Chapter Six - Schooled In Insults And Indifference.

One of the redeeming virtues of infant school that I did not realise at the time was that organised sport was not played there. Competitive team games started in the second year of Primary School and it was one of several dire experiences that were compulsory. 

It was not until that second year that I began to realise that school sport was designed as competition where a lack of mentoring/coaching was the point. It was aimed at people who knew nothing about the advantages of being coached. The parents who surely knew a little more than the pupils about what sport involved, and knew a little of the advantages that coaching gave pupils, excused themselves by claiming to know very little about what was a rigid and central part of the school schedule. Instead they cast themselves as consumers to their children who they expected to do well to justify the outlay of money on football boots and other costly sports equipment the school expected parents to pay for, as if the mentoring lay in the claims of money spent on the kit. Parents then let their children absorb the inequality the school sought to foster in the name of fair competition whilst the children attempted to grade themselves as 'winner' or 'loser', when the odds were that there were always going to be however well pupils tried to do far more them would become losers than would become winners.

In the first class of the first year of Primary School we did not write much but spent a lot of time was spent with paper, glue, and scissors making patterns out of coloured bits of paper as if we were still in infants school. I got bored when I could not see the point of this inactivity. One of the status games that was going on around me in school was that bigger boys with richer parents got to wear long trousers sooner. So when the teacher was not looking I used the paper scissors to cut my  short trousers just an inch. When Mother noticed the cut in the grey short trousers I lied, and said another boy did it and I had wanted him to cut it for me, as I cut his trousers but he had refused to let his trousers be cut. The lie was pursued and found to be mine, and I was punished with the cane. The lesson I learned that I was second stream, among the also-ran's who were weak, and bad at lying/covering up how weak they were. Whatever I did to fit in with the school after that I didn't fit. I became a dreamer who was only ever half there.

Football started in the second year of Primary School, the year I chipped the corner of my left front tooth. At my parents house I was barred from playing outside the back gate lest I wander off. Inside the back gate there was a small concrete yard with clear space in it just big enough to draw out eight small hopscotch squares. Around that clearing there was dad's shed which was narrow and long, and where he kept his pushbike. There was the dustbin and the sides of the yard were lined with wooden plant boxes full with flowers and mint in them, all mounted on top of tins that had once had been filled with government issue National Dried Milk Powder left over from the days of rationing, 1939-53, any milk in them long since used up. The tins had probably been left in the house by the previous owner when my parents bought it and they became prey to Mother's hoarding instinct where everything had to have a use. Above me was the washing line which ran between the farthest corners of the yard. I was not allowed to play anywhere else and I thought there was space enough for me to play hopscotch on my own. Then I tripped and fell headlong, and my upper jaw met the step of the back door at an angle, with sufficient force that I had a rather different smile after that. It changed the official school photo that followed soon after somewhat, much to Mother's chagrin. She had already knitted me a heavy cream coloured jacket for the occasion of the photo being taken. I was good spoiling official photos of myself. 

School sport was no place for dreams, or dreamers. When I played football I recognised, but paid little attention as to why, when the older boys were team captains of the week and chose their teams. I was nearly always among the last to be chosen. I understood that the most popular pupils became team captains every week, and the prize for being popular was choosing other, slightly less popular boys to be on your team, until even the most unpopular boys were in a team. By the the the last were chosen any  sense of reward with being chosen was long gone. We were the dregs and we knew it. Experiencing this repeatedly was why my hair colour changed from sunny blond to mousy brown and I shrank as as a person.

Thus it was that to supposedly limit the 'streaming' effect of the most popular boys selecting only the boys nearly as popular as them, and to help the school look outward, a few team captains would be chosen for the Summer inter-schools competition. They chose their teams weeks before the competition and the rest of school were meant to assist these 'A' teams train. Uncompetitive people like me were formed into uncohesive 'B' teams. When the the A team captains formed their teams they had a defence and an attack. With the training for competition the 'A' team defence and attack would be split up and yoked to their opposite on a 'B' team, so the different halves of the 'A' team were confronted with each other and the 'B' team still-in theory-got a game. But when the two halves of the A team were the best and the rest of us were inferior then how could we improve their game? We couldn't, because as the different halves of the 'A' team played they kept possession of the ball and deprived the split up 'B' team of even playing at their own level. The 'A' team were far more interested in playing with themselves with how they made up opposing practice teams.

As it was in sport so it was in the classroom-the rule was crude; 'keep up or else'. If anyone got as far as saying the words 'Or else what?' towards even the least hostile of the staff then the reply would have been 'You don't want to know the answer to that question'. My biggest hope was that if there were enough stragglers like myself who did their work as well as they could but with a cheerful indifference to the results then we were at least equal to one another and we might drag down the average. 

A less obvious example of non-mentoring was 'swimming lessons' in the local public pool which is what we had from the first year onward. They were lessons because they were in school time but we were not taught to swim. We learnt more about following orders than anything else. The first order was have your trunks and towel with you, second order was the orderly walk for the whole class from the classroom, out of the school and across three roads, to the swimming pool. The third order was about the group we were put in for getting into and out of the pool, which was indicated by the colour of the band on our wrists. And we would be shouted at if we were in the water and our colour band had been called to get out and dry/dress ourselves in the primitive chalets at the side of the pool. 

Swimming was the least part of the exercise-no child who had not learned to swim outside of the lessons ever learned to swim in them. The time in the pool was a chlorinated version of life in the school playground, with increased supervision by teachers out of fear of the school's insurance policy being called upon. These lessons echoed the annual work's family day trip to the beach, but transposed to the school, more effort was spent on the journey than at the destination reached. The organisational effort was more than the educational and enjoyment possibilities to the point where the lesson all form and no content.

The swimming pool was opposite my old infant school and it was yet another fine Victorian Gothic building on the outside that had naturally had been hacked about on the inside to adapt it for use by the modernised education system of the early 1960's. Mother had bathed in the building there when she was single and it was a slipper bath. When there was nearly no plumbing in the building in which her bedsit was, the slipper baths were the place to communally bathe and wash. I have no idea how slipper baths once operated, or what they looked like inside, though I can imagine fine Victorian or Edwardian features to flatter the bathers with as they made up for the lack of running water at home. The crudities of the way the insides of the building were adapted for schools was rudimentary indeed. There were no showers. We just dried ourselves and dressed in the wooden cubicles painted a blueish off-white that lined up along the walls around the pool.

If swimming lessons were ritualistic and nothing like their description then the annual school photo sessions were another, slightly less strained, ritual that parents paid for which they often felt cheated by when the got the results. Being in the school choir was another more positive, ritual. The chipped tooth did not get me kicked out of the school choir though it altered my charm when I smiled. Getting kicked out of the choir came when my voice changed. I was disappointed because it was one of the more inclusive school activities, but when I they said my voice had changed it I knew what they meant. But I could not disguise that I was miffed at being pushed out, a lot more than just my voice had changed.

What I and many other pupils, along with their parents, resisted understanding was that Primary school was a clearing house for the next educational stage, Secondary or Grammar school. Poorer parents rarely thought more than the next day or few days, ahead. The poorer they were the more they got mired in endless everyday crises. Some parents thought barely one week ahead towards supplying the right sports kit on the right day, whilst struggling to keep their heads above the fear of debt and disgrace. When a child 'accidentally lost' their sports kit out of a dislike of the sport they could not get out of playing then many a mother would be more worried by the expense of replacing the kit than concerned for the sanity of the child who for being bad at activities, and unable to improve, was still forced to continue being bad at something s/he disliked. 

That chipped front tooth got me teased in school though it was not just that. There was a cruel taunt that some boys used against me that was horribly accurate that I could not answer back to however hard I thought to try to. It really hit a spot where I hurt. I had the chipped tooth and big lips and Mick Jagger was newly all over the red top press a lot back then. He was masculine and a rule breaker in his character and feminine with his lips. The taunt that the boys made was to do with me 'being a mother's boy', gladly subordinate to my Mother when we we were out together-as if they weren't equally controlled by their mothers. It ran 'I bet when your mother takes you shopping, with those big lips of yours she sticks you to the window [suction with your lips] when she goes in.'. They had captured something that was true of Mother, she could be almost masculine and quite driven in her character when she had to be. My mind went blank with that taunt, I could not think to answer back to the boys that said that. With that they knew they had won and would win further in future.

The best times with Mother were in the school holidays, walking up to her allotments. Less because I was with her but because there was nobody else with us, we were walking away from the house, and the further we walked from the house the calmer we felt. When we passed my cliquey school where I got bullied we soon stopped to feed the horse that we saw daily with the carrot peelings and apple cores Mother kept for the animal. Mother was carrying other veg scrapings too, but they were for the compost bin on her allotment. When the horse was not there we were disappointed and everything went on the compost heap at the allotment. The field the horse was in backed on to the primary school's land, and the sense of us having a private pets corner was to a small highlight of life that I was glad she shared with me.

The extremes of near zero food waste that Mother took to will be clearer when I say that she would carry a shopping bag full of vegetable matter over a mile from the family house to the allotment and walk there and back. When she returning it was with veg for the home for next few meals. Without the rotting veg up up there would be fewer fresh veg coming down the hill.

The allotment eventually became her church as well as her part time job. Gran had tried to get Mother and I to attend the nearest Church of England church. St John's was a pleasant 1920's brick building surrounded by trees grown in steep banks on two sides of it, with a school and vicarage attached. Gran's first effort was to get for Mother a formal letter of introduction to the clergyman of St John's, an idea which failed to work when tried. Then Mother attempted to connect with the church by herself, and failed. We, Mother, me and my sister attempted to attend a carol service. My sister was still itchy and sensitive and noisily cried through the service which Mother left half way through, out of sheer embarrassment. It was cold, wet, and dark outside which doubled the sense of rejection. 

The following summer that I attended Sunday School at my Gran's church. Gran wanted me to be interested in life, and to her that meant the life of the church. Had my parents backed me as a member of Cub Scouts or some other organisation then they might have been able to say 'No, he has other commitments' to Gran, to stop me going to Sunday school. But my parents disliked me joining any club as a child, and on the matter of 'belief' I was meant to make my own choice when I was old enough, and for it not to affect them. Clearly me joining even the easiest to join of boys organisations did not fit in with their needs. But still I went to the Sunday School at St John's for a while.

Perhaps Mother was pleased to have me out of the house of a Sunday morning-she could work in relative peace, or perhaps she worried that I might learn something based on the values her mother held to which she would want want to cut down in me if she found it. Either way without Gran being directly involved then my attendance at Sunday School was not sustainable. Either Gran could not be around often enough for me to be well supported whilst Mother kept herself at a sufficient distance from the idea, possibly on instructions from dad, or both parents wanted the commitment to fail. Dad's opposition to Gran, and their mutual dislike of each other, should not surprise anyone. Pub vs church had been a culture war for many generations.

One week, for whatever reason, probably because of some upset in the home that had happened between my parents, I did not want to go to Sunday school. I felt drained and tired. I only had Mother to talk to as to whether or not to go. Mothers response was cold to the point of withering. She treated me like the adult I was not and made my choice then and there the binary of 'Either you go every week, forever, from today, or you never go near a church again.'.  She was angry, though not really at me, and for my having doubts and asking for help I became the target of her anger. I did not go and I sat on the front pavement and cried, as far as I knew I had just got in the way of everybody as trapped children will. Mother's sliced right through me.

I sat outside the house and bawled my eyes out for two hours, the length of time that I could have been in Sunday School had Mother not poleaxed me. She was happy to leave me cry. My sister had cried for longer before the doctor found ways to get around her thyroid gland not working. I have written before about the law in the parental house about anger; anger would lock the jaws of passive children, make women shout with a vehemence and men spontaneously use their fists. The pattern held, Mother's anger was verbal rather physical and even as it was non-physical, it physically froze me. Not just in the jaw either, it was so bad that I could not get any angry words out, but I felt then dig into me. A fortnight later there was a picnic and I asked Mother if I could go to it and she 'No. You decided before to never go again.'. Her response was as crude and sharp as the brief time at the police station had been a few years before.

So the allotments became Mother's place of  worship and where I was her altar boy and cut the grass paths. The chair that used to be her grandmother's, Grandma Clifton, was kept in the shed and got out when she wanted to pray or connect with her gran. The value of home grown vegetables became more about her taste for the autonomy than flavour the veg gained for being home grown. The allotment was her space, somewhere that everybody knew to not come near unless invited/instructed so to do. She did not set the conditions where the allotment work she did was the nearest she could get to the paid work that she wanted to do, but she accepted that rule as long as she could do the work her way. She made more of a virtue of this limitation than most women would, and clearly took a measure of pride in her limited autonomy.

On the positive side the food she grew on the allotments balanced the household budget. The gardening also balanced her hoarding instinct positively too, by making it work better far away from the parental house than ever it could be made to work anywhere near it.

Find Chapter 7 here 

Find the chapter guide here.