If the common room and hall were where we played and the kitchens left us full and happy, then the school rooms were where we were educationally malnourished. Lessons in this new school were odd and repetitive, as if the teachers were there less to teach us and more watch us for open signs of uncontrolled behavior in the small class sizes they kept us in, ten to a class. The level of the teaching was roughly third year primary school level, roughly aged 10. However much older we got it never changed throughout all the time I was there. The same lessons were both taught and received but the older we got the more our enthusiasm waned. But as long as the lack of enthusiasm matched between teacher and taught then all seemed alright. If the school had aimed to have us take and our 11+ when we were 14*, the age we were meant to leave when I first went, then with the teaching we had we would still have failed it. The biggest lesson that was never taught was that clearly, since we were 'maladjusted', then the teachers by definition had no faith in our intelligence and very little confidence in social skills and manners.
We were taught to not even ask what 'being maladjusted' meant. I understand it now to be a non-technical word that parents would grudgingly accept when it was used by the schools authorities to describe their errant male offspring when they did not fit in with the education system when it over-processed them and they displayed either near-criminal acts close to the family home, or displayed mental health problems in classrooms. With thirty odd pupils to a class there was no time to support the stragglers and barely the collective discipline to contain the more disruptive pupils. We were not quite stupid, but some of us had displayed signs of mentally illness and for the authorities our behavior had to be contained. For everybody's sake we were best contained far away from our families.
Once I tried to go beyond the usual circular arguments the staff sometimes used that went way over our heads. I asked a member of staff the open question 'Why are we here?'. His reply was 'You are here because you are a near criminal. You would become a criminal if you were anywhere else.'. I could not process the idea of criminality, I was too stunned by his answer to even think to try to ask him another question. I was afraid of the word 'criminal' itself, and also because with Mother's stories of patriotic wartime bullying between children the word 'near' had come to mean 'actual', in my mind.
There was a corroboration of sorts to his answer when via gossip we learned that the alternative to being where we were was being in either 'an approved school' or a 'borstal'**. Naturally, instead of being interested in the gradations of criminality and the difference between different government departments we as children we joked about a school being 'approved' as if being naughty seemed quite nice to us. We were encouraged our delusional humour too, it made keeping us in line easier.
My first lesson was a reading test, except the teacher was doing office work at the same time. We were meant to read a series of books where each book was harder to read than the last. The teacher wanted us to read them in order to determine our reading age. He told us to to tell he each time we finished one book. But several times part way through the lesson teacher disappeared with the office work that he had freshly completed. Since he was gone from the school room I just got the next book in the series and when he returned just kept on reading. When towards the end of the lesson he asked how many of the books I said 'Nearly all of them' he was surprised because he had marked me off as reading very few of them. It sounds petty to say he issued us with instructions we couldn't keep because he had left the room so often. But anyone giving instruction to people new to the school has to be available to those they instruct to recognize that what they wanted to do is being carried out.
What we were taught depended on what staff there were that half term. About half the teachers were were permanent staff. The rest stayed for one or two terms and went on to other schools. A few of the staff were barely out of teacher training college. The temp staff divided between either teaching to fill in between other professions or engagements, e.g. one of the staff member I liked a lot was a professional children's writer, or they were starting out and preferred the idea of teaching ten difficult 'problem' children to 30 'normal' children. With hindsight the school seemed to double as a half-way house for training teachers before they taught in regular schools.Whatever personal interest or body of knowledge a new member of staff had the school expected them to make lessons out of it for the boys amusement. With hindsight the school seemed to be a half-way house for training teachers before they taught in regular schools.
The lesson that mattered most to the school was English Language on Thursday mornings, most because they made the lesson in language a lesson in letter writing on to our families. There was the joke sentence that we were not to write 'Dear Mother I am sending you a pound, but not this week.'. What we wrote had to be simple, brief, grammatical, and entertaining for them to read. We were expected to fill two to four sides of an A5 writing pad with the correct spelling and punctuation over 45 minutes. We wrote the address on the envelope we were given too. They saw the reassurance of our parents as vital to the working of the school, though how parents should be assured by in our not-quite-illiterate child-like ramblings I can't imagine now, unless it a calculated appeal to the innocence in parent's natures. It occurs to me now more than I imagined it back then that they may well have read the letters we sent, because in the afternoon the staff had a weekly conference where they all reported back to each other. On 'conference day' aside from the general reporting on all the boys, one child would be chosen and he would be told in private 'You are the subject of today's conference, is there anything you want said in meeting?'. Since we had no idea how they talked about us how could we give the teacher who had shown us the courtesy of telling us we were this week's subject some comment that might give them real food for thought?
We were taught basic maths and it never went beyond basic division, multiplication, adding and subtraction. What made the maths more complex was a scenario being added to the sums, because the scenarios that the teachers added seemed normal enough to them but to some of the boys, me included, they seemed weird and confusing. I remember some sums arranged around wages and deductions which seemed surreal to me less because of the actual figures, more because all I knew about money was Mother's stories of hardship on a tight budget where if she succeeded in balancing the books one week then she would still feel afraid of failure for the next week. Then there was my socially trying be the equal of the boys my age on half the pocket money they had. Sums with money in them did not work for me because money=anxiety and being anxious=the loss of reason and confidence.
One classroom had chemistry equipment in it, there were never any lessons in the subject. In that classroom we persecuted a french teacher from France something rotten when his job was to teach us French whilst controlling the class and doing neither. He cried and had to be relieved by the headmaster who restored order quite creatively, almost through debating with us why we were ill disciplined. There was a carpentry workshop where we produced very little because when we were in it we had to be heavily watched when allowed near sharp tools we might cut ourselves with (we never did). Art lessons were enjoyable but even there any art I created wandered away from the brief the teacher gave for the lesson, which naturally annoyed him.
Media studies classes were memorable. The earliest was around the subject of noise. A teacher set up a class of eleven year old's with paper glue and scissors and let us all get on with making whatever shape they wanted. Behind a movable screen he set a reel to reel tape recorder to record. Half way through the lesson we were asked to stop. The tape recorder was revealed and brought to the front of the class. Then we listened to ourselves for twenty odd minutes. I remember clearly how in all the length of the recording there was only one brief silence and it lasted for only a few seconds before a child spoke and the talking over each other restarted.
In another lesson I saw what must have been an early video recorder for the first time. We were shown forty five mins of adverts back to back, no programme between them. We were then asked to comment on what we saw. This produced a good debate between us all about image vs substance when people are sold things. We quite quickly concluded that in advert land everything is bigger and more glossy than in real life. Life is easier too. The same teacher in another set of lessons played us recorded music, much of it orchestral/classical and he made the point of the music lesson very clearly about saying nothing and listening together, like a secular R.E. lesson. One week we got the 1973 rock opera 'Quadrophenia' by The Who, which was a very intense bit of story telling and music for us teenyboppers to contemplate.
School outings exemplified one pattern of the school, where something was made out to be more than the sum of it's parts. I missed the first school outing, an exchange week with a school in Kent where seeing France on the cross channel ferry trip, but not getting off the ferry, was the draw. I got on the next ferry trip, I saw Yorkshire by getting the ferry across The Humber Estuary. We traveled the twenty miles journey in the school minibus, got on on the ferry at Grimsby and wandered around the deck of the ferry for the 30 mins duration of the crossing, stayed on deck as it docked in Hull and then returned to Grimsby and returned to school. I was enthralled by the big paddle wheel of the old ferry, and crudity of the paint work. The lesson was that 'abroad' might mean other counties, it was not going to mean other countries on the budget life I had to live out.
The outside world was no more encouraging, ITV had a current affairs programme called 'World In Action', broadcast every Monday at 8 pm. They made an episode on the school and it's pupils. Only one set of parents let their child be interviewed on camera. All I saw of myself was my legs at the back of the pack at the start of a brief cross country running scene. But the worrying had-wringing tone of programme was true to form in reinforcing popular prejudice.
School was similar to my parents house, in both we would be very quickly headed off by the adults from any topic of conversation that they were ill at ease with. In the school it was why we were there, in my parents house the subjects banned were politics, religion, money and sex - so most of life then.... To be fair to my parents they strove never mention those subjects between themselves as much as they wanted us to to know nothing about the those subjects either.
With the exception of sex, school was the same. Though to call the one sex education lesson we had misleading would be to understate the matter. It was a lecture with slides, no questions allowed. There was nothing about procreation in it. We were shown a series of monochrome images of horribly diseased willies, which were deformed from different untreated, and once untreatable, sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis was the most major disease then. The lesson was clear; sex means disease so don't have it, not with anybody-not even yourself. Don't have children; they might turn out like you boys and they too might have to be warned by horrible looking slides and a lack of scientific evidence.
*The official School leaving age from a normal school was 15 at the time.
**Our school was a boarding school 'for the maladjusted', it was financed and organised by the County Dept of Education. Approved schools and borstals were similar in nature, but more coarse, and they were financed by the prisons services and children were directed to then by the courts.
Find Chapter 16 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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