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