Shadows From The Past. Part 3

First published in 1995

Having my birthday in February, I started school six months early instead of six months late, the idea being that it would give me a good start. So I was much younger than my classmates, as much as twenty percent younger. Ann, naturally, went off to join the other girls, while I was suddenly left alone, to face a totally strange environment.

My memory is a total blank about that period. My Mother often told me of the uproar I created. Perhaps it reminded me unconsciously of my experience of hospital, of being left suddenly alone in an alien environment. More than once, apparently, she was called to the school, where, so she said, she found the teacher in hysterics and the classroom virtually wrecked. Even though I still feel this was an exaggeration, it was confirmed, in part, by someone else. If this was the case, it would be natural for the other kids to keep a distance, but there was also the class thing.

It will be remembered that there was a dichotomy in the village between the rich upper middle class and the relatively poor working class. Since the children of the former were sent to boarding school, out of the way, the village was populated mainly by the children of the latter. I don't particularly wish to involve myself in forties' social politics, and I am trying to write in a non-stigmatising way. Even so, my mother, more than once, referred to them as 'back street kids', which could hardly have endeared her to the other parents.

I suppose I was 'different,' and a target for certain of the other boys to project their insecurities. It probably started out as straightforward teasing, but having no experience of other children, I had no experience of dealing with it and it soon took on a more vicious aspect.

I remember sneaking away home and hiding among the raspberries at the bottom of the garden, or hiding in the school lavatory. (Later, at junior school, this became a place of danger, where I could be isolated, and I learnt to last all day.) Truancy has been very much in the news recently. I feel great empathy for the children concerned. Everyone seems to be keen to round them all up, but no one seems to care why they skip school.

So we chanted tables, and learnt our writing and spelling, and drew pictures. Whenever I see the typeface called Century Schoolbook, I remember the Beacon Readers and Old Lob, the farmer.

Even fate seemed to be against me. The school spent one afternoon at the recreation ground for some prestigious cricket match. In boredom, I was walking around the crowd when another boy turned round and made some comment. On this rare occasion, I answered back and, while he was thinking of a reply, a boundary, with all the field available, struck him squarely on the back of the head. In their consternation, the mothers nearby, looking for a scapegoat, turned on me.

So I avoided everyone, boy or girl, and trusted no one. At school, 'A' stayed with her friends among the girls of course, but, in any case, when the war was over, she returned with her Mother to Worthing. In the second year, we had graduated to pens and ink. One afternoon the girl next to me stuck her pen in her arm and put her hand up, blaming me. Possibly, the uproar of the ensuing summary punishment was the last straw. The teacher for that class had the fearsome respect of all the children, but parents acknowledged her capability. The result was that, in desperation, my father dug deep into his wallet and I was enrolled in a private kindergarten, Miss Maltby's in Derby. I suppose, nowadays I would be sent to a special school to be for ever labelled as 'disturbed.'

At least the other children, at Miss Maltby's, accepted me as I was. I spoke when I was spoken to and joined in when I was invited. What do I remember? The garden, about sixty feet long with an oval path. Devonshire cream, which was boiled milk, at the morning break. I opted for the little gill bottles of milk that I'd become used to at the previous school. These, like all milk bottles in those days, had caps made out of little circles of card, with a centre piece that you pushed in, to insert a straw. The trick was to manage it without pushing the whole cap in, thereby spraying milk all over yourself and most of the room as well. I remember travelling to and fro on the bus, sitting on the sideways seat near the rear door, with two or three of the other pupils - five penny return tickets, mauve coloured.

The following year, like other boys of that age, I 'dropped' - that is, I started wearing long trousers. The age of seven or eight has always been seen as a rite of passage.

Another rite of passage at this age is the move from infant to junior school. I could stay at Miss Maltby's no longer and had to begin at the Boys Endowed School. The girls had their own school, further down the street. I quickly learnt to make myself psychically invisible, so that no-one noticed me.

One of the favourite games was called 'chainey.' One or two boys would link arms and run in a circle, tagging others as they went, who were expected to join on with the chain. To be at the centre, you needed considerable strength to hold the chain together. If you were the last to be tagged, you would be moving at a considerable speed. If you tripped, you'd go head over heels and if you lost your grip you'd be likely to go whizzing away like a slingshot. After one experience of this, I decided discretion was the better part of valour and made sure I was in a corner out of the way. In any case, if you weren't tagged, but got in the way of the line, the force of the collision would be considerable.

I had always loathed my name, but now I loathed it even more, seeing it as effete. In general though, if I adopted any male behaviours, it was in order to remain unobtrusive.

Wherever I went in the village, I could expect to meet verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Little boys are told to fight back, but I learned too late to make the attempt. In any case, how can you fight ten or fifteen who are standing in a circle, throwing stones from about twenty feet away? On this occasion, I looked straight ahead and walked through the circle. It parted in complete silence and, as I walked away, one or two pebbles clattered around my feet, and a rather larger one whistled past my ear.

I did have various friends for short periods, though I never initiated the relationship. They didn't last long. I was very like my mother in this. She took people as they came, but was never very outgoing. At this time, I remember, she often used to describe herself with a line from the Just So Stories, "I am the cat that walks by itself and all places are alike unto me." But I simply didn't trust anyone.

The one ultimate rule was that grown-ups were the 'others.' You didn't tell tales.

Tell tale tit,
Your tongue shall be slit,
And all the little dicky birds,
Will have a little bit.

To a child, adults are remote authority figures, even now. You simply don't involve them, for the results are likely to be so embarrassing that it is better to put up with things. The new Children's Act has put counsellors in a terrible dilemma. All their training tells them to 'stay with' the child who has revealed its problems. To gain its confidence and trust, to prepare it gently to tell others, to prepare it for what is to follow and to 'be with' the child through the process. But by respecting that confidence for as it long as it takes to do so, they render themselves liable to criminal prosecution.

I had, of course already experienced the embarrassment of my mother's involvement in my school life and I preferred to keep quiet. I must have let slip something about one incident, because my mother turned up and boxed the offending boy's ears, with the whole dinner queue looking on. Since he had probably forgotten the incident, as I had, he must have thought she'd gone mad.

So I kept my life to myself. Probably my stay in hospital had been, after all, a lucky break. I learnt very early to rely on my own resources. I didn't need relationships. I could hide my feelings and any pain could be buried deep under a layer of 'don't care.' I lived from day to day, taking each one as it came.

There are other little sayings that I remember too, like "Little children should be seen and not heard". Years later, when I had a family of my own, during a particularly fraught morning, I repeated the phrase and my wife literally hit the ceiling. Though this was the golden rule of my childhood, I didn't mean it seriously, simply trying to relieve the tension with a little humour. My sense of humour was, and still is, sometimes misunderstood.

The prevailing ethos in society and school was the idea that children were like the young of animals. With time, and good fortune, they would attain that state of grace called adulthood, and thereby become human.

As long ago as the Roman era, Quintilianius had written that corporal punishment was bad and that it was better to encourage comradeship. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote that there was no moral value in education to punishment, and Comenius insisted that the individuality of the child was the important consideration. There were also the writings of Rousseau, but all this passed over the head of British educationalists.

In the schools of my childhood, if there was any psychological direction at all, it would be of the Watsonian behaviourist school, or following the teaching of Locke, that the natural inclinations and interests of the child were a result of the sinful nature of man.

At the breaks in mid-morning and afternoon, the teachers would retire to the staff room, leaving the playground battlefield to manage itself. Ninety five per cent of a child's learning goes on in the playground virtually undirected, in learning about itself and about relationships.

There was one interesting episode which highlights an aspect of summary punishment. Someone, if I remember rightly, had stolen something. At about half past eleven one morning, the head came into our class and asked the culprit to own up. Receiving no answer, he announced that, if there was no admission of guilt by the end of the dinner hour, he would cane the whole class. That dinner, the 'bad boy' of the class coached us on how to take the cane. You were expected to hold your hand out straight, but you should keep it as relaxed as possible without it being noticed. As the cane made contact, you moved your hand with it, again being careful to time it in such a way that it wasn't noticeable. At the next break after the caning, we all got together to compare bruises. As an exercise in detective work, it made a first class way of encouraging peer group bonding, even including an outsider like myself - us against them.

One afternoon, near Christmas, the class was practicing the carols. When it came to We Three Kings of Orient Are, for some unfathomable reason, the teacher selected me to be the second king. The three of us had to stand on our chairs and sing our verse when our turn came. There was I spending all my time trying to be invisible and suddenly I was on a chair in front of the class. All I managed was one croak, before I froze completely. Needless to say the class collapsed in hysterics and, needless to say, I took it personally. If someone had told me then that, fifty years later, I would be addressing audiences of up to two hundred people, I wouldn't have believed them.

Boys of that age, I am sure, were assumed to be born with a football at their feet and an innate knowledge of the off side rule. Since I couldn't kick a ball straight to save my life, I incurred the wrath, not only the other boys, but the teacher as well. I adopted the strategy of making sure that, wherever the ball was, I was as far away as possible. I wonder that I didn't go down with hypothermia standing for an hour twice a week, for all those years, in the freezing wind. At any rate, it gave me a lifelong loathing for all forms of sport.

During the cricket season, I would naturally, be on the boundary, or last man in. Hence I was rarely expected to bat. Once again someone who made a career of being invisible was expected to be in full view, awkwardly holding a bat, and waiting for someone to fling a projectile at him. I was usually distinguished by having as many as four slips. However, by some mischance one day, the bat connected with the ball, and struck one full in the face. On this occasion, the teacher seemed more sympathetic towards me than usual. Having checked the injured boy's face for damage, he suggested that if he must field at slip, he ought to keep his wits about him. Unfortunately, the humour of the situation was lost on the boy concerned.

What grown-ups told you was the ultimate truth and not to be questioned. We learnt our times tables and I was fairly good at reading and writing, so I gained a scholarship, now called the eleven-plus to the local Grammar School. It was a lucky break. If I'd grown into puberty in that environment, I might have been in real trouble.

A few years ago, people used to complain of "wooly-minded liberals", but they seem to have been replaced by wooly minded right wingers. The concept of testing and labelling children at different ages has returned, in spite of the protests of teachers, who, we assume, are the ones who understand their craft. From the comments that I have heard about the National Curriculum, it seems to be reconstruction of adult power over children, emphasising teaching over engaging with them in the process of learning. What Shotton has called the three R's: "rote, regimentation and regurgitation."