Issue No. 6: GROWN UPS

Whatever puzzlement small children are to adults, adults are completely bewildering to small children. My association with adults, family and teachers apart, were thankfully minimal.

The Doctor 

One of my first encounters, at the age of six, was with the family GP, Dr Lancelot (or Lance) Boyle. Dr Boyle was a man in his fifties and he was in a GP partnership with his wife. I'm not sure if they had children. If they did, family conversations must have been a strain.

My mother had taken me to the surgery for some now forgotten reason. I remember sitting on a big, wooden, leather-padded chair, my legs dangling a long way from the floor. Dr Boyle silently examined me, listened to my chest and back with his stethoscope, felt the glands in my neck, looked into my ears, peered down my throat, tapped my knees with a small hammer and then faced me and said quietly:

"Now young man, how are your waterworks functioning today?"

I looked uncomprehendingly at him and then at Mam. She took many long minutes, avoiding the (she thought) socially unacceptable "pee" and "wee" words, to convey the meaning of his question. Eventually I cottoned on and replied to him "Alright". For the rest of the consultation he ignored me altogether.

The Oldies

My neighbourhood seemed to consist of three types of adult. First, the parents of kids I played with who, as 'Mams' and 'Dads', were more or less anonymous, unless they were particularly eccentric. There were a few of those. Then there were the old people. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was no 'grey revolution' or 'energetic, post fifty generation'. Working class people, when they retired, were generally old before their time, clapped out and rarely lived very long afterwards. The notable exceptions were the very old ones, all women, who lived into their eighties and nineties. One was Mrs Timlock, who lived next door to my friend, David Green. She was ancient. She dressed in black, like Queen Victoria, or rather like a black-clad Miss Havisham, and shuffled back and forth from her house to her front gate. I never saw her go beyond that point.

 [ I digress at this point to say that Charles Dickens once stayed at 'Cleadon House' in Front Street in nearby Cleadon Village. This visit inspired him to create the character of Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'. The description of her house is a description of Cleadon House. There is also a story that a man who lived there was stood up at the altar, and he subsequently ordered the clocks and reception at the house to be kept exactly the same as that at the moment he was to be married - for one year.] The fact that Mrs Timlock lived in a council house appeared so incongruous; she seemed to belong to a different era altogether. In actuality I suppose she did, as she must have grown up in the 1870s, when our estate was just farmland.

There was a local character, an old man, whose appearance used to terrify and fascinate all of the local kids. He was small and swarthy and used to sit for hours (and for years) in the huge, cavernous bus shelter, handily situated above yet another underground public toilet, in the local shopping area, waiting for the pub across the road to open. He always wore a shiny black jacket and shiny black trousers, a grey flat cap and a white muffler. However, his face was just a mass of folded, greyish flesh, in which one eye and half of his mouth could be distinguished. When I was much older, it was revealed to me that he had progressive skin cancer. As kids, we were unaware of this. He was universally known, to young and old alike, as 'The Man with a Hundred Noses'.

The Teacher

The adults I most encountered were teachers. Some were sympathetic; some were anything but. Miss Doddy was elderly, old-fashioned and generally kind. She was my class teacher in the second year of my time at the Junior School. However, my main memory of her, unfortunately, relates to her causing my classmate, Tommy Blower, some acute embarrassment. Tommy was a tall, clumsy but kind-hearted boy who was graded near the bottom of the top class because he was a bit slower than his peers. He was often puzzled by teacher's questions and tried his best to avoid answering any. He wanted to play the tuba but that wasn't something our school particularly encouraged. He was also mildly incontinent, and in the middle of any lesson, his hand would shoot up so that he could be excused.

One day, for some reason, old Miss Doddy at first seemingly did not see Tommy's raised hand for about ten minutes, and then studiously ignored his subsequent  frantic wavings and the repeated calls of 'Miss!' 'Miss!' At last the din became so loud that she had to stop the lesson, turn to Tommy and angrily ask 'Yes, Thomas, what do you want?'  Unbelievably, when Tommy asked, she refused, and the lesson then proceeded for another quarter of an hour before the hand wavings and pleadings started again. By this time no one was taking any notice of her anyway, so she opened the classroom door and, like a desperate pup, Tommy scampered out.

It was quite a hike to the toilet block in the school yard. Neverteless, it must have been another half an hour before someone noticed that Tommy had not come back. Again, loud whisperings interrupted Miss Doddy's lesson, so she stopped again and queried the cause of the distraction. Someone told her. She sent out a posse of one to find Tommy. After a while, the deputy returned, rather giving the show away by holding his nose and shouting 'Poo!' and 'Yuk!' and so on. All eyes turned to the classroom door. Tommy eventually, slowly edged into the room, red-faced but, more tellingly, brown- smeared from his thighs to his ankles. He stood alone at the front of the class, head lowered and eyes downcast, the nearest kids theatrically drawing back from him. Miss Doddy was dumbstruck for some minutes (maybe she felt a tad guilty) but eventually managed to ask 'Thomas, what have you done?'

Tommy raised his head and steadily looked Miss Doddy in the eye, recognising a straightforward question he could answer at last. He replied loudly 'Please Miss, I've done my pants!'