Where Did It All Go Right? (11 page)

The changes didn’t appear to affect me adversely. Yet despite my own commendably laid-back attitude, middle school was a culture shock and it made me grow up a bit. For a kick-off, the place used to be a St Trinian’s-style girls’ school – we were only the second mixed year to be inducted, which meant that the top two years were all girls. Bear in mind these were girls aged 12 and 13, in the throes of puberty, and you’ll understand how intimidating the set-up was. We kept well out of their way. They really did have hockey sticks.

But it wasn’t just bigger girls replacing the bigger boys (and the fact that we now had a witch-like head
mistress
, Miss Malins), there were institutional changes too. No more sitting around in one
classroom
all day, idling through pirate books and breaking out the poster paints – at middle school it was timetables, periods, double periods, years, options, groups, prefects, a bell going off at regular intervals and ‘break’ instead of playtime (chiz). And there were so many teachers now, we had to deal with surname clashes. There was plain old Mrs Jones, the initialised Mrs D Jones and Mr Jones. However, only one Mr Leleux.

Even though it was a modern comprehensive, ghosts of the past stalked the corridors. I think they even had a head girl when we arrived, but that was phased out when someone noticed that rationing had also ended. Nevertheless, all pupils were shuffled by surname into five colour-coded ‘houses’, named after saints – St Francis, St Stephen, St Michael, St Luke, St Matthew. Welcome to Hogwarts! Angus and I were in St Francis and we all wore a green badge to identify ourselves. There were green sashes for prefects too, but no marching season I’m happy to report. The musty idea was to instil in us some spurious sense of artificial rivalry. St Francis could have St Stephen any time, that sort of thing. We had saints’ days where you went home early, and house assemblies at the end of each term where ‘credits’ were added up.

I don’t know if the arcane credits system is common, so here’s how it worked: you were awarded credits for doing creditable things, like scoring a goal for the school team (amazingly, I was never to earn one this way), making a good puppet in art, or – the milksop academic route – by accumulating three ‘goods’ for written work. You secured a ‘good’ in your exercise book for doing a good thing like getting all the answers right in a test, while a ‘very good’ was the fast-track route to two goods. Because no stigma was attached to academic excellence at middle school (that would come later), I gaily ratcheted up goods, very goods and credits over the next four years, but I never came out with the highest score at the end of term. That was always some Homo Superior who was clever
and
on the school team.

My first form teacher was the bearded Mr Walman (who, amazingly, teaches at the school to this day, albeit now unbearded). ‘He is very nice,’ I told my diary. And although my diary masks any deep anxiety or antipathy by always looking on the bright side and
saying
everybody new is ‘nice’, Mr Walman was nice. Mr Leleux, though, was a bastard. Pronounced Lur-luur (take the piss at your peril), he was the school librarian; once a week we had a lesson with him in the library, during which we learned all about the Dewey classification system, which was about all you
could
learn in a library lesson apart from how to be quiet, and at the end we got to pick a couple of dog-eared old books which he would sign out and stamp (you could tell he loved stamping). Leleux was a fat old relic from another time who rode a black ARP warden’s bike to prove it: he used to shout at us every week without fail and hit the table with a ruler and it was enough to put you off libraries and reading for ever. No sense of the wonder of books, Leleux – more interested in barking at kids like a sea cow.
⁸

Like any school, the staff could be divided down the middle. There were nice teachers – Miss Parsons (PE), Mrs Hulland (maths), Mrs Hooton (cookery), Mr Edley (games; lunchtime table tennis club, which Angus and I keenly joined in term one), Miss Scott (needlework), and Mrs Dennison (English). And there were bastards who got a perverse kick out of shouting – Mr Brice (woodwork, although to be fair he only shouted if someone did something stupid with a chisel), Miss Malins (assemblies; corridors), Mr Leleux (library) and Miss Borton (also cookery: too much make-up and long fingernails). Then you had Mrs Peck (needlework) who could go either way.

Yes, needlework and cookery. Abington Vale Middle was the height of modernity. Because of its former life it boasted excellent facilities in the lady sciences: home economics and sewing. So a double period of art could mean baking a pineapple upside-down cake or running up a patchwork draught excluder on a sewing machine. Again I look back on this experience as a character-building one. It was a triumph for women’s lib: girls did woodwork, while the boys learned how to thread a bobbin and flour a rolling pin.

In December 1976, Angus, Soardsy (Martin Soards) and I were asked by Mrs Hooton if we would like to recarpet ‘the flat’ in our lunch hours. The flat was a facsimile living quarters located off the cookery room, where, presumably, pupils could play mummies and daddies although it seemed chiefly to be used by the designery teachers as a mini-staff room. This was a major project which we accepted gladly (staying indoors in winter
and
there were credits in it). We pulled up the old carpet and laid brand new carpet tiles in a fancy interlocking pattern over a series of weeks – the sort of practical experience you can’t buy. It was a great success and a credit windfall, except for one
faux pas
: when half the tiles were in place, we had to lay paper notices down requesting visitors not to walk on the carpet yet. In our enthusiasm, we covered these warnings with swastikas – for a joke! They upset one of the Jewish teachers and we were ticked off by Mrs Hooton. A valuable life lesson there in the first year of punk situationism and the reclaiming of symbols.

I also note from my 1976–77 diaries that Jes, Angus and I were very pleased with ‘a sequence’ we’d worked out in PE under the auspices of Miss Sabin (nice). We’re talking about gymnastics of a distinctly homoerotic stripe here, the sort which would culminate in a
Triumph of the Will
style ‘gym display’ in front of the rest of the school and sometimes the parents. All told, isn’t it amazing how unselfconscious we all were at this age? I was even in the choir. On 17 November 1977 – the year of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ – I’m proud to announce in my diary that the teddy I’d made in needlework, Arthur, ‘came second in the teddy contest – HOORAY!’. Far closer to Fotherington-Thomas (‘hullo clouds hullo sky’) than Molesworth, and yet without dishonour or a good pasting.

Middle school was a paradox, but a happy one: it had many of the traditional trappings of a St Custard’s – hall monitors, form captains, homework, chess club, cross-country runs, school sausages, French, algebra, detention, rugby with Mr Bates (I was usually hooker, due to my mini size) – but none of the awkwardness, pressure and inner conflict that comes with the mid-teens, hormones and O-levels. Never mind the patina of protest in some of 1977’s diary entries (‘we were let out of Colditz ten minutes early’), this was play school.

During my three-year tenure, my circle of friends expanded. The old core of Griff, Eddy, Johnny Green, Paul Milner, Kim Gupta, Jes and Angus were joined by Doyan (John Lewis), Dobs (Stephen Tite), Watto (Dave Watson) and Nigel Wilson.
⁹
My repertoire of skills expanded too. We’re moving ahead a bit here, but when I left middle school in the summer of ’78, I could cook, sew, weave, saw, carpet-tile, breast-stroke, climb a rope, play table tennis, pass a rugby ball,
parlez un peu de français
and construct a
Kon-Tiki
raft out of drinking straws.
¹⁰
A renaissance child, no?

I had a fairly natural academic affinity, one which was allowed to blossom at middle school. They gave us exams at the end of each year (a quantum leap from the odd spelling test at primary school) but these did not faze me. At the end of year one, 1976, I came top of the class, with marks like 81 out of 100 for English, 85 for RE and 92 for geography. I fell to second place in 1977, but I came top again in 1978. Star pupil. Combination choirboy-cum-carpeting-genius. Credits to spare. I even put my arm around Anita Barker on the last day of term because she was crying.
¹¹
I was king of the world! St Francis would have been so proud of me – had he not been so busy saying hullo birds hullo woodland creatures in thirteenth-century Assisi.

Sadly, life would be less simple when I was back in the jug agane. But don’t skip forward to upper school just yet – there was more to life than skool. There was home time.

1.
While we’re on the subject of ordering things sight unseen from these la-di-da book clubs, I also remember purchasing
Carrie’s War
by Nina Bawden. This was the source novel of the 1974 kids TV series about Second World War evacuees, and I only wanted it because of the telly programme. A familiar tale: love the TV show; buy the book;
never read the book
. I optimistically bought Alex Haley’s black-experience doorstop
Roots
some years later, for the same reasons (it was my favourite TV show of the time) – now there’s a volume whose spine has remained resolutely intact ever since.
Ice Cold in Alex
by Christopher Landon – I wonder why Scoop got money off me for that? I liked the cover though, and what parent would discourage their kids from building up a library? Particularly one that stayed in such mint condition too.

To be fair, I did try to read
Carrie’s War
on the long drive home from Wales one year but it made me car-sick (reading generally did). I’ll never forget the TV series though: Druid’s Bottom! Mr Johnny the mental bloke! Dropping the skull down the well! I was glad I didn’t have to be evacuated and get spooked down the lane by Mr Johnny. (We’ll come to my childhood fear of the handicapped later.)

2.
It’s like something my college friend Jane Chipchase once said, partly in jest: ‘Oh look there’s an ashtray – I’d better start smoking.’

3.
Nothing too explosive – indeed I impressed
myself
, so grown-up and measured was my response to the mishap. I had simply misjudged the length of time it would take to run from the playground to the toilet in Mrs Crutchley’s classroom. Luckily I was wearing those ‘coloured paints’ Nan bought me.

4.
I wish Northampton had thrown a more varied ethnic mix at me but that’s just the way it was then: one black girl in our class, and two Asian. The Leslie family lived over the back from us in Huntsham Close, next door to the Prouts, and I don’t recall any careless talk of house prices falling. Despite the whiteness of our estate, little comment was ever made about skin colour – I’m retroactively proud to say.
See Chapter 13
.

5.
How confusing that was. We were ‘given’ French names, and mine was Simon (
See-mon
). Someone else got André.
C’est ridicule!

6.
Off the top of my head then: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, [
and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil – oops
], for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen. (Get ’em while they’re young, you see.)

7.
I’d love to be able to tell you more about these dances, or indeed why the Virginia Reel was my favourite, but the steps have gone from my memory. I know that a do-si-do involves going round your partner in a circle. That’ll never leave me.

8.
More book disappointment: fascinated as I was by black and white horror movies, I was thrilled one week to find
Notre Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo among the library’s ancient stock – no doubt the original 1831 translation – and duly borrowed it. What a damp squib. It was really long and had no pictures of Lon Chaney in it.

9.
Nigel Wilson was a lovely chap who lived at the top of our street on Bridgewater Drive. He became briefly notorious at middle school for saying to someone in class, ‘Look, I can move my trousers.’ I’ll leave the method to your imagination. My friend Paul Bush would always thereafter faithfully refer to him as Nigel ‘I can move my trousers’ Wilson.

10.
A Miss Lindsay craft project. Consult the
Cambridge Biographical Dictionary
:
‘Heyerdahl, Thor
(1914–2002) Anthropologist, born in Latvik, Norway. In 1947 he proved, by sailing a balsa raft (the
Kon-Tiki
) from Peru to Tuamotu I in the South Pacific, that the Peruvian Indians could have settled in Polynesia.’ No mention of drinking straws.

11.
And as Anita has since reminded me (thanks once again to Friends Reunited), ‘I probably did cry buckets the last day of school, but that’s understandable as I was moving away.’ To Luton, indeed.

1974

Selected Extracts From My Diary

ANOTHER ORANGE DISNEYLAND
diary, same model as the inaugural one. It’s been cunningly designed to fit any year (you fill in the days of the week yourself). Interestingly, while 1973 was written in more sophisticated but ugly joined-up writing, I regress here to non-joined-up writing. Why? No idea. Equally, why does this diary grind to a halt after 28 June? No idea. Too busy ‘country dancing’ perhaps?

In the
Personal Notes
at the front of the book I reveal that I am now four feet one inch tall and weigh four stone. Porker
.

Friday, 4 January

I played with Carl all day. We played pulling each other about in Carl’s sleeping bag.