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:
It was called Abington Vale Middle School. Where else were the pupils of Abington Vale Primary School going to go?
It was physically even closer to our house than primary school. Even having a car was no excuse to drive there.
* * *
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.
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 headmistress, 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), Mr
s 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.
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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.
Saturday, 5 January
We went shopping in the morning, Simon bought a beret1 and I bought a Subbuteo team.
Tuesday, 8 January
Dad went to London. We saw Abbott and Costello and Mum had a Young Wives meeting.2
Friday, 11 January
Me, Griffin and Boults all did a Basil Brush show. I was Basil Brush, Boults was Mr Roy and Griffin was the special guest.
Monday, 14 January
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 8