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