It's Not What You Think

by Chris Evans

  4 The kid who thought it was hilarious to defecate anywhere but in the toilet cubicles—his tour de force was to do it in the pool when we were swimming

  3 Competitions to see who could keep their hand on the hot radiators longest

  2 Amanda, my first kiss

  1 My packed lunch

  School is in many ways the beginning of those shark-infested waters we call real life—when people, young innocent children in this instance, are hauled out of the utopia that is the family unit, hopefully full of love and warmth and protection, to be thrust instead into a whole other world where they are instantly told what they are and are not good at, who’s better than them and why they need to change immediately.

  What a particularly stupid idea. Within days, the humiliation begins. There are sports team selections that you do or don’t make, the latter always being the case where I was concerned. Immediately you’re made to

  feel like a loser and maybe, like me, then start to consider the rounders team as an option as long as it means you might get picked.

  Then there’s the endless giving out of gold and silver stars and house points and merits and the ticks and the crosses and all manner of other things that start suddenly coming at you. All designed to let you know whether you are currently a chump or a champ—so many things that can cause a kid to become paralysed as the first pangs of the fear of failure begin to set in. How many self-help books have been written on the selfsame subject? Yet it’s something that’s bred into us almost from the word go. And how about the poor kids who never get a mention?

  How often do we hear of a professional sportsman who suffers career-threatening dips in confidence because of a run of poor results? Think about the poor little kiddies peeing their pants waiting for the humiliation of another set of spelling test results.

  Then there’s the social aspect of the pecking order, evident nowhere more than at lunchtime.

  There’s the kids that go home for lunch—does this mean their parents love them more than yours love you?

  The kids that bring packed lunches—does this mean their folks can’t afford school dinners?

  The kids who receive free school dinners—surely this should be kept a secret?!

  The kids who go back for seconds—is this the only meal of the day they’re getting?

  The kids whose mum is a dinner lady and get extra chips as a result. (Not that we ever had chips at our school, not once—we had scooped mash that tasted strange, nothing resembling any other mash I’ve tasted before or since!)

  For the record I was a packed-lunch child, not for any other reason than that I didn’t like school dinners. My packed lunch was without doubt the pinnacle of my school day, it truly was manna from heaven and the thought of it was one of the few things that kept me going through the interminable hours that made up my morning lessons. Cold toast was included for break, an item of fruit, a choccie bar, usually a Breakaway but sometimes a Kit-Kat, a Blue Riband or a Penguin, a flask of soup* and the unquestionable stars of the show: two pasties for lunch that Mum had cooked from frozen in the morning and then opened up so she could fill them with ketchup before resealing them again. Absolutely mouthwatering.

  * * *

  *My flask was always under great threat as we used our bags for goalposts when playing footy at break or lunchtime—during which, if the ball happened to hit the post (i.e. pile of bags) hard enough, this would be heralded with the sound of several flasks simultaneously smashing from within. The only thing left to do with a flask after such a catastrophe was use it as a maraca for the rest of the day before getting shouted at when you arrived home.

  Top 10 Tastes, C. Evans, 1966-86

  10 Chips and Tyne-brand tinned stewed steak with heaps of mint sauce and tinned peas

  9 Bovril crisps dipped in tea or tomato soup

  8 Ham on over-buttered floured baps from Greggs the bakers

  7 Tinned toms and bacon with as many rounds of white bread and butter as it will stretch to—minimum five

  6 Soggy tinned salmon sandwiches on white bread with white pepper and too much vinegar, hence the ‘soggy’

  5 Meat and potato pie sandwiches with ketchup—making my mouth water now as I think about them

  4 Beans on toast, plain and simple, no poncey Worcestershire sauce or anything lke that

  3 Fish, chips and gravy—gravy on chips (it’s a Northern thing)

  2 Dad’s gravy dip chip butties—sublime

  1 Mum’s hotpot from the war, again, with added miracle margarine pastry*—there is no better thing to put in your mouth on planet Earth

  When you’re a kid, there are hierarchies and lowerarchies (a word that doesn’t exist but common sense says it should) springing up everywhere you look. Who’s hanging out with whom in the sandpit? Who’s always at the top of the climbing frame? Who’s on their own in the corner of the playground?

  The argument that all this is a good idea, I suppose, is that these are the situations that will help prepare children for similar environments they may encounter when they are re-released into the free world. Well, how about the fact that the future adult environments may only exist because of the creation of former childhood ones? Sure, it may have always been thus in the past, in caveman times, but shouldn’t we be doing something to change that now instead of perpetuating them—at least honour the worst kids with something if only to stop the tears. Awards for one, awards for all, that’s what I say. We’re all good at something; it’s up to the schools to prise out of us what that may be.

  My infant/junior school was St Margaret’s—absolutely run of the mill. Old Victorian classrooms complete with ornate, rain-echoing verandas somehow linked clumsily to a new unimaginative square concrete building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed there by mistake.

  From the off we had the good teachers and the bad teachers as most schools do, those that could and those that could not when it came to communicating. There was Mrs Clark, the old Ena Sharples battleaxe type who would scare the living daylights out of us—although I can’t remember exactly how. There was the glamorous Mrs Johnson who looked like she should have been on one of those ever so slightly risqué Top of The Pops album covers and there was Mrs Smith who always reminded me of Virginia Wade for some reason. But my favourite was a supply teacher we had called Mr Hillditch. He was born to teach and took us to the Robinson’s bread factory one afternoon where he used to work. When his two weeks of deputising came to an end I remember being genuinely sad that he was leaving. I even wrote him a song and stood up in class to sing it to him.

  Mr Hilditch we think that thee Is no good at being referee.

  The only thing you’re good at is baking bread Also we’d like to thank you For giving us such a lot to do Mr Hillditch we love you And good bye.

  (I was also pretty pleased with the tune I came up with for this ditty—on the audio book I will give it plenty, don’t you worry.)

  During breaks it was conkers, the climbing frame, a game of footy, or British bulldog, or you could, if you wanted, while away the hours clinging to the school fence, pretending to be a prisoner, dreaming of freedom and rueing the crime that put you inside. I did this quite a lot.

  Prizegiving was one of the few highlights, as was sports day, mostly because it meant no lessons. Rarely did I feature in either of these annual events—from the first year it was obvious which three or four kids would rule the roost in both categories and after that the rest of us were demoted to mere bit-part players in the predictable soap opera of typical primary school education.

  * * *

  *This is a magic pastry that takes 15 minutes from bagged to baked, all brown and crusty. None of this resting it in the fridge for four hours wrapped in cellophane nonsense. Again, any attempt by me to get the recipe for this fell on conveniently deaf ears.

  Top 10 First Memories of Going to School

  10 First desk

  9 First school friend

  8 First sports team not select
ed for

  7 First hardest kid

  6 First sportiest kid

  5 First weird kid

  4 First smelly kid

  3 First mean teacher

  2 First test

  1 First exam

  One of the unavoidable dividers in school (there are many, most of them unfair and upsetting) is the school test—you know, marks out of twenty. I always did OK in these but imagine if you were one of the kids who couldn’t get out of single figures—poor souls. And then the teacher reads out all the results, just in case anyone might not quite have grasped just how dense you are.

  Tests were bad enough but then along came another phenomenon—the ‘exam’. Exactly when does a test become an exam? They must be different, I suppose, because they have different names. The thing is, for the first few years nobody tells you—or even gives you warning of their existence. You spend years having tests, spelling tests, maths tests, all sorts of tests and then one day the teacher says, ‘And in a few weeks’ time you will be having your first exam.’

  Exam! Hang on a minute, what are you talking about exam? What the blinkin’ bloomin’ whatsit is an exam? Whatever it is, it sounds scary and it must be—otherwise why are we being warned about it several ‘weeks’ in advance like the potential of a nuclear strike? Kids don’t do several weeks in advance. I remember thinking, ‘Crikey, this must be really something.’

  Even the word exam sounds big and dangerous. Test is a far more flighty word, a far more friendly word—test is light and trips off the tongue. Whereas exam is a deep and heavy word, its gravitas forcing your voice to go down when you say it: EX—AM.

  It’s a word that resonates in your head, like the hammer clanging in a bell—E X A M A A M A M A M A M.

  ‘This is not a test, it’s an exam!’

  This phrase brought on another first for me—nerves. Early childhood is relatively free of nerves. What is there to be nervous about? Your job is to be a kid, no problem there, all you have to do is get up every morning, be fairly well behaved and go to bed again the next night. Nerves, I have deduced, all have one thing in common, they are generally brought on by ‘expectation’.

  Ah now, expectation, a dreaded thing if ever there was one. Expectation—similar to exams—suddenly turns up on the scene out of nowhere, coming into play and throwing up a whole host of other factors that previously did not exist. Expectation for me was a direct result of the past performances of my elder brother and sister—David and Diane. They were both pretty much top of the class, especially my big sis; I was from the same family and therefore I would be ‘expected’ to continue this tradition of achievement.

  All the above could be encapsulated in the ominous…

  ELEVEN PLUS ENTRANCE EXAM(dramatic music here)

  Fortunately I passed my Eleven Plus with flying colours, which meant for now at least I had fulfilled my expectations: I had overcome my peer pressure, avoided any kind of judgement that might have befallen me and in the process unknowingly scratched the first hairs on the back of those troublesome beasts that go by the names of pride and ego.

  As a result of my recent success I was now qualified and officially brainy enough to attend the grandest of all grammar schools for the duration of the next five long years—or at least that’s what was supposed to happen.

  I was happy to accept the fact that it was now time to hop on the bus with the big boys, but not before Karen with the big boobies had taken me and a few other pals over to the park for a final farewell and a benevolent insight into why those big boys from the senior schools were already knocking on her door.

  Why is it some people are just set apart right from the start? Karen was in a different class to the rest of the girls—not literally, of course, but generally, she was the first girl of my age to show any signs of sexiness and everyone knew it. All the girls wanted to be in her gang and all the boys just wanted to be…well, you know. But Karen didn’t have a gang—she was a one-woman show and the only audience she was interested in was that of the male species. She was confidence personified. Even those girls who claimed not to be intrigued by Karen’s ‘powers’ had to admit they wanted to know what it was like to be her and to know what she knew, which, compared to the rest of us, was pretty much everything.

  I remember seeing Karen a few years later when she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She looked like a bloody supermodel. I have no idea what’s happened to her since but I hope she’s happy. She certainly deserves to be—goodness knows she spread enough happiness around herself.

  Top 10 Weird Things about Teachers from a Kid’s Point of View

  10 Their names

  9 Their hair

  8 Their clothes

  7 Their shoes

  6 Their moustaches

  5 Their cars

  4 Their bags

  3 The way they walk

  2 The way they breathe

  1 Their obsession with punishment

  My grammar school was a boys-only, stand-up-when-a-teacher-comes-in-the-class, kind of establishment with all pupils having to pass the aforementioned Eleven Plus entry examination to get in.

  Though now a subject of much controversy, the streaming system did undoubtedly work—for the clever kids at least. As a result no one in any of our classes was really that ‘thick’; consequently learning was relatively swift and even.

  While most of the teachers at my last school had been grey by comparison, most of the teachers at this new school were ‘colourful’, to say the least. This was an old-style school with old-style values and as excellent as the standard of education and learning was—the standard of discipline was formidable.

  Good order was kept almost exclusively by the use of fear and violence; and boy did it work. Almost all the teachers were happy, actually more than happy, to dish out physical punishment. At the time it was the norm, but looking back now, it was highly questionable behaviour at best, more likely criminal. It’s hard to believe that in all the time I was there not a single dad turned up to give one of the masters a good thump.

  Almost all the teachers took great pride in their choice of weapon to beat us with, all feeling a perverted need to continue their academic theme.

  Our chemistry teacher would beat us with a length of Bunsen burner rubber tubing, Normally brown, his length had blackened with age—apparently he’d had it for years. At first we didn’t believe it was real: we thought it was just a ruse told to us by the older boys to frighten the life out of us freshers, but one day we pushed our teacher too far and discovered we were wrong, the notorious whip did indeed exist.

  This particular master was nicknamed after a cartoon character. We even had a song about him, sung to the juggling tune they use at circuses:

  Here comes Sir with his Bunsen burner, Better watch out ’cos he’s a learner.

  Our chemistry teacher hid his terror at the bottom of his battered old brown briefcase and when he decided to use it he would physically start shaking with a worrying mixture of anger and excitement. This would cause him to scatter the contents of his briefcase all over the place in the frenzy to dig out his whip. Even his comb-over came to life.

  The offending malcontent would hear his name called out, followed by the instruction to come to the master’s desk—or bench as it was in the chemistry lab. By the time the poor quivering pupil had arrived, ‘Sir’ was armed, winding up and getting ready to let rip.

  He would first tell you to hold your non-writing hand out and then proceed to lash you on your outstretched palm. If the required degree of remorse was not forthcoming he would next make you bend over across his bench before ceremoniously lifting the flap of your school blazer up and over your buttocks and giving you a good few thrashes across your pert young arse.

  Some of the tougher boys would not let him see their pain; for them it was a game, a game that often made ‘the master’ cry before they did. This was most humorous for the rest of us as he would continue to hit them bleating, ‘Why are you making me do
this, this is wrong, I don’t want to hit you [now sobbing but still of course thrashing away] I don’t…want…to…hit…you.’

  Needless to say, he was a confirmed bachelor.

  The sports teacher hit us with a plimsoll, the maths teacher with a yardstick. There was one teacher who ran the chess team, so he decided to bring an extra-curricular theme into his choice of weapon of mini destruction; he used to thrash us with a folded-up chessboard. This guy was seriously warped: he used to suck in the air on the back swing of his stroke and exhale triumphantly on the follow through. He was a truly evil man.

  He was also king of the board-duster throwers. This was a sport several masters indulged in and one rumoured to have its own league table pasted on the wall of the staff room. The basic premise was: if you weren’t paying attention in class, i.e. you were looking out of the window and wondering why most of your teachers weren’t in jail, you were considered fair game to have a great heavy wooden blackboard duster hurled at your head. Not only would this scare the shit out of you but it could also cause serious injury—blood and concussion, to name just two.

  The really unfair thing was when a master missed their intended target and hit someone else who was innocent instead. This used to happen all the time, especially if they went for someone at the back of the class.

  To overcompensate for their obvious embarrassment and evident lack of skill, with the kid who’d done nothing wrong now on the floor screaming in agony, the master would often call out the original offender and give him an almighty whack, much harder than they would have normally, as if it was his fault somehow that they had missed in the first place.

  Meanwhile, ‘Get yourself off to the nurse lad, it’s only a bump on the head,’ would be the only sympathy offered to the half-dead boy still writhing around on the floor.

  Absolute wankers, the lot of them.