It’s Not What You Think

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 selected 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.

I think I experienced almost all these various methods of sadism during my days at the grammar school—with maybe the exception of the yardstick and the strap, both of which looked too menacing to risk any misbehaviour. No thank you. Another reason I escaped their wrath perhaps was simply because I didn’t stick around at the school long enough—we ended up parting company before my fourth year.

One afternoon we were attempting to survive a physics lesson. It was a sunny pleasant day outside and we were stuck in a classroom which looked out over the school playing fields, past the cricket pavilion and on to the railway line in the distance.

I hated school generally but I really hated physics, I was sure I would have absolutely no use for it at any point ever again in my life. I was permanently angry that my time was being wasted learning something I would have no use for. I also thought my physics teacher was a serious nut job.

He was an old, wizened, twisted and bitter man who had forgotten how to smile; all he could do nowadays was contort. I often wondered what might have happened to him in the past to cause him to turn out this way. It was almost impossible to imagine he’d ever been young at all and somewhere along the line he’d turned into the kind of person who gives old people a bad name.

I had long since drifted off far away from whatever it was we were supposed to be studying that day and had taken instead to writing on my desk. I know this is wrong and I shouldn’t have been doing it, but as wrong as it was I didn’t deserve what was about to happen next.

Unbeknownst to me, the physics master had been stood behind me silently for the last few minutes, for the duration of my ‘vandalism’, watching me scrape and scratch away at the wooden lid of my desk. He waited for a while before choosing the moment to begin his attack.

He then proceeded with a slow and determined diatribe of disgust at what the hell I thought I was playing at.

He began calmly—certainly.

‘Evans, what-are-you-doing?’

It was one of those annoying questions when it was obvious what I was doing; he knew it and I knew it, he just wanted me to say it out loud, all perverts want you to say it out loud.

‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m bored out of my brains because you are a useless teacher and I hate physics anyway and I want to kill you but I know that is against the law, so now I am considering suicide which is also against the law but it means I’ll be the only one dead, so that’s alright in my book and at least I’ll be out of here and away from you and your warped idea of existence—you miserable old…’

Of course this is what I wanted to say and this is what all my classmates wanted me to say, but as it happened I didn’t say anything.

He repeated his question, this time so perplexed and through such gritted teeth I could barely understand what he was saying. The veins in his neck were standing out like a penis with an erection, his mouth foaming at the sides.

‘Evans…what…are…you…doing?’

This time I did manage to utter something, albeit very reluctantly. ‘Writing on the desk, sir.’

This reply immediately had my classmates in fits: they were clasping their hands over their mouths to suppress the laughter. It was obvious I was for the chop and when you’re at school, as long as it’s not you, that’s the funniest thing ever.

The sniggering and snorting was doing nothing to help my cause. It only added to making a mockery of the whole situation, something that thrust old Nutjob into hyper rage. He was furious by now, his ire consuming him. But what he hadn’t yet seen was exactly what I was writing on the desk, I was praying to God he wouldn’t.

‘And…what…are you writing?’

Well now, here’s the thing, you see, I was writing his name and my impression of his preferred sexuality.

‘Oh fuck,’ I thought.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘I’m fucked.’

And I was.

‘Come on Evans, WHAT DOES IT SAY?’ he screamed.

Now he still hadn’t seen what it said and was waiting for me to read it out, something I wasn’t prepared to do because whatever he thought it said, I bet he didn’t think it said what it did.

He asked me three more times but I just sat there. He couldn’t understand why I was being so defiant. The rest of the class couldn’t understand why either. Their sniggering had stopped, the room was now filled with an overwhelming air of tension, as if they were just urging me to get it over with. It was obvious I was going to get the whacks anyway. Why didn’t I just say whatever it was that was written on the bloody desk?

Some of them even began to mouth: ‘J U S T—T E L L—H I M.’

But I couldn’t, I had decided that the only thing worse than writing those words was then to vocalise them in front of a class of thirty-odd boys and a man who was now the most insane man on Planet Earth.

‘Alright Evans, then I will read it out. What does it say?’

‘Shit a fucking brick,’ I thought, ‘here it comes…’

And with that, his eyes widened as his brain engaged with the four simple single-syllable words that lay before him. There was a rumbling, like a volcano about to erupt, and then he screamed, ‘SIR…IS…A…QUEER!’

That was it, that’s what I had written, the fact that, in my ill-informed schoolboy brain, he was indeed a queer. The rest of the lads were immediately back in hysterics.

This was bad, very bad, and made worse by the fact that I had declared that he was a queer in front of a class of boys who all had supposed he might well be for some time now.

He ordered me to stand up. I was reluctant to do so. He ordered me again. Petrified, I slowly rose to my feet.

He looked at me as if he wanted to kill me.

He then punched me as hard as he could, not in the face but in the chest.

There was shock all around the room. My classmates sat open-mouthed in amazement as I was thrown backwards down the aisle where I hit the wall before slumping to the ground, completely winded.

What in Christ’s name did this psycho think he was doing?

I was a thirteen-year-old boy and, yes, I had been naughty, very naughty, but you don’t punch a kid, no matter what he’s done. My own father had never once raised a hand to me over anything and now here was a man whom I barely knew striking me with the full force of his adult strength.

I will never forget what I did next. There is a difference between bravery and fearlessness; I think bravery is more contemplated whereas fearlessness is more of reaction to a situation, the consequences of which are not an issue. This is exactly how I was feeling.

Incredulous as to what had happened, I raised myself up off the floor, scrambled back to my desk, picked up my chair and smashed it over his head as hard as I could—at least I think I did, that’s how it felt at the time anyway. It probably wasn’t quite as dramatic as that but I was so angry.

I do remember for sure him looking up at me and visibly cowering; suddenly his whole demeanour had changed: he looked like he was scared to death. The coward had shown himself for what he really was—a sorry and pathetic bully who had been stripped of his so-called might. I threw down the chair and walked out.

As the big heavy classroom door thud shut behind me with the help of one of those big brass cantilever arms that no one ever knows the name of, I found myself transported from chaos and calamity to calmness and serenity. I was suddenly alone. The corridors, often so busy during changeover and break times were now deathly quiet.

It was all very poignant.

I took one last look inside the classroom at the scene of bewilderment.

You can have that, I thought.

I was by no means a model student, but nor was I one of the bad lads and I certainly didn’t deserve what had just happened to me.

I turned and started to walk, the hollow sound of my own footsteps reminding me to keep on going. I can still picture it now, like a perfectly framed shot from a Luc Besson movie—the long, highly polished expanse of dark parquet flooring stretching out into the infinite distance, leading to a white light of hope, in my case the two huge main school doors which I was about to exit for the very last time, never to return.

When I woke up that morning I had no idea that by the end of the day, something would have taken place that would change my life for ever.

I would now need to find a new school, and the next school in question would have the added bonus of having girls—and one girl in particular.

But first let’s get death out of the way.

Top 10 Deaths

10 Elvis Presley

9 Princess Diana (sorry, but it’s true*)

8 My dog Max

7 My friend Ronnie

6 Uncle Harry

5 John Lennon

4 My friend James

3 My dog Rita

2 My dog Enzo

1 My dad

And so to the early death of my father—Martin Joseph Evans.

First of all let me I apologise for using the term ‘early death’ as I’m not quite sure whether that’s right, it’s just something we’ve always said about Dad. None of us know when we are supposed to die in the first place; therefore how can anyone’s passing really be declared ‘early’. Surely we are all meant to die when we do die and that’s why it happens when it does. The reason I suppose we refer to Dad’s death as being early is because he was relatively young, still in his fifties, when he was plucked out for promotion to that higher office in the sky.

Dad, like Mum, smoked twenty cigarettes a day—at least. Woodbines, evil non-tipped things. I often had a go on his dog-ends when he wasn’t looking. Enough to put anyone off smoking for life—not that it did. Martin J was also marginally overweight, maybe a tad more than marginally if I’m brutally honest. He had a marvellous squishy belly that my finger used to disappear into whenever I would check it out. (I have one of those bellies now.) My inspection of Dad’s belly would usually take place while I was draped over him on the sofa, using it as a pillow. Another feature of this experience is that I would be able to hear his breathing loudly up against my ear. He always had a whistling wheeze at the end of each breath, like the last puffs of air faintly draining from a set of bagpipes.

When it came to Dad’s diet, it wasn’t the best in the world but by no means was it the worst either. He did, however, lead what was for the majority of his days a sedentary lifestyle, which couldn’t have been good for him. He was either sat in his car driving to and from work, sat at home in his favourite chair or sat at work doing his sums as a wages clerk for the local health authority.

On the face of it, maybe not such a healthy existence, but then again he didn’t drink, he went to bed at 10.30 every night, he led a nine to five existence which seemed pretty stress-free, and he enjoyed a steadfastly sound and happy marriage.

In short, I think the things he did do that were bad for him were counteracted by countless other things that he didn’t do that could have been bad for him. I’m guessing he might have expected to make his early seventies at least.

Smoking is obviously the main suspect when it comes to the demise of people like Dad and can be merciless, but when my father died the docs said he had the lungs of a non-smoker—a fact Mum loves to reel out to anyone who will listen. She has a library of such facts from her life that she never wants us to forget, but this is perhaps her favourite.