We spent the morning looking around Whitby, climbing up the 199 steps to the abbey, visiting the museum and Captain Cook’s house and having a guided tour around a great masted sailing ship called The Grand Turk, which was moored at the quay. We had our sandwiches sitting on the wall, listening to the seagulls circling in the air and the loud music in the amusement arcades along the front.
‘This is amazing,’ said Ignatius looking around him. ‘Amazing.’
At Robin Hood’s Bay that afternoon we headed for the beach down a steep hill, Mrs Sculthorpe in front, giving a running commentary about what we could see. Then we made our way through a series of narrow cobbled walkways between small stone cottages with whitewashed walls and roofs of orange tiles and grey slates. The houses seemed to cling to the cliff side. Barry and Kevin had attached themselves to us and I was getting sick and tired of their constant moaning.
‘In the olden days,’ Ignatius told us, like a guide, ‘the smugglers unloaded all their contraband and carried it to the top of village through a maze of secret tunnels underneath the cottages to evade the customs men. I’ve read in my book –’
‘That’s really interesting,’ interrupted Kevin, looking bored. ‘But will you shut up. You sound like a teacher going on and on.’
‘I’m starving,’ moaned Barry. ‘I hope there are some shops at the bottom. And just think of the walk back up to the top. It’ll be like climbing a mountain.’
‘I’m cold,’ complained Micky. ‘And I’m getting wet.’
‘What about your specially padded walking boots, thermal gloves and heavy duty socks?’ I said. ‘Some good they are.’
‘I’m still cold,’ he moaned.
On the beach Mrs Sculthorpe gathered us around her.
‘Now everybody look this way,’ she said, ‘and that does include you, Barry Bannister and Kevin Murphy. Put that piece of driftwood down and listen. It’s cold, wet and windy this afternoon and as you can see we have the beach to ourselves.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ muttered Micky. ‘I’m like a block of ice.’
‘We have an hour here to explore the beach,’ continued the teacher, ‘looking for interesting pebbles, fossils and unusual shells. I want you to be especially careful.’ She stopped. ‘What do I want you to be, Barry Bannister?’ she asked.
‘Pardon, miss?’
‘In one ear and out the other!’ exclaimed the teacher. ‘I said, I want you to be especially careful. Beaches can be dangerous places. No running about on the slippery rocks, no going in the sea or climbing up the cliffs. Stay on the sand and behave yourselves and meet me back here at three o’clock. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, miss,’ chorused the class.
‘I’m not looking for stupid fossils and shells,’ Barry told us as we walked off along the sands. ‘I’m off to explore the caves. If there were smugglers here there might be hidden booty.’
‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Ignatius. ‘It would have been discovered years ago.’
‘Ooooh, I don’t think that’s very likely,’ mimicked Barry. ‘Come on, Kev, I’ll race you to the rocks.’
‘You heard what Mrs Sculthorpe said,’ I told him.
‘You’re getting to sound like Plunket,’ Barry shouted back. ‘Anyway, she didn’t say anything about caves, did she?’
‘All the same –’ began Ignatius.
‘Can I come, Barry?’ asked Micky. ‘I don’t want to look for fossils and shells either.’
‘Are you coming, JJ?’ asked Kevin.
‘No, I’m stopping with Iggy,’ I told him.
The three of them ran off shouting and laughing and kicking sand in every direction and left Ignatius and me looking for shells and fossils.
Ten minutes later Barry came running up to us, red in the face and out of breath.
‘Can you come quick!’ he yelled.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s an emergency.’ He began to tug at my sleeve. ‘Come on, hurry up!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s Micky,’ he told me, panting. ‘He’s stuck.’
‘Stuck?’ I repeated.
‘In the mud.’
‘In the mud?’
‘Stop repeating me,’ he screamed. ‘Just come and help, will you? He’s got himself stuck in the mud and he can’t get out. He’s in a real state.’
I started to laugh but Barry yelled in my face. ‘It’s not funny, Johnson, he’s sinking.’
So Ignatius and I followed Barry until we came to the cliff bottom. The cliffs were steep and rocky but a great curtain of mud had slipped down and covered part of the beach. There up to his knees in a big mound of chocolate-coloured mud was Micky, wailing and tugging. ‘Help me!’ he cried. ‘I’m stuck and I can’t get out.’
Ignatius immediately took charge. ‘Michael,’ he said, ‘you have to stay calm.’
‘Oh great,’ said Barry. ‘He’ll be up to his neck in mud in a minute and you say stay calm.’
‘Michael,’ said Ignatius, ignoring the comment, ‘you have to remain calm and stop struggling. The more you move about, the more you’ll sink.’
‘Get Mrs Sculthorpe,’ he moaned.
‘We have to act quickly,’ Ignatius told him. ‘By the time Mrs Sculthorpe arrives you’ll be –’ He stopped before completing the sentence.
Micky howled.
‘How did he get stuck in the mud?’ I asked Kevin, who had remained quiet and open-mouthed throughout.
‘He climbed up the cliff side and then jumped off. He thought it was a big brown rock below him but it turned out to be this massive mound of mud with a sort of hard crust on the top. When he landed he went straight through it.’
‘Stop talking and get me out!’ cried Micky.
‘Look, Michael,’ said Ignatius, ‘you must try not to get all upset, and don’t struggle. You’ll only make matters worse. We will get you out.’
‘How?’ asked Barry. ‘Don’t think I’m climbing up on to that mud. I’ll sink too.’
‘I saw a piece of pipe down the beach,’ said Kevin. ‘Micky could use it as a breathing tube when the mud goes over his head.’
‘Ohhhhhhh,’ whimpered Micky.
‘I don’t think you’re being very helpful,’ said Ignatius. He removed his long multicoloured scarf. ‘Give me your scarf, Kevin.’
‘What?’
‘Your scarf. Give it to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Just give it to me, and yours, James, and yours, Barry. I intend to tie them all together to create a makeshift rope and we will pull him out.’
‘And how will we do that?’ asked Barry.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Ignatius calmly.
He knotted the several scarves together, made a loop at one end like a lasso and climbed up the cliff side, positioning himself directly above Micky. He lowered the scarves.
‘Put the loop over your head,’ he told Micky, ‘and then under your arms.’ He turned to us on the beach. ‘I do need some help. You three come up here and give me a hand.’ Slowly but surely we heaved and Micky was pulled from the mud. He scrambled on to the cliff side and then climbed into the sand, where he collapsed and began sobbing. ‘I could have died! I could have died!’ he howled.
‘That was amazing,’ I told Ignatius.
‘I read this story about a famous sleuth,’ he told me.
‘A what?’
‘A detective. Sherlock Holmes had fallen into a deep slimy bog and was sinking, and Dr Watson, his companion, managed to get him out by remaining calm and collected and deciding on a clear plan of action. The important thing is not to panic.’
‘He could have gone under,’ said Barry in a gruesome voice. ‘He could have sunk without trace. Just think, choking and drowning in mud.’
‘Will you shut up, Barry,’ I said.
Micky soon calmed down and was unusually quiet on the way back.
‘You had better wash your boots in the sea, Michael,’ said Ignatius.
‘I have a feeling that that grumpy bus driver won’t let you on his coach in that state. And I think we could rinse through our scarves as well.’
We all did as he suggested.
‘My goodness,’ said Mrs Sculthorpe when she caught sight of this group of mud-caked boys tramping along the sand towards her, holding their wet scarves ‘You look as if you’ve been swimming in mud, you boys. Just look at the state of you all.’
‘Michael slipped,’ explained Ignatius. ‘We went to help him.’
‘Well, I hope you all have something to write about when we get back to school.’
Ignatius looked at me, smiled and winked. ‘Oh yes, Mrs Sculthorpe,’ he said.
8
THE EXAM
The long-awaited day finally arrived. I sat opposite Mum at the breakfast table fingering a piece of toast, with my stomach doing kangaroo jumps.
‘Come on, love,’ said Mum, ‘eat your breakfast. You don’t want to go to school on an empty stomach, particularly today.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I told her sighing miserably.
‘You’ve got to have something. You don’t want to go and faint in the middle of it all.’
‘I won’t,’ I said.
It was the day of the dreaded eleven plus examination. In the 1950s every pupil in their last year at primary school across the whole of the country sat the eleven plus, sitting down with a big thick test paper in front of them, trying to answer the questions on English and arithmetic and general knowledge.
At school we had been building up to this day for a good few weeks now, practising our spellings, being tested every morning in mental arithmetic, writing stories in half an hour, doing boring comprehension tests about the life cycle of the butterfly or dairy farming in the Yorkshire Dales or how they constructed the Panama Canal. Now the day of reckoning had finally arrived and I felt awful. My head throbbed, my chest hurt and my stomach jumped up and down.
The dreaded eleven plus examination decided which pupils in the town would go to King Henry’s College, the grammar school at the top of the hill, and which would end up at Sunny Grove Secondary Modern at the bottom. Mum had set her heart on me going to the grammar. She didn’t go on and on about it like Michael’s mum, who seemed to think about nothing else, but I knew she was really keen for me to get through the eleven plus so that I ‘would get a decent job with good prospects’. As an eleven-year-old, interested only in football, comics and model aeroplanes, a decent job with good prospects was the last thing on my mind.
For the last few weeks Mum had gone through my spellings every night, given me maths problems to solve, set me timed essays and even bought me some practice papers from the bookshop in town.
Every Friday, when she was paid, she had taken some money out of her wage packet and put it into a tin which she kept on the top of the kitchen cupboard. I knew that this was for my school uniform if I should pass my eleven plus. The letter she’d received from the school a few weeks previously had explained that those who were successful in getting a place at the grammar school – and very few were fortunate enough to do so, it added – would have to be equipped with a white shirt, school tie, black blazer, grey flannel trousers, grey socks and black shoes, all to be bought from Seymour and Son, High Class Family Outfitters, on the high street. They would also need a full football/rugby strip in the school colours and boots and a PE kit and regulation plimsolls. Each article of clothing had to have a name label on. These could be ordered from Seymour and Son. Then there would be a satchel, fountain pen, pocket school dictionary and the school hymnbook to buy. It added up to a lot of money, so Mum had started saving at the beginning of the year.
‘Come along now,’ said Mum. ‘I think it’s about time you were going.’
I sat frozen to my seat. What if I couldn’t answer one single question? What if I knew nothing about what was on the paper? Mum reached over the table and put her hand on mine. ‘Just do your best, love, that’s all you can do. If you pass, then all very well and good. If you don’t, well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?’
I met Micky on the way to school. He looked as nervous as a lamb in a cage full of lions.
‘My mum’s in a real state today,’ he told me. ‘It’s as if she was sitting the flipping exam. She was up at five o’clock this morning and she never shut up at breakfast. My dad went to work early. He told her she was getting neurotic and he couldn’t stand it any longer.’
We soon caught up with Ignatius Plunket, dawdling along as usual with his head in a book. It seemed to him like any other day. He didn’t seem to have a worry in the world.
‘It’s all right for you, Iggy,’ said Micky gloomily, pulling up alongside of him.
‘What is?’ asked Ignatius, looking up and squinting in Michael’s direction.
‘You’ll sail through the eleven plus,’ said Micky, looking gloomier than ever. ‘You could do it standing on your head, blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ replied Ignatius, smiling.
‘Course you will, Iggy,’ I said. ‘It’s just up your street, all those general knowledge questions and problem solving and story writing.’
‘I’ve been sick three times this morning,’ Micky confided in us. ‘All over the bedroom, the bathroom floor and down the stairs. Mum would have gone mad normally because we’ve just had a new carpet fitted, but this morning she told me to leave it and she’d clean it up. It would take her mind off things.’
‘I hope there’s not too much arithmetic,’ I said, not really listening to his ramblings.
‘I really don’t think I can go through with it,’ said Micky suddenly, stopping in his tracks. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night. What happens if you’re ill and can’t sit the paper?’
‘You do it later,’ Ignatius told him, ‘up at the grammar school, and, of course, they give you a different paper.’
‘Best get it over with today,’ I said.
‘Just do your best,’ said Ignatius cheerfully. ‘You can’t do any more than that. You’ll be fine, Michael, you really will.’
‘That’s all very well, Iggy,’ said our despondent companion, ‘but my mum has set her sights on me getting through. My cousin Oliver, who lives in Harrogate, passed his eleven plus last year and we’ve never heard the last of it from my Auntie Doreen. I think my mum would commit suicide if I failed. I tell you the pressure is getting me down. It’s making me sick as a parrot. I’ve already tried on a blazer at Seymour’s. Then, of course, my mum and dad have shelled out a lot of money for me to have private tuition as well.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘your mum told me.’
‘I’ve been going to Miss Peacock on Ramsden Road every Saturday morning for the last few weeks. She’s a retired teacher and has been helping me with my maths and English. She’s a flipping slave driver is Miss ‘Know-it-all’ Peacock. She’s given me lists of words and phrases to learn so that I can use them when I write my essay and she goes through my work with a great big red pen. It looks as if she’s had a nosebleed all over the paper, there’s so much red on the page. And I’m sick to death of flipping practice papers.’
‘Well, it will all be over in a couple of hours,’ said Ignatius calmly. ‘Just try and take it in your stride.’
‘As I said, it’s all right for you, Iggy,’ said Michael. ‘You’ll sail through the paper.’
The atmosphere at school was very different that morning. Instead of screaming children running round the playground, boys booting footballs and girls skipping, there were knots of glum-looking pupils chattering quietly by the school wall.
When the whistle blew, we all filed into school quietly and down the corridor to the hall where we were to sit the exam. We must have looked like a lot of condemned prisoners going to our execution. All of us, that is, except Ignatius, who still ambled along with his nose in a book. As we waited outside the school hall, I caught sight of Mrs Sculthorpe rushing around like a jam-crazed wasp, puttin
g pencils, rubbers, rulers and sheets of paper on each desk. She looked more nervous than anyone.
When we were seated, Mr Griddle, the headmaster, came in carrying a large brown envelope which he placed on the desk at the very front.
‘Now, I want you all to listen very, very carefully,’ he whined. ‘Ignatius, would you put your book away now, please, and look this way. In ten minutes you will have in front of you your eleven plus paper and you will have one hour and a half to complete it. The first thing to do is print your name clearly at the top of the paper. Then you will work your way through the questions, making sure you have not missed a page. If you finish before the hour and a half is up, then you should go through the paper carefully and check over what you have written. Answer all the questions. If you don’t think you can answer a question then have a guess. Writing something is better than writing nothing. Now is there anything anyone wishes to ask?’
Micky’s hand shot up. ‘May I go to the toilet please, sir?’ he asked.
The headmaster sighed, glanced at his wrist watch and said, ‘Very well, but be quick about it.’ Michael scurried off. ‘If anyone else wishes to visit the lavatory, do it now, because you will not be allowed out of the hall during the examination.’
The paper wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. The essay – to write about a favourite seaside place – was one we had written for Mrs Sculthorpe a few weeks back, so that was a real stroke of luck. I wrote three pages on the trip to Whitby. The arithmetic presented no real problems and I answered every question. The comprehension, where we had to answer twenty questions on a set passage about the history of railways, was hard and boring but I managed to finish just before Mr Griddle told us to put down our pens.
‘I’m so glad that’s over,’ said Michael on the way home. ‘It’s like a big flipping hundred-ton weight being lifted from off my shoulders. It’s just the wait now. My mum will be like a cat on a hot tin roof for the next three weeks until the results come out.’
A Load of Old Tripe Page 7