I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (3 page)

By getting a hamster for the class I think the teacher was trying to teach us responsibility. Looking back, I'm amazed that she actually allowed us to look after a living animal, since we spent most of the rest of the time fighting amongst ourselves and pulling chairs out from underneath each other. Let's just say hangman wasn't a word-building game in our school, unless the vocabulary you are building is ‘Quick the teacher's coming! Get him down! Get him down! Stop crying, Stephen! You better not tell anyone about this or you're dead meat!'

I remember one girl, Sarah, who was easily the most annoying person in the class, with a whiny voice and bipolar temperament. Even at the tender age of nine, it was clear to see that she'd end up with a few failed marriages and an addiction. She asked one morning:

‘Miss, why do we do finger painting? It's dirty and stupid.'

‘Why?' enquired Miss Robbins, trying to conceal her frustration at yet another precocious question. ‘It's so we can have a record of all your fingerprints . . . early!'

This funny little quip was probably not lost on most of the kids in school. I was definitely in the minority having both of my parents married, still together and neither of them in Wandsworth Prison.

There was one nasty little criminal in the making called Keith whose fingerprints and DNA were destined to be taken many times in his life. Keith was a bully. He was strong. He was dumb. He was ugly. He was horrible to everyone and commanded fear in most of the rest of the kids. He was the best at hiding itching powder in your jacket. He was good at going through your coat pockets where they hung up by the door looking for sweets or money. He used to hang up my coat from the hook by the door . . . Not very nice, because I was still in it at the time.

In spite of the challenging environment the little hamster was well cared for by the pupils. Everyone gave him little scraps of food from their packed lunches and when he started to get too fat we clubbed together and bought a little hamster wheel and put it in his cage.

Apart from his generally furry innocence and friendly character, the very best thing about Penfold was that it turned out bipolar Sarah was allergic to him. If she got a whiff of his rodenty behind she'd start sneezing uncontrollably and her eyes would water and go red. The upshot of this was that she wouldn't come within ten feet of the back of the classroom, where I sat. So not only was he a little ball of fun at the back of the classroom, whirling around on his squeaky wheel, but he was also a four-legged snub-nosed Sarah repellent.

Because I always sat at the back, Penfold and I got to know each other very well during this time. I was fascinated by how he used to eat crumbs and seeds by scooping them in front of his pink twitching nose with his little paws before gobbling them down. He'd always try and burrow under his newspaper bed when we had maths, the most boring class. But when we had art and all the kids were busy with paints, glue, dried pasta and crumpled-up bits of tracing paper he'd come out of hiding and go whizzing round on his squeaky wheel. Even though he was small, he was a very sensitive animal and he could pick up exactly on the mood in the class and join in.

The only kid apart from Sarah who didn't like Penfold was Keith. He was a sadist and was always trying to poke the hamster with a pencil or scoop him out of the cage for some evil purpose. Stella and I were normally on hand to stop him from doing any lasting damage. When it became clear that Sarah was allergic to Penfold, I could see Keith's slug-like brain behind his beady little eyes trying to squeeze out a horrible way to take advantage of this fact. Sarah may have been whiny and a bit wheezy if she got too close to Penfold, but Keith was a much worse character.

One morning I should have realized something was up when halfway through the first lesson Sarah's nose started to drip uncontrollably. By the end of the lesson, she was sneezing every thirty seconds and her eyes were bright red. Miss Robbins decided to take Penfold to the staff room for the rest of the day, much to my distress. I never liked to let him out of my sight when I was in school. But far from improving, Sarah got worse all day until no one could do any work without the ah-ah-ah-tishoo sound punctuated by the slurp of a really disgusting snot-filled sniff. By lunchtime, she was in such a bad state that she had to be sent to the nurse. The teacher went over to Sarah's desk and opened it up only to find handfuls of scrunched-up newspaper taken from Penfold's cage buried under her books at the bottom.

No one admitted to it, but I knew it was Keith who had done it. He mercilessly teased Sarah about her big panda eyes when she came back to class and for the rest of the week he kept doing fake sneezes and sniffles to get under her skin. Bipolar Sarah was not called bipolar Sarah for no reason. She rose to the bait in a big way. She would start crying when Keith provoked her. Or she'd call on the teacher when he threw some balled-up paper at her. Or she'd throw a tantrum when he blew his nose extra theatrically. It got to the point where no one in the class could make even the smallest sound without Sarah thinking someone was making fun of her.

It wasn't funny at all to see a nine-year-old have a mini nervous breakdown whenever someone scraped their chair or coughed. If someone whispered to their neighbour asking to borrow a pencil she'd glare at them with real hatred in her eyes. Sarah was so paranoid that she thought the whole class and even the teacher were against her. When Miss Robbins got some chalk dust up her nose and sneezed, Sarah jumped right up and screamed, ‘I hate that hamster,' before pelting out of the room in tears.

By Thursday, the teacher said that she was going to take Penfold home at the weekend and not bring him back because he was causing so much grief in class. I was heartbroken because I swear we had grown to be friends during those long boring lessons in maths, geography and English. I hated Keith at that point; because of him I was going to lose my best distraction and I'd have to go back to counting the ceiling tiles and staring blankly at the clock on the wall.

I resolved to make the most of the rest of the week by playing with Penfold at every opportunity. I even broke the golden rule of class by letting him out of his cage at break time on Friday and cradling him in my arms along with a few of the other kids. Passing him from hand to hand; giving his tummy a rub; feeling his tiny heart thumping a mile a minute; feeding him bits of sandwich. That little critter had never had so much attention its life. In the corner of the classroom, however, far away from the rest of us playing around with Penfold, sat Keith staring at us and biting his nails. He used to bite them right down to the skin. It was disgusting.

After lunch on Friday we had double art, which was always a nice way to see us off into the weekend. We were all given a set of paints and a blank piece of paper and told to do self-portraits. This was more Miss Robbins's doing. Before she had turned up, art classes consisted of the serious job of cutting a potato in half and making prints on coloured card (teachers in those days really didn't have to be much more clued up than the kids they were teaching). I was making a mess of things and producing something that Picasso would not have been proud of when I noticed that there was something missing. Where was the usual squeak, squeak, squeak of the hamster wheel? Where was Penfold? I turned and went over to the cage but he was nowhere to be seen. He wasn't on his wheel. He wasn't hiding under the newspaper. He was gone!

‘Miss! Miss! Penfold's gone! Where's Penfold?'

Miss Robbins came to the back of the room and looked worriedly at the empty cage. ‘He must have got out. Can anyone see him?'

Of course all the kids started running around the classroom like headless chickens calling out, ‘Penfold! Penfold!' and generally revelling in the distraction. All except for Sarah who definitely didn't care about the hamster and who, after a week of suffering persecutions (some imaginary, some real – she really was very annoying), was beginning to look a lot like Private Pile out of
Full Metal Jacket
just before he loses it and goes on a killing spree.

‘Get back to your desks this minute,' commanded Miss Robbins, trying to regain control of a bunch of overexcited and delinquent children.

‘Maybe Stephen's got him inside his desk. We all know that Stephen's gay for Penfold,' spat Keith.

‘Am not, miss! Take that back.' I was only nine years old.

‘Be quiet, Keith. Everyone check inside your desks.' An unholy racket of desks slamming open and shut ensued for a few minutes as all the kids took advantage of the chance to further disrupt the class.

When the teacher finally regained control, Keith said slyly, ‘Miss Robbins, Sarah's not checked her desk yet.'

‘Sarah! Just look inside!' cried an exasperated Miss Robbins. Sarah opened her hinged wooden desktop and uttered a piercing scream as poor Penfold's nose gently emerged from the lip of her desk. He must have been terrified in the dark wooden desk with all the noise in the room and, as he tried to escape, Sarah threw the desk lid down on top of him and we all heard a horrible crunch. A red wet matted patch of fur was crushed under the lid and everyone fell silent in shock. Everyone except for Keith who cackled with laughter, slamming his desk top up and down and pointing at Sarah, who was completely horrified.

What happened next confirmed my suspicion that Sarah was a bit unhinged herself. She let out a hateful scream and sprinted across the room to Keith where she began to beat him with closed fists. It took the teacher to pull Sarah off of Keith as she pulled his hair, yanking his head from side to side. And I mean the teacher literally pulled Sarah into the air with a fistful of Keith's black hair in her fist.

Once free, Keith was clearly dazed and bruised around the temples. He staggered around a bit and cradled his neck, trying to make sure his head was in fact still attached to his body. He saw the whole class looking at him with total hate. Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I was definitely giving him the evil eye. He did what all cowardly bullies do. He lied straight through his teeth. ‘It wasn't me! Stop looking at me like that! I didn't do anything! I don't know how that rat got in her desk!' Maybe the beating he'd sustained had knocked his senses out of whack – if he ever had any to start with. He could see that the whole class was against him.

Forget potato printing. That day I learned a lesson in how the line blurs between doing mischief and doing something really really bad. It was a line that he would go on to cross plenty of times in later life I was sure. I could see his face harden then and there and he went from being a naughty kid to being a criminal-minded bastard. He'd killed a defenceless little creature and whatever light of innocence he had went out in his eyes. I could see straight through his head as he stared down the class of horrified nine-year-olds. His little reptile brain was working away but there was nothing good left in there. I mean the wheel was turning, but the hamster was truly dead.

Keith may have been trying to play a joke but had ended up murdering Penfold and sending Sarah right over the edge. When you are grown up and run into people you went to school with everyone probes around a bit to try and find out how everyone changed. Nowadays, with things like Facebook, it's even easier, and even I've been known to lurk around to see what people got up to. Ugly kids got married and had children. Bullied kids got jobs and went on to be happy. Quiet kids moved abroad. Nobody knows what Keith is up to now because he doesn't have a Facebook page. Well, you're not allowed to have one in prison.

B
ACK IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES
there were only a handful of black kids around, and two of them were me and my twin sister. It would be a few years until the younger siblings would be able to join us, and my brother Albert, who was three years older, was already at a secondary grammar school. So we had to come up with survival strategies to get by in those first few shaky years. The best tactic was to meet up in break and talk about who had been really horrible, then my sister would crouch behind them and I'd push them over her. It was hilarious and it always worked. It was at primary school that I first started to become the typical class clown. Well, you have to see the funny side when kids were coming up to you and saying things like ‘Do black people wash their hair?' My answer: ‘Why no! We stand outside and wait for it to rain.'

And the teachers weren't much better. When I did my 11-plus exam, I got good enough grades to make it to a grammar school. But when I had a conversation with my careers advisor, he said, ‘Hmmm, you could be a bus conductor, a chef? How about a runner? You people run, don't you? Run! Run!' These were the kind of teachers who if Barack Obama had said that he wanted to be the world's top politician, he'd have been told, ‘Hmm, well I can definitely see you on a campaign bus, but only if you're driving it.'

I was very pleased to take my 11-plus and leave that particular primary school behind. It was expected that most of the kids would go on to the local secondary modern school or, more likely, borstal. The only reason I passed the exam was because of my sister. She had studied hard and never taken any notice of the other kids at school. All the teachers thought that she'd get into the local grammar school easily, but she desperately wanted me to get in too so that she wouldn't be alone in class.

So she tried to tutor me. Now, if I don't pay attention in class with an adult at the front harassing me to learn my nine times table then I definitely wasn't going to perform any better for Stella. After a while she realized that it was going to be impossible for me to get up to date with the curriculum. I literally knew nothing. She asked me to my face how it was that I hadn't picked up on anything in class. Then she asked me who was tying my shoelaces every morning because apart from in reading and writing I displayed the knowledge of a five-year-old.