If we weren’t making stuff we were listening to stories or watching some kind of semi-educational children’s programme like Puddle Lane on an enormous wood-panelled television. The teacher would wheel the television in as the children sat cross-legged on the carpet in excited anticipation and would then spend the next fifteen minutes or so trying to work out how to switch it on. I’m certain a good portion of my school life was spent watching teachers trying to get educational videos to play on Betamax video cassette players.
On Friday afternoons we had ‘free time’, which was the highlight of the week, when we were allowed to play inside or outside with any of the sports equipment, games, toys or musical instruments. I liked to go into the Quiet Room on my own with a little electronics set that consisted of a few wires, a light bulb and a battery. When any other children came in to the same room and disturbed me I would tell them I was making a bomb and showed them the sinister-looking tangle of wires and dimly glowing light bulb. I remember one child being quite worried about this and they ran out of the room shouting for the teacher.
A rare Betamax TV/VCR combo, the stuff of nightmares for many school teachers who struggled with any form of new technology. (Courtesy of Franny Wentzel/Wikimedia Commons)
At lunchtime all the children would file into the school hall to eat their packed lunches together. As a child from a low-income family, I would hand over my special pink ticket and be given a government-provided packed lunch. The packed lunch was so outstandingly horrible that I can remember the exact contents to this day: soggy sandwiches filled with some kind of grey, bad-tasting reconstituted meat (my brother told me it was donkey meat), a packet of cheese biscuits, a puckered and bruised apple that had definitely seen better days and some kind of dry biscuit with one half dipped in something that looked like chocolate but didn’t taste like it. It was virtually the same lunch every day with the only difference being a variation in the unrecognisable meats. After a while I became so sick of the lunches that I stopped eating them altogether and began smuggling them out of the dining hall so I could hide them down the back of the benches in the cloakroom. After some weeks of successfully getting away with this, the school caretaker finally caught me and reported me to the teachers. I was handed back the stockpile of mouldy sandwiches and told to put them out for the birds on the school bird table. To this day I pity the poor unsuspecting chaffinch that discovered my rotten sandwiches.
Even though I didn’t enjoy my school lunches, I was one of the few children that enjoyed the milk that we were all encouraged (forced) to drink at break times. Every child was given a miniature glass bottle of milk with a straw in it and told to drink up the lukewarm milk. If you didn’t drink up all your milk then you didn’t go out to play. The daily milk ritual started at playschool and continued throughout first school and then middle school, and all the while I was told how good it was for me. If I ever had any doubts about whether or not I really needed to drink so much milk, regular television adverts starring Kevin Keegan would be shown in the early afternoon and evening telling me I should drink even more milk and that it was really good for my health.
The health of school children was taken very seriously in the eighties and as well as being given our daily bottle of milk, we were regularly inspected by a variety of nurses and doctors to check that we were healthy in every respect. We started with the nit nurse who would check our heads for any sign of the dreaded head louse, and some weeks later we would see another nurse who would check our hearing and eyesight. Then came the school dentist, who would perform a cursory examination of our mouths, and another nurse would check our height and weight. Whenever the medical van came to the school, the excited chatter among the children would begin and everyone would speculate about what kind of procedure we would be subject to today. Mostly the talk was of large needles and full-body examinations, but fortunately none of the wild rumours turned out to be true. I got a clean bill of health in every examination, probably because I always drank up my milk.
For my final year of first school I was transferred to a different local school because my parents were concerned about the unusual methods of corporal punishment being used, which I seem to remember included pulling children up by their ears. Corporal punishment was not abolished in UK state schools until 1986 and I remember getting a smacked bottom on at least one occasion at first school, probably with very good reason. I think my parents also felt that teachers smoking during lessons was a bad idea.
My next school was set on the top of a hill and nestled in among a perimeter of tall pine trees. The school was split in two with the original Victorian building on one side of the road and a new school and playing field on the other side, consisting mainly of portable buildings, some with the wheels still attached, making them look rather like lorry trailers. My new class was in one such portable building which wobbled, creaked and groaned when anyone walked around in it.
At my new school I suffered, for the first time, the horrendous experience of swimming in an unheated outdoor swimming pool. To this day I shudder at the thought of jumping into the icy water and having to keep swimming just to prevent the onset of hypothermia. Even on a sunny day the pool was bitterly cold because it was shaded by the tall pine trees surrounding it. Everyone had to swim – no exceptions and no excuses. If you forgot to bring your swimming things, the teacher would wait until everyone else had left the pool and make you go in on your own wearing nothing but your pants. We were taught how to swim and dive and sometimes the teacher would throw a handful of coins into the pool and ask us to rescue them for her. It wasn’t a great incentive, though, since she always asked for the coins back afterwards and carefully counted them to make sure no one had robbed her.
Back in the relative warmth and comfort of the classroom, our class topic was space travel and we spent a lot of time discussing how the Space Shuttle worked. We even went so far as to create a model Space Shuttle with a balloon propulsion system that whizzed across the classroom on a piece of string. The project was tied in closely with the forthcoming launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which was due to take off on Tuesday, 28 January 1986 with seven astronauts on board. Our class was especially interested in this Shuttle launch since one of the crew was a young female school teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who was the first to be selected through Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project designed to inspire students in all things scientific and astronomical.
On the day of the launch, the excitement of the children in our class was barely containable and we could hardly wait to get home from school to watch the Shuttle launch on television. Finally, just before 5 p.m. that evening, we tuned in to BBC1 and waited excitedly as Philip Schofield handed us over to Roger Finn in the Newsround studio. Newsround opened with the following words: ‘Disaster for the Shuttle, an explosion on Challenger’ spoken in a very grave voice as we watched video footage of the Space Shuttle disintegrating into a terrifying plume of smoke and debris. The camera then cut to a solemn-looking Roger Finn who continued: ‘Within the last few minutes we’ve heard there’s been an explosion on board the Space Shuttle Challenger.’
The disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. I watched the footage with shocked horror on John Craven’s Newsround. (Public Domain)
We eventually learned that all seven crew members of the Space Shuttle Challenger, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, had been killed in the disaster which was caused by a faulty O-ring seal on the right solid rocket booster. I remember the terrible feeling of horror, disbelief and grief as we heard about the tragedy which curtailed not only our own school space project, but also led to Ronald Reagan’s cancellation of the Teacher in Space Project. Until this point, I had dreamed of becoming an astronaut and often imagined what it would be like to sit in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle, strapped in firmly as the enormous rockets blasted me into outer space. After the Challenger disaster I decided that I would become a fighter pilot instead – a much safer option in my mind.
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nbsp; With our Space Shuttle project firmly behind us, we moved on to new topics, including, rather randomly, basket weaving for which I showed a real flair and great enthusiasm. My parents were initially thrilled with the woven tea tray I brought home but I felt their enthusiasm begin to wane as I continued to bring home more and more woven objects, and each had to be paid for. I remember my teacher suggesting I slow down the pace of production since I was working my way through an alarming amount of materials leaving very little for the other children to use. Fortunately, the basket-weaving lessons were short-lived, most likely because I had used up all the resources, and so we moved on to our next endeavour – learning to play the recorder.
As a class we had already mastered the tambourine, maracas and glockenspiel, and the obvious next step was to take on the challenge of the recorder. For some reason, children of many generations have been forced to learn this bizarre instrument which is rarely heard outside of the English classroom. Looking back, I pity our poor teachers who must have had the patience of saints as they spent countless hours trying to get our class to perform a flawless round of Frère Jacques or Oranges and Lemons, instead receiving an earful of tuneless screeching.
Every now and again we would be taken on an outing to the zoo, museum or seaside and we would all file on to a dated-looking orange and brown coach that was driven by a worryingly tired and harassed-looking driver. The school coaches invariably smelled of urine and vomit and had chewing gum on the seats and crude anatomical drawings scratched into the windows. Within five minutes of departure, one of the children would start to feel sick, while another child would have a nose bleed. After ten minutes, the first child would vomit over the child next to them and another child would suddenly decide they were bursting for a wee. A fourth child would then spill their orange juice on the floor, while the remaining children sang The Wheels on the Bus repeatedly until we reached our destination, only pausing occasionally to ask if we were nearly there yet.
On arriving at our destination, the teacher would count us off the coach only to discover there was an extra child from a different class that wasn’t meant to be there. Meanwhile, nose-bleed child, blood splattered down the front of their pristine white shirt, fainted because they were too hot and hungry. We would eventually make our way inside the zoo/museum and be given a clipboard and blunt pencil each so that we could answer some kind of worksheet; inevitably all the pencils would be lost by the time we had reached the first item on the sheet. By this time the rain would usually have started so the emergency cagoules were handed out and since more children were now feeling faint, we’d adjourn for lunch.
I obviously had my, somewhat industrial, government-issue packed lunch with donkey-meat sandwiches and would look on longingly as other children enjoyed a chocolate-spread sandwich, a packet of Ringos, a can of cherry Coke, a packet of raisins and a square of jelly. The warm can of cherry Coke would usually detonate upon opening, covering several children in a fountain of pink foam and leaving more pristine white school shirts ruined.
Having visited the remaining items on the worksheet, we would then head off to the gift shop which was the highlight of the day. Each child had a small amount of spending money, usually kept in some kind of purse or container on a string around their neck, which would be spent on scented erasers, polished stones, coloured sand or leather bookmarks with the name of the attraction printed on them. The children would be counted back on to the coach and the return journey would begin as vomit-child and nose-bleed child began to perform vigorously once more. At some point on the way back the coach would come to a screeching halt as a panicked teacher suddenly realised that the extra child from the other class was still in the gift shop.
Now you may think I am exaggerating with my description of school day trips, but I can honestly say that virtually everything I have described above actually happened, although it probably didn’t all take place on the same day.
My time at first school drew to a welcome close and in September 1986, after the seemingly endless summer holidays, I began middle school where I was destined to spend the remainder of the 1980s. Everything was different here: the teachers, the children, the lessons, even the playground games. I had only just settled into the swing of things at my first school, and now I was wrenched from my cosy classroom where I was one of the big kids and thrown into a school where the biggest children had body hair, and one hormonally active child had already begun to grow facial hair.
At the first school, our uniform had been pretty simple and casual: boys wore a blue shirt and the girls wore a blue dress. It didn’t really matter what type of shirt or dress it was, as long as it was mainly blue. Or white. And the boys had to wear grey shorts, or black shorts, or trousers. There was just one boy in our class who wore a blue and white striped tie that may or may not have been part of the uniform – no one really knew.
At the middle school, however, our uniform was a lot more disciplined and we had to wear black shoes, black trousers, black jumper, a white shirt and a black and white striped tie. For some reason, my parents decided to embellish upon this uniform by providing me with a black blazer to wear, which wasn’t part of the uniform and didn’t help me fit in at the school, especially since I was already looking distinctly odd wearing a pair of burgundy loafers and sometimes carrying a briefcase instead of a school bag. Fortunately, I managed to persuade my parents that the blazer was overkill and the burgundy loafers were toned down with the liberal use of some black shoe polish.
Ready for my first day at ‘big school’ dressed in a blazer that wasn’t part of the uniform and wearing burgundy-coloured loafers with a free Midland Bank school bag. (Author’s Collection)
Now that we were at middle school we had proper science lessons with Bunsen burners and test tubes, we had geography lessons that taught us about oxbow lakes and plate tectonics, and we learnt about the effects of smoking and how to ‘Just Say No’ to drug pushers. I felt like a character from Grange Hill, but not one of the cool kids like Tucker, more like one of the nerdy ones that got pushed over in the corridor and had no idea where they were meant to be going and which class they were meant to be in. In fact, I remember sitting in the wrong lesson on more than one occasion with the dawning realisation that I didn’t recognise any of the other children in the room. Sometimes I sat through the whole of the wrong lesson, having no idea where else I should go, and on other occasions the teacher would spot me and send me on my way, leaving me wandering the corridors peering hopefully through the windows of the other classes looking for faces I recognised.
After finally locating the correct classroom, I was introduced to the exciting new concept of French lessons which taught us essential phrases and vocabulary to prepare us for a future cosmopolitan lifestyle. We were aided in our learning by the ever-popular textbooks called Tricolore, which featured a collection of French stereotypes living in La Rochelle on the west coast of France. The central characters were the Dhome family, who had a baker’s shop in the town, and they and their friends would most commonly be found in a local cafe ordering Orangina and ice creams and taking part in various vocabulary-expanding activities. As well as their somewhat unusual passion for Orangina, many of the characters in the Tricolore textbook were prolific letter-writers and liked to tell you all about themselves in writing.
Perhaps the best part of learning French was the role play sessions where we got to pretend that we were grown-ups on holiday in France with the exciting opportunity of ordering beer in a restaurant and being ‘married’ to the girl at the next desk.
One of the most welcome benefits of my transition to middle school was not having to eat the government-issue packed lunch since my new school had its own canteen staffed by a vast horde of cheery (and some not so cheery) dinner ladies. For the first time I was allowed to choose what I had for lunch and although I still had the low-income pink ticket, this could now be traded for food up to the value of 70p, which back in the mid-1980s was enough to buy you a three-cours
e meal and a carton of milk. From what I understand, the majority of people do not have particularly fond memories of school dinners, but in comparison to the donkey-meat sandwiches I had endured for the previous four years, the canteen food was manna from heaven. Now I could (and did) order jacket potato with chips and a bag of crisps with a chocolate biscuit for dessert.
After we’d eaten lunch, the dinner ladies would usher us out into the playground for some fresh air and exercise, while a few of the more mischievous children would sneak back into the classrooms and hide to avoid going outside. We would often spend the whole lunchtime just peeking out from under a pile of bags and coats in the coat racks, occasionally ducking for cover to avoid the military patrols of the dinner ladies.
One of the dinner ladies once found herself rooted to the spot in the playground, completely unable to move, after discovering a condom on the ground. Thinking quickly she put her foot on it to hide it from the children and hoped to avoid drawing attention to it. Unfortunately, one eagle-eyed child had already spotted it and word quickly spread around the playground with the result being that within a few minutes, the dinner lady was surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive children asking her what was under her foot, what a condom was and why was she hiding it from them. Without any means of communicating her predicament to other members of staff, she remained in place for the majority of the lunch hour, red-faced and flustered trying to field a barrage of awkward questions.
When we weren’t menacing the dinner ladies we took part in normal playground activities for our age group: some children played ball games, others played chase, and a few others pretended they were lorries and spent the whole time ‘driving’ around the perimeter of the playground stopping occasionally to load or unload some new cargo. Another group of children battled it out with Top Trumps, while others traded Garbage Pail Kid stickers.
A 1980s Childhood Page 15