational jet lag was reduced by two things:

* * *

So off we all went to ‘big skool’. Because it was a good deal larger (two storeys, two blocks, mobile classrooms, science labs, tennis nets, a library and a gym), pupils came from much further afield than just Abington Vale and as a result most of my primary school crew were randomly scattered throughout different classes, now called forms. Of the old gang, only Angus (Bristol-born Richard Angerson) was in mine – so for the sake of convenience we became instant best mates, and stayed that way for the entire four years. My nickname was ‘Collie’. We were Collie and Angus. Inseparable, except when forced apart by the myriad groups-within-groups that characterised middle school life.