In O-Level year I knew my school career had no future when my form master gave me his vision of what it would be.
‘I see your future, young man. Draped before you is a green cloth of artificial grass on which are displayed suspect fruit and vegetables garnered from the dustbins of honest greengrocers.’ How would that go down today?
My conflict with my school, in the very different social climate of the 1950s, made no impact on my family. God bless them, they weren’t the sort of people who felt themselves able to lay down grand plans for their offspring. No family conferences to decide whether I was to go in the Army, the Church or be something in the City. No discussions about being cut out of father’s will if I didn’t pull my socks up. And no World Teacher Day.
My fast deteriorating school performance was reflected in the dreaded School Report at the end of each term.
Though both were highly literate and numerate my parents weren’t in a position to help with homework either. Dad had been obliged to leave school at 13 and was soldiering in the Great War at 16, while Mum had been ‘placed’ in domestic service as a young girl.
No, though I loved my kind, emotionally intelligent parents very dearly, they were no use at geometry and neither was I. Yet they always did their duty. On school open nights Mum would dress in her Sunday best and Dad would look uncomfortable in his only suit.
They were daunted by the teaching faculty and far from challenging they would hardly raise a single question except ‘Is our son behaving himself?’
To which the answer was inevitably in the negative.
My fast deteriorating school performance was reflected in the dreaded School Report at the end of each term.
As time wore on, the Headteacher’s comments darkened in tone from ‘Must try harder’ to ‘Going downhill’ and, finally, ‘One fears for his future’. Presumably the Head hadn’t conferred with the Form Master about my prospects as a dodgy costermonger. The steep term-on-term decline in my class position confirmed the dire reality. Not knowing what else to do, my parents would sign the Report without comment
Meanwhile, I used the time I stole from school work to see movies, read forbidden books and watch the world go by.
Oddly, nobody questioned me when, wearing my school blazer, I queued with the senior citizens to see films like The Crimson Pirate starring Burt Lancaster. I tried to imagine myself looking bronzed and muscular, swinging from the rigging of a pirate ship under the blazing hot sun of the Caribbean. It was quite a stretch from the perspective of my grey suburban corner of austerity Britain.
And nobody prevented me from indulging another of my fantasies by borrowing Casanova’s Memoirs from the local library, even though I had to endure a look of withering disapproval from the assistant lady librarian.
Back at the school my teachers had quite justifiably written me off. They were prepared just to let the clock tick over until our mutually welcome parting of the ways. Towards the end of my tenure, I paid the school one of my increasingly rare visits.
The form master seemed surprised to see me at all: ‘Come to look the old place over, have we?’ he asked.
At around this time, Dad did something most unusual for him. He communicated. His method was to ask me to join him for a drink in a pub facing Hadley Common. I knew this location was the scene of the famous Battle of Barnet during the War of the Roses. It was said that the bones of many slain warriors lay beneath its grassy slopes.
My imagination went into overdrive. Was this going to be another battle?
Well, no; not with dear, gentle Dad. We sat outside in the evening sun so that I could drink a shandy while Dad supped his pint of mild and bitter. He offered me a cigarette in a gesture of male bonding and lit me up, then opened discussions. He didn’t reproach me though he had every justification. Instead, in his quiet way, asked: ‘Have you thought about a job yet?’
‘I’m thinking of a few things,’ I muttered.
It reminded me of when I was thirteen and mum had pestered him to teach me the facts of life. Dad had simply handed me a mildly racy paperback novel, saying, ‘Read that, boy’, before retreating behind his News Chronicle. I was grateful that he’d at least spared me the birds and the bees’ speech
The Hadley meeting was just as inconclusive. After our short exchange we supped our drinks and turned to far more pressing matters. Like Tottenham Hotspur, and how they were going to win the League in the coming season.
It was a pleasant, if delusional, evening.
