Issue No. 18: NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK


 

Yikes!

When I was young, I was taught that honest endeavour and hard work would always be rewarded. No doubt kids nowadays are taught the same thing. Our American kinfolk have a pithy retort – ‘Suckers!’

This was brought home to me when I was 11 years old, and in my first year at Grammar School. I was enthusiastic but useless at all sports. However, rugby, at that age, was a great leveller of talent, simply because nobody particularly had any (I exempt Ronnie Buller – see Issue No. 16).

Therefore it was to everyone’s surprise that, at the end of a morning’s PE lesson, during which we played a game of rugby, I was selected to play for the school’s Under 12s (First Year) Rugby Team. I recall that the only thing of note I did that whole match was to pick up the ball and run like hell for the white line in the distance. I was no sprinter, and the leading attack dogs of the baying pack caught me a few feet short. My shirt was grabbed and ripped; I was scratched and punched and I flailed my arms in response, punching back. I saw the line and lunged over it, scoring the only ‘try’ of my whole school career. Only I didn’t. In the excitement, confusion and heat of the moment, I had, inadvertently, run straight across and not up the field and had dived over the sideline. Oh well! However, the PE teachers must have been impressed with my tenacity if not my sense of direction and selected me for the school team. Sporting fame (or any fame) at last beckoned. 

The first competitive game was against Southmoor School in nearby Sunderland. I did nothing remarkable at all during the game. In fact, I can hardly recall touching the ball more than twice. I consoled myself that everyone else, on both teams, was equally incompetent. The score ended three points apiece. About five minutes before the end, one of the Southmoor lads kicked me in the shin and drew blood. I thought nothing of it at the time but, by Sunday night, the wound had turned septic. A couple of days later a few boils appeared, oozing puss (especially if you squeezed them hard!).

Most mothers would have taken their kids to the doctor and had some antibiotics prescribed. Not my Mam. Instead, she decided to cure the problem by applying scalding hot bread poultices in order, she said, to draw out the infection. Really, this was just an acute form of child abuse. The infection wasn’t drawn out but the process was. The torture of having hot poultices applied three times a day went on for weeks and weeks. The boils didn’t go away; they grew and multiplied, obviously enjoying the steamy heat. Eventually, the infection and the boils did recede. I guess they had simply run their course.

Mam was puzzled as to why the poultices didn’t work quicker. She speculated: Could the cloths have been hotter (you must be kidding!)? Should she have also used mustard (or jam)? Should it have been brown bread instead of white? Never once did it occur to her, during or after my weeks of agony, that maybe she should seek medical advice. In her own mind the poultices did work because the infection eventually cleared up.

By the way, I don’t want you to get the impression that Mam was into homeopathy in any way – she wasn’t. The only herb she’d heard about was the good looking trumpeter who fronted The Tijuana Brass. Mam was more into hot water and steam. Bread poultices were one manifestation. Another was me sitting with a towel over both my head and a steaming bowl of hot water to cure my sinus problems (it didn’t!). Yet another was the insistence that she had properly tested my bath water on a Sunday night, after my usual sweaty and muddy game of football, only for me to step into a bubbling cauldron. I never cleared any scum off the sides of the bath afterwards but rather a whole layer of boiled epidermis.

I couldn’t play any sports because of my enduring injury and my debut game for the school team was also my last. I tried my best but was never able to regain my place in that year or all the succeeding years of my time at Grammar School. Sucker!

Issue No. 17: PEANUTS FROM CHARLIE BROWN

George Buist had a very big head. I say this not in any sense as a comment on his self-importance but simply as a statement of truth. George had a small, squat body and an enormous head on top of it - "Like a drum on a pea" as Mam once succinctly put it.

George was one of a number of kids from my estate (although, in his case, the 'nicer' east side) who went with me from our Junior School to the Grammar School. For a year or so, when he was eleven and twelve, George thought that he was Denis Law, the legendary Manchester United footballer. Simultaneously, he started to speak in a thick Liverpudlian accent. I'm not sure if George started to speak like a Scouser because he couldn't perfect a Denis-like Aberdonian accent or because his older sister's boyfriend was from Liverpool and he wanted to impress him. For a couple of years, his close friends endured the sight of George running around the local park playing footie in his Man.U. strip, holding onto the cuffs of his sleeves like Denis, and then trying to decipher what he was saying during and in between these sessions. George was a likeable lad. Nobody wanted to dishearten or disillusion him. However, the facts were that (like the rest of us) George was an enthusiastic but crap footballer and that no one, including his sister's Liverpudlian boyfriend, could understand a word of what he said.

'Tojo'

George and the rest of us were plagued by a younger boy who lived near him and who, despite our best efforts at dissuasion, attached himself to our group when we were at George's house. He looked like a snotty-nosed Tojo, the former Japanese Minister of War, with his round face, round NHS wire-framed glasses and close-cropped hair. Possibly unlike Tojo, he also used to stink of sweat and ancient, accumulated farts. We routinely tortured him with 'red hot pokers' and by bouncing tennis balls off his head. Sadly for him, he was called Charlie Brown. Charlie's only saving grace was that he had an older sister, a couple of years our senior, who looked like Dusty Springfield. It's fair to say that a number of us developed a crush on her, yet no one could pluck up the courage to say anything to her. Then we thought about Charlie.



Dusty Springfield

For a couple of weeks we were exceptionally nice to Charlie. We let him play with us, gave him sweets and ignored his smell. He wasn't stupid; he knew something was up. We pumped him for information about 'Dusty' - her likes and dislikes and whether she had any boyfriends, especially any bigger than us. We then composed an anonymous letter to her signed 'An Admirer' and posted it through her door. We heard nothing for a week, as Charlie had been kept in sick, with typhoid fever or cholera or something like that. Eventually, he re-appeared in George's garden. We grabbed him and asked whether 'Dusty' had got the letter.

"Errm...yes", said a reluctant Charlie.

"Well, what did she think about it?"  we asked.

Our insistence was too obvious and the penny dropped with Charlie. He squinted at us through his steamy, grubby glasses and grinned, showing yellow and brown teeth and said "She went to the toilet and wiped her bum on it!"

We were humiliated, mortified, crushed and, in a manner of speaking, wiped out. We didn't know if Charlie was telling the truth or not; there was no way of finding out. We should have thumped him anyway for being so pleased about our defeat. We didn't, we just silently sloped away home. George told us later that he had taken Charlie to one side and spoken to him quietly and at length about friendship, loyalty and sympathy towards his comrades. And then he thumped him.

Issue No. 16: BULLY BOY

Ronnie Buller was big-boned, brawny and brutal. He was in the Junior School with me and, apart from his size, he was then fairly anonymous. When he went to the Grammar School, however, he discovered talents neither he nor anyone else who knew him could ever have guessed he possessed.

Rugby

He always seemed ungainly and rather ponderous at games, especially football. However, the senior school opened up the world of rugby to him. Still not fleet of foot, he nevertheless used his superior height and strength to great advantage. As he grew, so did his prowess on the pitch. I remember, in one rugby match, trying to tackle him round the waist. This only slowed him slightly and, as other opponents came in, he smashed them down with his free hand. A couple of other boys grabbed onto him, but he powered down the field with three of us clinging on, being thumped heavily to free his progress. He easily made the school rugby team in the successive years he was there, growing bigger all of the time.

Mean Machine

In Junior School and for the first two years at the senior school, I remember Ronnie as being affable, despite his later prowess on the rugby field. This changed in the succeeding couple of years. By the time he was fifteen, Ronnie had developed a bullying mean streak. You tried to avoid him when going home at dinner (lunch) and tea times. A normal conversation would suddenly turn nasty because of some imagined slight, and you would find yourself being pinned against a fence, or crushed in a head lock or flat on your back on the pavement with him on top. If you didn't beg for mercy or forgiveness he would simply bash you until you did.

By a series of eliminators, Ronnie eventually came face to face with his main rival for school fight champion, an equally cruel and vicious boy from across town. This, apparently, was the fight to end all fights. There was no Marquis of Queensbury rules applying here. The fight was with fists, feet, knees, elbows and heads. It was, in truth, like a gladatorial contest. If one of them fell, the other would simply kick him in the face and at full force. Eyes were gouged, hair pulled, shirts and trousers bloodily ripped and fists, clothes and shoes were smeared with the blood of both parties. After an epic and stomach-churning battle that lasted for over an hour, Ronnie emerged as the undisputed champ. He was bloodied, battered and bruised but, as they say, you should have seen the other guy!

Just a year later, when still at school, Ronnie suffered a bad bout of rheumatic fever, which nearly killed him and which weakened his heart. However, his reputation was still intact and no one bothered to take advantage of his weakened status when he returned to school. The walks home were no better; his bullying instincts were undimmed.

Ronnie suffered academically, maybe as a result of his illness. He stayed on at school, past eighteen, for another one or two years, I was told.

What happened to him? He eventually became a primary school head teacher.

Issue No. 15: THE GREAT DIVIDE

For two years in the top class of the Junior School we were constantly drilled, tested, graded and punished in order to succeed. The ultimate prize was to pass the 11+ exams. We were repeatedly given old 11+ papers in all of the subjects and completed them under examination conditions. There was no room for failure. However, inevitably, there was failure and the consequences of this were calamitous for many.

When the results of the 11+ exams were known, the boys and girls who passed were, obviously, proud and elated. However, it was soon borne in on us that some of our friends, comrades and fellow sufferers who had, it seemed to us, spent a lifetime with us (six years, but it felt much more) were no longer going to be part of our journey through life. Maybe we expected some of them not to pass, particularly the kids in the two bottom rows of the class. Quite probably, they expected the same, but the sudden realities of success and failure, with the forced separation of friends and the very different prospects to be faced in secondary education, came as a great shock to everyone. This was the first Great Divide in our lives.

Billy Jones & Co.

There were also those who were expected to pass but didn't. One of these was Billy Jones. He was a quick-witted, bright, cheerful and smallish boy, who was always dressed smartly, topped off with a natty bow tie. He lived straight opposite the school gates and was the apple of his mother's eye. His Mam looked much younger and prettier than the other Mams and, unlike them, wore brightly-coloured summery dresses. Her hair was in the style of a 1940s movie star and she always had a big smile for Billy when he emerged from school.

When Billy failed the 11+, the bright light dimmed in his eyes and also in his Mam's. Over the next two or three years I saw him trudge up Park Avenue on his way to the secondary school when our paths briefly crossed as I went in the opposite direction. There was no longer any spark or cheerfulness about him. I saw his Mam too a few times. She looked older and worried. She now wore drab browns and greys, like the other mothers. She had pinned her hopes on Billy's bright future - and they had been dashed.

Catherine Colley, the top girl, sailed through the exams, as did Fatty Lawrence, the top boy. Catherine's two loyal fillies, the Oates twins, faced the cruellest fate; one passed the exams and the other didn't. Born together, brought up together, birthdays together, schooled together and roped together as part of Catherine's proud team, they were now, aged 11, prised apart and forced to go their separate ways.

If the shock of separation at that young age was traumatic, then the education system in our town had a yet crueller twist. The 12+ exams allowed a very few kids from secondary schools a last chance to enter the Grammar Schools. However, at the same time, the Grammar Schools carried out a 'cull' after the first two years and expelled those that they deemed as failures. One of these was Harold Downes who, ironically, lived in the next house to Billy Jones.

Embittered

Harold was embittered by being expelled and couldn't come to terms with it. I guess that he was ashamed but hid this beneath a cloak of anger and resentment. I met him in the summer holidays after his expulsion. Already, he was being picked on and taunted by other boys that he would soon join at the secondary school. His anger had led to a number of fights, all of which he had lost. His immediate future, once he attended the school, was obvious.

Like Billy, Harold was the 'big hope' for the family. In his case though, unlike in Billy's, this had a desperate edge. His parents were poor and, either due to the poverty or to some genetic condition or both, his Dad, his two younger brothers and Harold himself were all chronic asthmatics. His Dad could never hold down a job for long. His Mam was a dead ringer for Bette Davis, with the same slightly bulging eyes - but these eyes were always showing fear and anxiety. She carried the whole family, but it was clearly crushing the life out of her. Harold, briefly, possibly offered a way out, if not for her or the rest of the family, at least for himself - but he had been thrown back into the coughing and wheezing pit of their shared existence.

There were many working class children who went to Grammar School in the 1940s, 50s and 60s whose lives were forever changed for the better as a result of the opportunities that the experience opened up for them, and this would not have happened but for the introduction of the 1944 Education Act and the inception of the 11+ exams. Of course, there were also those children who attended the secondary modern schools who, despite not going to the local Grammar School, nevertheless forged successful careers and better lives for themselves. However, society develops and progresses (or should) from one generation to the next and one must question a system which introduced an arbitrary quota of only allowing 20% of kids to pass the 11+ exams, with the in-built bias towards middle class kids from better resourced homes. What I have anecdotally described is the flip side of the well-known Grammar School success stories, the side of the vast majority of kids who never made it to the 'elite' and whose voices would remain unheard until a more egalitarian system of education was introduced (in England and Wales) in the 1970s.



Further Reading: Check out Michael Rosen's excellent blog on Schools in the 1950s.