Smithy, who was in his forties, had a small moustache and wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. When he’d finished marking the register he got up and stood in front of the class. I thought he was going to welcome us and perhaps give us an encouraging speech on how we needed to work hard in our final year at school, but instead he told us secondary modern school lads like us, who would leave at the end of the year aged fifteen, had an easy time at school. Much easier than his two daughters, he explained, who, because they were at grammar school, had to do homework and stay on at school to take GCE O and A level exams because they wanted to go to university and have professional careers.
Later that term Smithy chalked SOCIAL CLASS in capital letters on the blackboard. Underneath he wrote WORKING CLASS, before asking some of us what jobs our dads did as examples of the type of work done by the working class. Then, after he’d written MIDDLE CLASS on the blackboard Smithy asked for examples of middle-class professions.
‘Bank manager,’ said one kid.
‘Good,’ said Smithy.
‘Vicar,’ said another lad.
‘Yes,’ said Smithy.
Further examples were called out – doctor, lawyer, accountant – but Smithy wasn’t satisfied. He demanded more examples, then more still. Finally, it dawned on us he was waiting for someone to call out teacher and acknowledge he belonged to a higher social class than us. Without a word or a glance at each other we somehow decided that we wouldn’t give Smithy what he sought, as the examples of middle-class professions became more mischievous.
‘Scissor grinder,’ one lad shouted.
Fred, our English teacher, who had a kind face and wore an unbuttoned jacket and corduroy trousers, looked more bohemian than the other teachers. One day he read poetry to us. One of the poems was Horatius at the Bridge by Lord Macaulay. In the poem, in a desperate attempt to save Rome, Horatius stood on a narrow bridge that crossed the river Tiber and fought off the Etruscans as the bridge was being chopped from beneath him. I was so taken by the poem that at the end of the lesson I stayed behind pretending to be looking for something I’d misplaced. Then, when everyone had left the classroom, I took a copy of the poetry anthology from the cupboard in which they were stored, sat down at a desk, and began reading the poem again.
Earlier I’d shielded my eyes with my hand when Fred reached the part of the poem where Horatius, bleeding and in great pain, weighed down by his armour, struggled to swim back to Rome. Now, alone in the classroom, when I read ‘And oft they thought him sinking, But still again he rose,’ the tears rolled down my face as I urged Horatius to keep going and make it to the riverbank.
Budgie had found new school friends. Towser, who had also been moved up into the A stream, was now my best mate and like me he enjoyed poetry. We both liked Irene Rutherford McLeod’s poem ‘Lone Dog’, particularly the line: ‘I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep.’
We also enjoyed fiction, and were amused by a description from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye in which the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, said his teacher had picked up his exam paper and was holding it as if it was a turd. After we’d both finished reading the book anyone who picked up anything – a book, a pen, a piece of chalk – seemed to us to be handling it as if it was a turd. Towser spoke in a Barnsley dialect, as we all did, and although he lived in a stone terraced house, unlike the rest of us he came from a middle-class family that ran shops in the village. His parents had sent him for elocution lessons when he was younger, and he could speak Standard English without a trace of accent and had won prizes for reading aloud to audiences. So when Fred needed a passage from a novel or a poem reading out he would hand the book to Towser who would captivate the class with his delivery.
One morning as we walked together along the school corridor he told me that the previous evening, while out in the countryside with some other kids, they’d come across an injured ‘standing hawk’, a local name for a kestrel. My heart began to race. Ever since I had looked up at that hovering kestrel, at the underside of its outspread flickering wings and fanned tail shining white in the evening sun, that was the bird I’d yearned to keep. I still hadn’t discovered a kestrel’s nest. Heart thumping, I desperately hoped that whoever was looking after the injured kestrel would now pass it on to me.
‘Who’s got the kestrel?’ I asked.
‘Nobody,’ Towser said.
‘How’s tha mean?’
‘We killed it – with sticks.’
I rammed Towser against the wall and held him there with my arm across his neck.
‘It’d flown into the telegraph wires,’ he shouted into my face. ‘It was dying. We were putting it out of its misery.’
One day in a science lesson a lad called Denny sat on a stool at the bench in front of Towser and me. He’d had a haircut. The back and sides were shaved but the floppy hair on top of his head seemed to have been untouched. From the bench where we were doing work in our science books it looked as if Denny was wearing a cap.
‘Denny,’ I called in a loud whisper.
He turned round.
‘It’s bad manners to wear thi cap in class.’
‘Shut thi gob, Hinesy.’
He turned back to his work.
‘Denny,’ I called again, ‘take thi cap off in class.’
I hadn’t realised Denny was so sensitive about his hair. To my surprise he jumped up and marched over to the science teacher who, at that point, was sending an electric shock through half a dozen lads who were holding hands, making them writhe in pain. He turned off the electricity when Denny approached, and as Denny spoke to him and occasionally pointed to his hair the science teacher looked across the science benches at me, then he said something to Denny. Grinning, Denny walked out of the classroom. When he returned he sat back on his stool at the bench in front of me, turned, and told me: ‘Tha’s to go and see Ben.’
And so I did.
Ben the headmaster reached up to a high bookshelf in his office and brought down four canes, one straight and three with curved ends like walking sticks. He chose the straight cane. Ben taught us history now we were in our fourth year, and his knowledge and his love of the subject engaged my interest. One day he’d even embarrassed me by praising my work in front of the class. He seemed to like me and sent me on errands out of school. Now, looking exasperated, he asked: ‘What are you playing at, Hines?’
‘I only meant it as a bit of fun, sir.’
With a couple of flicks of the cane Ben indicated I should raise my hand. I’d once seen a lad who had been caned by Ben rush out of school and do three laps around the playground holding his thumb in agony. Other lads offered the advice that, to lessen the pain, you needed to make sure the skin on your hand was loose. Thumb tucked behind my first finger, skin nice and loose on my palm, I stood with my hand raised, steeling myself for the first blow. It didn’t come. I looked at Ben. He had the cane raised but he was shaking his head as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to thrash me or let me off. Then he stopped shaking his head and looked at me angrily.
‘You’ve got intelligence, boy,’ he said, ‘but it’s not human intelligence.’
Swish. Swish.
‘Other hand.’
Swish. Swish.
Blowing on my hands, rubbing them together, blowing on them again, I tried to lessen the pain of the four strokes of the cane as I made my way back to class. Suddenly, Herb, the wild rough lad who had told me my mother was nice, came sprinting down the corridor. Herb must have fled the classroom to escape a beating, because, running behind him, red-faced, breathing heavily and calling, ‘Come back here, you imbecile’, was Idle Jack, the art teacher.
One morning I came within a second of fleeing Idle Jack’s classroom myself. I can’t remember what I’d done to cause him to call me out to the front of the class. Using the first finger and thumb on each hand he took hold of the hair above my ears and then he slowly lifted me up. The skin on either side of my head was
pulled so tight that I was frightened it would tear. Idle Jack was a lot bigger than me and, when he’d lifted me to my full height and I was standing on tiptoes, my eyes level with his mouth, I could feel his breath on my face. I was suddenly overcome with rage. My fingers squeezed into a fist, and for a moment I was going to smack Idle Jack on the nose.
But I didn’t. Idle Jack, still holding the hair at the side of my head between his fingers and thumbs, let me down on to the soles of my shoes and finished off my punishment by ordering me to bend over, then using his full power hit me at least six times across the backside with one of those large blackboard T-squares.
‘Now get back to your place, you cretin, you imbecile,’ he roared.
In one English lesson I looked up the dictionary definitions of Idle Jack’s two favourite insults – cretin: ‘a physically deformed and mentally retarded person’; imbecile: ‘a person of abnormally weak intellect’. Idle Jack wasn’t the only one to insult us; other teachers would call us halfwits, morons, numbskulls, retarded. Even well-behaved lads couldn’t escape put-downs, as a teacher, while smirking or winking at other staff, would say, ‘I’m looking for an intelligent boy to do a job for me’, emphasising intelligent. Were the grammar school kids constantly told they were stupid? If they were maybe they’d have the confidence to know they weren’t, but for me, a lad who’d racked his brain over his eleven plus exam to no avail, the insults struck home.
Idle Jack left while I was in my last year at school and I thought I’d seen the last of him. Then one evening when I switched on the television there he was talking about his new venture on the regional news. I thought he might have become an artist because his figurative pencil drawings were brilliant but instead he’d set up a business making fibreglass car bodies. When asked why he’d left teaching Idle Jack didn’t hold back, telling the interviewer that the pupils he’d taught in our secondary modern school were cretins and imbeciles.
I was almost fifteen and soon I’d have to leave and find a job. In this my final year I had become so fed up with school I was often late. Some days I’d just sleep in despite my mother’s repeated calls, but in spring and summer I’d walk through the fields and take a long route to school.
I was still fascinated by nature. One morning I had to put six fully feathered young blue tits back into their nest, when, to my amazement, I’d found them clinging to my fingers when I’d pulled my hand out of a hole in a tree. On another occasion I watched as a young moorhen chick pecked its way out of its egg in a nest at the edge of a pond. On another morning, only a few minutes’ walk from school, I saw a mistle thrush dive-bombing another late schoolboy, forcing him back down a tree after he’d tried to climb up to its nest. But these sightings were nothing compared to the morning I went a long way round to school, and spent at least half an hour, sitting in Tankersley churchyard, gazing skywards after a ‘kikiki . . . kikiki . . . kikiki . . .’ had drawn my attention to three kestrels, the dark bars on the underside of their tails and wings clearly visible as they flew and soared together above the church.
One day in metalwork I was making a sugar bowl that Wee Georgie, the metalwork teacher, was going to send off to be silver-plated. I can’t remember what I needed but, whatever it was, Wee Georgie sent me to the stockroom to get it. On a shelf I spotted a patterned length of metal and pulled it out. It was wafer-thin, about a quarter of an inch wide and looked like a strip of silver lace. Later, when Wee Georgie was overseeing a lad who was holding a piece of white-hot metal in tongs and plunging it into steaming water, I sneaked back into the stockroom with a hacksaw.
At my bench I filed and bent the piece of patterned metal I’d sawn off into a silver band. I slipped it on my ring finger and it fitted perfectly. A touch of solder, discreetly applied when I soldered the handles on to my sugar basin, and I’d made a lovely ring.
‘Give it to me.’
It was Wee Georgie, his face white with anger. I hid my hand with the ring on it behind my back.
‘What, sir?’
‘Give it to me.’
Realising that some kid had shopped me, I took off the ring I’d so lovingly fashioned and handed it to Wee Georgie. He dropped it into his grey overall pocket, grabbed my wrist, raised my hand and held it there.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
I hadn’t realised he was carrying a cane and the first stroke crashed down on to my thumb. He grabbed my other wrist, raised my hand and once again held it high.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
The last three strokes were delivered with so much anger that it felt as if they were going to fetch off my finger ends.
Over the four years at school I’d guess I’d been given the slipper and the cane by teachers three or four times a month, but the thrashing from Wee Georgie for sawing off a small piece of fancy silver-coloured metal worth a few pennies affected me more than any of the other beatings. Before Wee Georgie confronted me I remember feeling pleased with myself as I crafted that silver band of metal into a ring. I couldn’t understand his anger. Maybe the strip of fancy metal was for the exclusive use of the adults he taught in a metalwork night-school class. Perhaps he’d had unruly classes all day and was at the end of his tether with disruptive boys. It wasn’t just the physical pain, or my bruised thumb and fingers: I felt as if I had been emotionally assaulted.
Later, still seething with resentment, I wandered around the metalwork room seeking to do damage that really would have justified such anger and such a beating. I spotted a small portable hand vice and, guessing that would cost Wee Georgie a lot more to replace than the few pence worth of metal I’d helped myself to, I drilled out the screws. The hand vice fell apart, and the damaged threads where the screws had been meant it couldn’t be put back together again.
A few days later, I was walking down the corridor at break time when I saw a kid standing outside the staffroom. Realising Wee Georgie, along with all the other teachers, would be in there enjoying a cup of tea, a surge of mischievousness and defiance overcame me. I flung open the door, grabbed the lad by the scruff of the neck and the back of his trousers and threw him in. Conversation stopped mid-sentence, laughter died and a couple of dozen teachers stared in astonished silence, as, hunched into a crouched run, the lad tried to keep his balance as he stumbled across the staffroom. I couldn’t see Wee Georgie, but Fiddler, our music teacher, who was lying back in a chair with his feet on a table, jumped up, spilling tea down his jacket, and Fred, the English teacher, choked on a biscuit. The lad’s momentum was brought to a halt when one of the teachers grabbed him as he stumbled into a group standing by a table.
‘A kid threw me in, sir.’
A gang of angry male teachers, all of them seemingly wearing tweed jackets, now marched the lad towards the open staffroom door where I was standing facing them.
‘Did he throw you in?’ asked one of the teachers.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the lad.
A cane seemed to appear from nowhere and I was told: ‘Get your hand up, Hines.’
I was then given six strokes of the cane as I stood in the corridor.
Towards the end of the summer term of 1960 Ben stood on the school hall stage, thrashing the lectern with a cane. It was Speech Day, and the proceedings had reached the point where a school prefect was supposed to give a speech and Ben was demanding that someone tell him where the prefect had gone. I don’t know if Ben realised he had done a runner. Or if he’d remembered the owner of the local drapery shop, who donated and handed out the prizes, was sitting on a chair on the stage behind him, but he stopped thrashing the lectern with the cane and said, ‘We’ll move on’.
The fourth-year lads whose fifteenth birthdays had fallen before Easter had left school at the beginning of the Easter holidays to work down the mines or in the steelworks. So, rather than being 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D, in the summer term we’d been split into L4 and U4, an abbreviation of Lower and Upper 4th year. In previous years I’d always won one or two prizes on Speech Day, but this year, because several o
f the kids who were good at specific subjects had left, there wasn’t so much competition and I won three or four prizes.
Returning from the stage after receiving my first prize, The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs, I sat on the school hall floor and turned to the picture of the kestrel’s mottled reddish-brown egg. My anger rose when I read that although kestrels feed only on voles, mice and shrews, like most birds of prey they’d often been ruthlessly destroyed and ended up on gamekeepers’ gibbets. My brother, Barry, had inherited a collection of birds’ eggs from an uncle who had collected them as a boy. The eggs were kept in a box, the catch of which I’d sometimes unfasten carefully before easing open the lid to look at the kestrel’s egg cushioned in sawdust in its own square compartment. I had no interest in taking eggs. Instead, as I sat on the school hall floor, in my imagination I scaled a cliff to a nest and took a young kestrel to rear.
There was an inscription at the front of the book. Ben must have run out of ink midway and refilled his pen with a different colour, for using both blue ink and black he’d written:
Form U4
1st Place
Awarded to
Richard Hines
July 1960
Although I was top of the class I wasn’t cleverer than the other kids. Maybe they hadn’t cottoned on – or more likely knowing they’d end up doing manual work whatever the results of the exams, they didn’t care – but when each subject teacher started going over work we’d done previously I realised he was preparing us for questions he’d set in the exam. Unlike a lot of the lads I stopped messing about and listened.
The drapery shop owner was now handing out prizes for coming top in a specific subject. Each time I was called up on stage to receive yet another book prize, Fiddler, the music teacher, clapped so gingerly he looked as if he feared he’d get an electric shock if he brought his palms together too enthusiastically. By contrast, Fred, the English teacher, clapped heartily and even gave me the thumbs-up a couple of times.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 3