September 7 1981: Winter Term starts - Lower VI at last!
Monday September 7th
Sometimes I feel I've got to / Run away I've got to / Get away / From the pain that you drive into the heart of me
- Tainted Love - Soft Cell (second week at #1)
At the start of my green Senior Schools Diary 1981 is my Fifth Year timetable. Thirty-eight years on, I'm still not entirely sure how I survived Mondays.
It started with double biology, a subject which, as far as I can remember, was filled with hour after interminable hour discussing stamens, chlorophyll and pollenation. Either that or what seemed like days of aimlessly soaking patches of the school playing field from watering cans in the vague hope of enticing worms to the surface.
These sessions would be punctuated with the occasional observation from the diminutive and rotund figure of our teacher, Mrs Gascoigne, who would encourage our efforts to be 'more rain-like'.
"The worms respond to the vibrations caused by rain falling on the surface of the ground above, boys," she would cry. "So your watering needs to be more rain-like! Hucklesby! Hucklesby! What are you doing, boy?! You're just pouring the water on the ground there! The worms will be putting out bloody sandbags! More rain-like, Hucklesby! More rain-like!"
On the rare occasions that we managed to strike the right note between a light spit and full-on monsoon and a worm appeared, it would be snatched up and put into a plastic container and then transported back to the lab.
And then, in the interests of science, its tail would be severed from its head. If it was lucky, the severing would be done behind its clitellum and it would grow a new tail. But if it was unlucky enough to have been caught by Mitchell Stubley, then certain death lurked just seconds and a scalpel blade away.
This, I now imagine, is probably how Josef Mengler spent his formative years.
Monday also brought the promise of geography, which I'd hoped, when choosing my options, might amount to nothing more taxing than learning the capital cities of the world and where the best nudist beaches in Europe might be, but which actually turned out to be about extraordinarily dull things like striations, shale and contours;
There was also the joy of Religious Education with Mr Munn and/or his wife, Mrs Munn, who were in their sixties and taught the condensed religious curriculum which excluded a lot of the minor faiths like, oh, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism;
Then there was physics which was far too much like maths for my liking, but which did have the singular advantage of not being chemistry. Although in my defence, I had shown early promise with my chemistry set, mixing and then superheating a number of chemicals in a test tube to create a solution that not only immediately corroded any metal it came into contact with but which, as it turned out, was also highly flammable.
Basically, I’d invented liquid rust that could catch fire. Pasteur had nothing on me.
We were also forced to endure Games lessons. This has always seemed to me to be an unqualified misnomer. Games carried the faint promise of something enjoyable, a soupçon of pleasure. There was no pleasure to be derived from Games at Alleyne’s, unless you were a rugger bugger who was built like a brick shithouse and whose only goal in life was to be awarded half or full colours.
Games was, however, distinct from P.E. lessons, which focused on fitness and mastering the art of first climbing a rope to the apex of the sports hall roof and then being able to come down slowly enough that you didn't suffer first degree friction burns to your inner thighs. Quite what this skill was intended to prepare me for in my life as a journalist remains a mystery to me to this day.
Games lessons supposedly focused on actually playing specific sports. But in reality, so far as I can tell, these lessons actually amounted to nothing more than turning out in sub-zero temperatures in ill-fitting PE kit which was slightly damp from being left in your sports bag for a week, and then spending an hour and a half standing ankle-deep in icy mud on a rugby field while your thighs turned blue.
And then, once your toes had separated from your feet through advanced frostbite and you were allowed back to the changing rooms, you could enjoy the privilege of some cunt spraying Ralgex on your testicles.
Alleyne's was a rugby school first and foremost. Sure, it pretended to also promote the finer arts of hockey and cricket in spring and summer respectively, but in truth they formed part of the Phys. Ed. curriculum only for want of something to fill the time until September rolled around again. If Haberdashers Askes or Parmiters had been up for a game of egg-chasing in the dog days of June, the gentle thwack of leather on willow or the less gentle thwack of Richard Lucas’s hockey stick on someone’s thighs or arse when the teacher’s back was turned would have been instant history.
Football was, to quote the unreconstructed wisdom of Alleyne’s games master Mr Biggerstaff, 'for poofs'. So we spent the autumn term playing rugby, spring term playing hockey and summer playing cricket. It was as if someone had stumbled across a list comprising the three sports I hated most in the world and had then built the games curriculum around it.
To cap it all, there was the delight of Maths to look forward to towards the end of the day. The reality of Maths at school was at least preferable to the unmitigated misery of being ‘helped’ with my Maths homework by Dad. If I close my eyes and concentrate a bit, I can still feel the leaden fist of dread that would grip my heart as Dad cheerfully announced he’d help me with whatever insurmountable task had been set for that evening.
Trig was bad. Algebra was worse. The journey from my bedroom to the living room, my books clutched hopelessly in my hands, was one of despair. Matt - to whom numeracy had been gifted at birth - would throw me a knowing and, I felt, spiteful smile as we passed in the hall. Dead man walking! the walls seemed to cry. Dead man walking here!
Dad ‘helping’ me with my Maths homework was what Groundhog Day would have been like if it had been made by John Carpenter instead of Harold Ramis.
Each time this recurring nightmare of reality took place, Dad would start with the best of intentions and the patience of Job.
“Okay,” he would begin placidly, after I had set my books out on the floor and we had positioned ourselves side by side on the carpet to tackle a subject that was and remains unfathomable to me (why we had to do this on the floor also remains a mystery - it’s not as though we didn’t possess a dining room complete with a big fuck-off table in it), “so if x = 3 and y = 2, what is x² − y²?”
I didn’t have a fucking clue.
“Four?” I would suggest, hopefully.
At this point, early in the process, he would smile benignly and exude the kind of patience that warrants beatification. “Well, no,” he’d say, choosing his words so deliberately and slowly that I sometimes felt I might be a gazelle that he was scared of spooking. “So we know that x equals three, so what is x squared?”
I feigned deep thought as numbers tumbled and multiplied and swam in and out of focus in my mind’s eye. When I felt like I’d given the impression of having paid more than fleeting consideration to the question, I would swipe blindly at a passing number in my head and volunteer it. “Seven?”
“How could it possibly be seven?” he would ask. “Seven isn’t divisble by two and I very much doubt the school is asking you to work in algebraic fractions.”
He might as well have been speaking Swahili, but I got the distinct impression that seven wasn’t the right answer either. “Six—-” - I saw a cloud pass across his face as his patience began to show its first fissures - “——teen?” I ventured.
“Sixteen?” He’d shake his head in despair. “Sixteen. Jesus. Now you’re just guessing, Mark.” (well, duh-huh, Sherlock)
“Let’s go back a stage. What’s three times three?”
I knew that one. “Nine.”
“Correct. So if x equals three, x squared must be …?”
“Five?”
And so it went on. Eventually, Dad - a chartered accountant who had another, normal son - would lose patience. The books would be snapped shut, we’d both be released from our self-inflicted purgatory and I’d be happy with my F in a subject that I neither saw the point of nor cared about. I may not have been worldly-wise at that stage - or at any point since, in many ways - but even at 16 I couldn’t imagine any sort of Dystopian future in which my emloyer might require me to solve algebraic problems as part of my duties.
But on September 8th, the waking nightmare of biology, physics, RE, geography, French, maths and games would be at an end. The Sixth Form awaited. I had to worry about only three subjects (English, German and History), would get to be in the common room (which had its own kitchen, tuck shop, radiators and sofas) and would enjoy occasional free periods, some of which were conveniently at the end of the day and some of which were of my own creation and in direct conflict with what the school thought and believed I was doing.
In my diary, each and every subject in my 5th year timetable has been crossed through in a sort of ritualistic cleansing of my academic life. Written above it, in my own neat, youthful hand, are the words:
M. Norman LVI
Destiny awaited. I had arrived.