Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  3. Knights with an ‘s’.

  4. Not a clue. ‘Dirt collectors’? We’ll chalk this one up to the childhood imagination and endeavour to protect it from modern innuendo.

  5. Kelvin was the eldest, Harvey the youngest – their parents were Tony and Pat Lay. (Mum and ‘Auntie’ Pat actually went to school together.) They had a cat called Suki which once bit Kelvin on the knee and made him cry. He’s a policeman now, just like his dad. I think Kelvin and an unnamed mate once pulled me down the grass bank at middle school by my legs for a cruel jape, and I pretended to have asthma to make them feel guilty. How ironic. (It didn’t work.)

  6. Weekend magazine, a lively precursor of things like Chat and Bella which held an allure for me on two counts: it had pop posters in it (at a time when pop was entering my life), and a weekly feature wherein true-life tales of human peril were illustrated with a dramatic photo-reconstruction, something I would morbidly pore over (‘My legs were trapped and the train was coming’, that type of thing). An early hint at my subsequent masochistic fascination with disaster. Even at this age I was learning to control my fear.

  7. Or ‘Sharpy’ as we knew him. Round-faced boy who lived in Chelfham Close.

  8. A toy tractor, naturally.

  9. Richard Griffin, also known as Griff. Someone who occupied the ‘best friend’ slot for a while. He – along with David Edwards (Eddy) – was unfortunate enough to be one of the first kids in class to be fitted with glasses. He had I think slightly older, starchier parents than the rest of us, but was nonetheless the only kid I knew who had a Shaker Maker and, boy, was I jealous of that. (A heavily TV-advertised ‘craft’ toy: you filled plastic moulds with some noxious pink agent and shook it vigorously as if mixing a cocktail. The gunk set hard in the shape of Donald Duck or similar and when it had shrivelled dry you painted it. That was it. The USP was the shaking. Immortalised in name by Oasis in 1994.)

  10. Maria and Justine Edwards, daughters of Geoff and Jean, our next-door neighbours (we holidayed together in Yarmouth that summer). Because most of the houses in our estate had low, wire-mesh fences as standard issue, an awful lot of handing over of kids by parents occurred (they were too high for us to scale without assistance). All rather convenient and sociable. The Prouts, whose garden backed on to ours, erected a high wooden fence for privacy, as was their right, but we would simply peer through the slats as if they had something to hide. We put up a high wooden fence between us and the Edwards eventually – just a few boards, not the whole length of the garden, and nothing to do with the family feud I have since learned about.

  11. We all had swings. It was as if they were issued along with the coal bunker and the wire fence. Wooden seat, chains, steel-tube frame held in the ground with metal hooks, but Richard Woodall was really going at it, and they must have worked loose. The Edwards had a slide.

  12. Mary Gardener. Not a blood auntie, a friend of Mum’s from back in the Duss’on welfare days. She and her husband had bought this barn in a field in Roade and intended to convert it, 25 years before there were entire theme evenings on BBC2 showing you how to do this. Their kids, who must have been about the same age as us, had an Evel Kneivel toy, the kind that did stunts in the TV advert but not in real life.

  13. Carl Merrick, an only child who lived on the intersection of Winsford Way and the slightly posher Milverton Crescent (the Merricks had a car porch, a canoe and a beautiful Samoyed dog). I think he was a year older than me – he certainly carried the aura of a kid who knows more. I liked Carl a lot; he would frequently just give me things, like a figurine of Charlie George, or his old Surf Flyer skateboard. When he swapped his Haunted House board game with me the deal was so obviously weighted in my favour: he only got a John Bull printing set in return. But Carl cared not – he was fed up with his game, and coveted the little rubber alphabet, so to hell with the size or price differential. (Definitely older.) The Merricks must have moved away as he disappears from my life after 1977 without any fond farewell.

  14. I may have known the value of nothing, but I knew the price of everything.

  15. I also took fright on a tour of the pigsties. It was hot, loud and dank in this cavernous barn and one of the pigs jumped up and put its head over the side of its pen. Filled with fear – of what? pig attack? – I went back out the way I’d come in and waited outside on my own for it all to be over, like a softy. Didn’t write that down in my diary, did I?

  16. Carol Cater, home-hairdresser and wife of sales rep Chris. A childless and overtly sexy couple, he was in those days very much a prototype for Paul on the sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles (played sublimely by Peter Egan) and she had jet-black hair and the come-hither look of a young Dorien (Lesley Joseph) off another future sitcom, Birds of a Feather. I had my hair done by Carol for years; she cut my first ‘spike’ in 1980, supplied me with my first henna in 1981, and latterly endured a string of impossible pop star pictures torn from Smash Hits to copy: Sting (when he was cool), Nick Heyward, Bono (‘That looks like a root perm,’ she explained, scaring me away for good).

  four

  St Francis, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life

  ‘Boys,’ sa headmaster GRIMES, smiling horibly,

  ‘st. custard’s hav come to the end of another term.’

  Can there be a note of relief in his craked voice?

  There can be no doubt of the feelings of the little pupils.

  CHEERS! HURRAH! WHIZZ-O!

  CHARGE! TA-RAN-TA-RA!

  The little chaps raise the roof of big skool, which do not

  take much doing as most of it is coming off already.

  Nigel Molesworth, Whizz for Atomms (1956)

  I LOVED, AND I mean loved, the Molesworth books, written by exprep schoolmaster Geoffrey Willans and visualised by the spidery nib of Ronald Searle, whose work I knew from the title sequences of the St Trinian’s films and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. We had a book club at middle school called Scoop (the one at primary school was Chip) and through it I ordered the frankly inappropriate and scurrilous Molesworth volume Down with Skool!, purely on the strength of the Searle cartoon on the cover. I would not be disappointed.1

  Down with Skool! was one of four Molesworth books, first published back in the Fifties, collected from Punch magazine, not that I was aware of their vintage or their genesis. (The other volumes were Whizz for Atomms, How to be Topp and Back in the Jug Agane.) If they hadn’t been illustrated with cartoons I doubt I’d have read them, but once sucked in, I became duly obsessed with St Custard’s school; with Molesworth, Grabber, Grimes and Fotherington-Thomas, and the creative spelling and lack of grammar in the trademark prose. Molesworth spoke of ‘swots, bulies, cissies, milksops, greedy guts and oiks with whom i am forced to mingle hem-hem’ and introduced the term ‘chiz’ into my vocabulary (‘a chiz is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno’). Molesworth appreciation in adulthood is like belonging to a secret sect. The phrase ‘as any fule kno’ is like a code. You either get it – and form a wry smile at the very memory – or exist forever in concentric circles of unyielding darkness. Try it at your next dinner party.

  What’s interesting to me now about Molesworth is that St Custard’s was a boarding school. As in fee-paying. Live-in. For poshos. Mention of ‘new bugs’, ‘mater and pater’ and ‘writing home on Sunda’ should have alerted me to the fact that this was a scholastic universe far away from my own. But I never twigged. Skool was skool. And down with it chiz chiz.

  * * *

  Abington Vale Primary School – which achieved the impossible and took me out of the field, at least during the week – was a first-rate place. Brand new, red-brick, like so much of late Sixties Abington Vale, and built to serve the local estates. All the kids who went there, aged between five and ten, lived nearby. Quite villagey, in a way, but without the silage and flaming torches.

  It sat within comfortable walking distance of Winsford Way and in the infants (that is, the first and second year) ‘home time’ meant a benign pick
et line of expectant, chattering, bouffanted mums at the school gates, most with prams, waiting to troop us all back to our semi-detached plots in streets like Milverton Crescent, Lynmouth Avenue and Crediton Close. Why they were all named after towns in Devon and Somerset I don’t know. Perhaps one of the planners holidayed in the West Country.

  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 clo
sed down and sold to the private sector?

  We recited the Lord’s Prayer6 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: