A 1980s Childhood (22 page)

I should preface this chapter of nostalgic school day ramblings by acknowledging that school in the 1980s was undoubtedly a different experience for every child and that each person will have a unique memory of their student years. I would be mightily surprised, however, if you don’t find my memories of school life awakening recollections of similar teachers and incidents in your own school days. Of course, many elements of school life will always be the same and children of any generation will share similar experiences, but schooling in the eighties brought with it some unique technologies, trends and events that set it apart from any other decade. I’d like to share with you my personal experience of being a school child in the eighties.

My first day at school is etched indelibly into my memory: it was a sunny September morning in 1982 and my mum held my hand as I walked into the classroom, satchel on my back. Much to my embarrassment, as I walked in through the doorway I tripped on the threshold and landed flat on my face in front of all the assembled children. Not a great start to my school days, but it makes quite a good chapter-opener. Had I known then that I would someday use this experience in a book I was going to write, I might not have cried so much.

My first school was a typical 1970s-built, grey brick box with a large playground and even larger playing field. The playground was split on two levels with a lower playground that was just a rectangle of tarmac and an upper playground that featured a tantalising array of climbing frames and play equipment. I say ‘tantalising’ because we were never actually allowed to play on the equipment during the whole time I was at the school. Every break time all the children would file past the play equipment looking longingly at the ladders, monkey bars and climbing frames as they made their way to the lower playground. On one occasion, the temptation became too much to resist and a spontaneous rebellion broke out among the children as they rushed on to the play equipment, screaming and shouting with joy. I was among those sent to the headmaster for illegally playing on the climbing frames and to this day I have no idea why we were never allowed to use them.

I’m sure, at some point, someone must have explained to me what school was all about and why I was there, but for some reason it never sunk in. I simply followed my instructions and did what the grown-ups told me without questioning anything. I dutifully made crocodiles out of egg cartons, painted pictures of my parents and glued glitter on to an array of household objects, and for all I knew or cared I could have been part of a child slavery production line manufacturing goods to be sold on the black market.

If we weren’t making stuff we were listening to stories or watching some kind of semi-educational children’s programme like
Puddle Lane
on an enormous wood-panelled television. The teacher would wheel the television in as the children sat cross-legged on the carpet in excited anticipation and would then spend the next fifteen minutes or so trying to work out how to switch it on. I’m certain a good portion of my school life was spent watching teachers trying to get educational videos to play on Betamax video cassette players.

On Friday afternoons we had ‘free time’, which was the highlight of the week, when we were allowed to play inside or outside with any of the sports equipment, games, toys or musical instruments. I liked to go into the Quiet Room on my own with a little electronics set that consisted of a few wires, a light bulb and a battery. When any other children came in to the same room and disturbed me I would tell them I was making a bomb and showed them the sinister-looking tangle of wires and dimly glowing light bulb. I remember one child being quite worried about this and they ran out of the room shouting for the teacher.

A rare Betamax TV/VCR combo, the stuff of nightmares for many school teachers who struggled with any form of new technology.
(Courtesy of Franny Wentzel/Wikimedia Commons)

At lunchtime all the children would file into the school hall to eat their packed lunches together. As a child from a low-income family, I would hand over my special pink ticket and be given a government-provided packed lunch. The packed lunch was so outstandingly horrible that I can remember the exact contents to this day: soggy sandwiches filled with some kind of grey, bad-tasting reconstituted meat (my brother told me it was donkey meat), a packet of cheese biscuits, a puckered and bruised apple that had definitely seen better days and some kind of dry biscuit with one half dipped in something that looked like chocolate but didn’t taste like it. It was virtually the same lunch every day with the only difference being a variation in the unrecognisable meats. After a while I became so sick of the lunches that I stopped eating them altogether and began smuggling them out of the dining hall so I could hide them down the back of the benches in the cloakroom. After some weeks of successfully getting away with this, the school caretaker finally caught me and reported me to the teachers. I was handed back the stockpile of mouldy sandwiches and told to put them out for the birds on the school bird table. To this day I pity the poor unsuspecting chaffinch that discovered my rotten sandwiches.

Even though I didn’t enjoy my school lunches, I was one of the few children that enjoyed the milk that we were all encouraged (forced) to drink at break times. Every child was given a miniature glass bottle of milk with a straw in it and told to drink up the lukewarm milk. If you didn’t drink up all your milk then you didn’t go out to play. The daily milk ritual started at playschool and continued throughout first school and then middle school, and all the while I was told how good it was for me. If I ever had any doubts about whether or not I really needed to drink so much milk, regular television adverts starring Kevin Keegan would be shown in the early afternoon and evening telling me I should drink even more milk and that it was really good for my health.

The health of school children was taken very seriously in the eighties and as well as being given our daily bottle of milk, we were regularly inspected by a variety of nurses and doctors to check that we were healthy in every respect. We started with the nit nurse who would check our heads for any sign of the dreaded head louse, and some weeks later we would see another nurse who would check our hearing and eyesight. Then came the school dentist, who would perform a cursory examination of our mouths, and another nurse would check our height and weight. Whenever the medical van came to the school, the excited chatter among the children would begin and everyone would speculate about what kind of procedure we would be subject to today. Mostly the talk was of large needles and full-body examinations, but fortunately none of the wild rumours turned out to be true. I got a clean bill of health in every examination, probably because I always drank up my milk.

For my final year of first school I was transferred to a different local school because my parents were concerned about the unusual methods of corporal punishment being used, which I seem to remember included pulling children up by their ears. Corporal punishment was not abolished in UK state schools until 1986 and I remember getting a smacked bottom on at least one occasion at first school, probably with very good reason. I think my parents also felt that teachers smoking during lessons was a bad idea.

My next school was set on the top of a hill and nestled in among a perimeter of tall pine trees. The school was split in two with the original Victorian building on one side of the road and a new school and playing field on the other side, consisting mainly of portable buildings, some with the wheels still attached, making them look rather like lorry trailers. My new class was in one such portable building which wobbled, creaked and groaned when anyone walked around in it.

At my new school I suffered, for the first time, the horrendous experience of swimming in an unheated outdoor swimming pool. To this day I shudder at the thought of jumping into the icy water and having to keep swimming just to prevent the onset of hypothermia. Even on a sunny day the pool was bitterly cold because it was shaded by the tall pine trees surrounding it. Everyone had to swim – no exceptions and no excuses. If you forgot to bring your swimming things, the teacher would wait until everyone else had left the pool and make you go in on your own wearing nothing but your pants. We were taught how to swim and dive and sometimes the teacher would throw a handful of coins into the pool and ask us to rescue them for her. It wasn’t a great incentive, though, since she always asked for the coins back afterwards and carefully counted them to make sure no one had robbed her.

Back in the relative warmth and comfort of the classroom, our class topic was space travel and we spent a lot of time discussing how the Space Shuttle worked. We even went so far as to create a model Space Shuttle with a balloon propulsion system that whizzed across the classroom on a piece of string. The project was tied in closely with the forthcoming launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which was due to take off on Tuesday, 28 January 1986 with seven astronauts on board. Our class was especially interested in this Shuttle launch since one of the crew was a young female school teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who was the first to be selected through Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project designed to inspire students in all things scientific and astronomical.

On the day of the launch, the excitement of the children in our class was barely containable and we could hardly wait to get home from school to watch the Shuttle launch on television. Finally, just before 5 p.m. that evening, we tuned in to BBC1 and waited excitedly as Philip Schofield handed us over to Roger Finn in the
Newsround
studio.
Newsround
opened with the following words: ‘Disaster for the Shuttle, an explosion on Challenger’ spoken in a very grave voice as we watched video footage of the Space Shuttle disintegrating into a terrifying plume of smoke and debris. The camera then cut to a solemn-looking Roger Finn who continued: ‘Within the last few minutes we’ve heard there’s been an explosion on board the Space Shuttle Challenger.’

The disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. I watched the footage with shocked horror on
John Craven’s Newsround
.
(Public Domain)

We eventually learned that all seven crew members of the Space Shuttle Challenger, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, had been killed in the disaster which was caused by a faulty O-ring seal on the right solid rocket booster. I remember the terrible feeling of horror, disbelief and grief as we heard about the tragedy which curtailed not only our own school space project, but also led to Ronald Reagan’s cancellation of the Teacher in Space Project. Until this point, I had dreamed of becoming an astronaut and often imagined what it would be like to sit in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle, strapped in firmly as the enormous rockets blasted me into outer space. After the Challenger disaster I decided that I would become a fighter pilot instead – a much safer option in my mind.

With our Space Shuttle project firmly behind us, we moved on to new topics, including, rather randomly, basket weaving for which I showed a real flair and great enthusiasm. My parents were initially thrilled with the woven tea tray I brought home but I felt their enthusiasm begin to wane as I continued to bring home more and more woven objects, and each had to be paid for. I remember my teacher suggesting I slow down the pace of production since I was working my way through an alarming amount of materials leaving very little for the other children to use. Fortunately, the basket-weaving lessons were short-lived, most likely because I had used up all the resources, and so we moved on to our next endeavour – learning to play the recorder.

As a class we had already mastered the tambourine, maracas and glockenspiel, and the obvious next step was to take on the challenge of the recorder. For some reason, children of many generations have been forced to learn this bizarre instrument which is rarely heard outside of the English classroom. Looking back, I pity our poor teachers who must have had the patience of saints as they spent countless hours trying to get our class to perform a flawless round of
Frère Jacques
or
Oranges and Lemons
, instead receiving an earful of tuneless screeching.