The Homesteads - next stop Stanford-le-Hope - lived up to its name. This was the bungalow-belt in earnest. Slightly more up-market than the plotlands proper. Although still surrounded by farms and woodland, to my young self it had something of the air of prosperity about it. For a start we had travelled through it on a bus. Which in itself presupposes a road of sorts. Mind you, prosperity had yet to deal a blow to the highway’s equivalent of crop-circles - namely potholes. These mysterious entities - if a hole can be rightly called an entity - appeared out of nowhere. It was a Bermuda-Triangle for the local authorities. Council workmen sent out to do battle with these alien invasions had been known to disappear for days on end. Only to be found at last huddled together over black, steaming kettles in sundry sheds half-hidden at the ends of cul-de-sacs. Brave men that they were - despite the perils of the British climate and the far greater evil of the time-and-motion-study man - they kept the arteries of commerce - and in my case, education - open. So, like it or not, Stanford-le-Hope came shuddering into view. The church and the portals of an educational establishment little changed since the relief of Mafeking were about to extend - in the form of priests and nuns - a disciplinarian’s welcome to the approaching rabble.
This was the archetypical school of every conceivable scholastic nightmare. It was the epitome of traditional values. Its very structure seemed designed to instill the maximum amount of fear possible. The redbrick, towering Victorian edifice glared back at the sun-shot clearing of the storm, from its monumental high sash- windows. It had all the drama of a biblical epic. A vision of Elijah controlling the tempest at will. I could hear the implications, rain or drought, don’t ask the meteorologists just study the biblical texts, its fundamental to your spiritual development. I was on my knees already. I’d seen the light, but the light in conjunction with a star, a lone expending brilliant, powerless in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. Islanded and oppressed by the surrounding aeons of eternal darkness. “Form yourselves into five straight - I said straight! - lines,” came the strident command from the oft-times vesper whispering lips of a Whirling Dervish of a nun. It had begun. My infantile version of the Enlightenment, countered by bouts of Torquemada-like inquisition, had moved into its catechismal phase. Question and answer was to be our modus operandi. We were to be told what the questions were then given the appropriate answers to be learnt by rote. This was education in the strictest sense of the word. Seated at our sloping wooden desks - pens at the ready - we would be expected to respond to any doctrinal whim of our peripatetic, desk-slapping mentors. On that particular day, prison itself, the very dungeons of the most dismal of medieval castles, would have seemed preferable to what I was about to endure. My newfound surroundings will no doubt be familiar to many amongst you. The parquet flooring - buffed to a pernicious brilliance - waited like sheet-ice for the unwary speedster. The fifteen-foot high ceilings added greatly to one’s sense of inferiority and the blackboard and easel dominated the unfathomable foreground of each unintelligible classroom. The desks - as already noted - were of the wooden sloping variety, and unless my memory deceives me, seats were hard, attached and uncomfortable to live with. Along the top of the desks ran a groove. There we kept our pens and pencils. At the far end of the groove was the inkwell. Into this was inserted a small, cylindrical, porcelain pot, filled at intervals with what I’ve since come to know as octopus-oil. If you’d seen some of my earliest attempts at writing, the significance of the metaphor would become immediately apparent. Even now, whilst penning longhand this humble little autobiography, my fear of the handwriting class and my continually thwarted efforts to master the art of penmanship, haunt the very margins of the page. Things became so bad, that along with other graphical degenerates, I was relegated to the boiler-room for extra reading and writing lessons. Down there, deep in the bowels of that ship of knowledge, we were coached - not to say terrorized - individually. We sat on hard, slatted, wooden benches ranged either side of a white-scrubbed trestle table. There, with a scratchy overloaded pen and wads of blotting paper that didn’t blot, I wrote out the individual letters of the alphabet a million miserable times. There too, the repeat after me, spelling exercises helped to formulate a neurotic lexicographical disposition that plagues me to this very day.
Back upstairs in class on that first day I began to look about me at some of my fellow inmates. There was a plump little red-faced boy with the unusual - seeing as it was a Catholic school – Jewish sounding name of Finglestein. Still, being well and truly in the land of original sin he wouldn’t have to bear the full weight of the cross entirely on his own. Hearne, another remembered only by his surname, had white speckles and blotches behind all of his fingernails, which seem to suggest some sort of calcium deficiency. Whatever, the nickname of Mr. Pastry was inevitable. One whose name I can remember in full - can never forget in fact - was Jethro Buckley. He was reputed to have come from one of the large Essex gipsy families. Whether this was so - he certainly had something of a wayward and recalcitrant spirit - I couldn’t rightly say. What I do know is, he was about to become a good and loyal friend, although, the word friend could just as easily be translated - accomplice - for all intents and purposes. Most of my early troubles were either influenced or instigated by this devil-may-care apotheosis of a fallen angel. Strangely, I remember next to nothing in the way of girls at that particular time. Girls on the bus I recall, but they could have been destined for elsewhere. Sandals, white-socks and gingham dresses come to mind but the faces are vague and I couldn’t put a name to any of them. I was at that stage in my life when girls were considered to be surplus to requirements. Mothers-and-fathers and doctors-and-nurses were pleasures as yet to be refined. For now, apart from my female kith and kin and the unmerciful sisters of infinite wisdom, it was to be a predominantly masculine world.
Boys one instinctively understood. What to other eyes was seen as mischievous, sullen, or even as downright obstreperous, was to the stripling mind as natural as the clash of conkers or the sidelong, vituperative, mumbling of curses. Autumn was our arena. That postage-stamp of a playground appeared to us to be of inordinate dimensions. Running along the edge of the road, around the front of the school and up to the entrance of the church itself, our limits were defined by the spiky green spears of the statutory cast-iron railings. To the south, a low, grey, stonewall separated us from the convent and its thin-lipped and beady-eyed sorority. Between them and us grew temptation in the form of raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants. At the sunset end of the playground were sited the ‘offices of ablution,’ more commonly known as the ‘bogs.’ There sinks and urinals were open to the elements and even the cubicles themselves - owing to the dilapidated state of their corrugated iron roofs - could be considered more of an en plein air experience than other more delicate descriptions could confer. Over and above that high-stench, putrefying cesspit of an excuse for a toilet, spread out the leaves and branches of two tall and partially entwining walnut trees. Once again God had intervened. He, in His high-minded beneficence had decided to create something close to paradise here on earth. Boys and trees are inseparable, although, say that to an operative in the fracture-clinic and the shortest of shrift will become your true and just deserts. However, there in the mellowest of seasons, the green-splitting globes of the crop in question gave us a glimpse of their cerebral centres. Continuing with the mental metaphor, one has to ponder on the origin of the word ‘nutty’ itself. This - almost literally - cortex of a shell certainly inspired behaviour from both myself and others that could definitely be termed, as my mother might have said, “free pence short of a shillin’.” What possible vestige of sanity is to be found in the vision of a group of vociferous louts hurling great knobbly cudgels up into the trees immediately above their young and barely protected craniums? No good could come of it, you might say. And you wouldn’t be far wrong. Cudgels and heads not infrequently came into contact with one and other. Lumps the size of eggs at a first holy- communion breakfast sprouted from the skulls of black, blond and ginger-haired urchins with equal vigour. Those more akin to monkeys than to the be-cudgelled Neanderthals below, leapt about in the trees with all the agility of arthritic squirrels. If you’ve ever seen a wildlife film of monkeys in full swing - or more appropriately heard the sound of them in full cry on the approach of a predator - then you will have some idea of the shrill-throated, high-flung, pandemonium