Paul Daniels (5 page)

I refuse to believe that the ‘do-gooders’ will ever eradicate this problem as, in my view, it’s all part of growing up and an essential ingredient in the young animal’s training for life. However, I don’t underestimate the value of being able to talk about the subject openly at school, as I believe happens in many places today.

Coatham had ancient traditions. One of these was that at the end of the first sports afternoon, new boys were thrown into the shallow pond at the bottom of our cricket field. I hated cricket. I could see no excitement in it and would stand there wondering why I was there watching those guys run up and down a strip of grass.

‘Oh goodie, an hour has passed so it must be my turn to touch the ball!’ I think cricket is the slowest, most boring game on the planet. Even as a spectator, I could never understand its attraction, as one is always too far away to see the nuances and subtleties of the match anyway.

My main concern was my hands. I was starting to play
around with a hobby that was to have the most significant effect on my life. I was worried about having the tools of the trade, my hands, damaged by a rock-hard cricket ball. I wasn’t viewed as a ‘pansy’, though, because I loved rugby. I played in a position at the time called wing-three-quarter because I was one of the fastest sprinters in the school. Not that I was particularly fit, but I was scared of the other guys catching me and tearing me to shreds! I never had any bones broken.

So, having finished playing the most boring game in the world and being unaware of the school’s strange rituals, I stood aghast as several of my peers were grabbed by hand and foot and hauled into the mud. I tried to make a run for it, deciding that there was no way I was going to let them throw me in, particularly after my parents had skimped and saved so hard to buy the uniform. Dressed in gleaming white flannelette trousers, jumper and shirt, I was not exactly camouflaged for the great escape and was soon spotted by two boys who put me in a head and arm lock. As I fought back, they called for their mates to help and I was eventually dragged away by half-a-dozen boys while I screamed and struggled every inch of the way. Once out of the mire and looking like a wet mud wrestler, I knew I would be in even deeper trouble when Mam saw the state I was in.

At school, bullying was sometimes dished out under the respectable guise of punishment as Prefects and Monitors could exercise their right to ‘tan’ other boys using a gym-shoe. This piece of innocent-looking rubber and cloth could cause immense pain in the wrong hands and was often wielded in the name of ‘retribution’ rather than ‘education’. Offences such as talking in the lines; having your hands in your pockets; not wearing your cap or uniform properly; and eating sweets in public were all considered un-gentlemanly things to do and being caught would result in ‘six of the best’. Prefects had made
their journey up through the ranks of the earlier years and it was their job to help maintain the discipline of the school.

In our present-day, free-thinking society, ‘discipline’ seems to be a forgotten word and ‘respect’ part of a lost language. Do-gooders and freethinkers have changed the world but they have only seen one side of the coin. If you haven’t experienced both discipline and lack of discipline how can you possibly know? I have had both and I know which one I prefer. Discipline. It’s certainly helped me to control myself. We all need some sort of moral framework to keep us in check.

Being thrashed by a gym-shoe was nothing compared to the instrument of torture that the Masters wielded. Mostly, the Masters ruled by respect, not by capital punishment. It was an inbuilt reverence for their wisdom that kept me away from the cane. They had earned the right, through the education system, to wear their own particular uniform. Those black mortar-boarded and cloaked figures demanded respect for an insight and knowledge that we didn’t have and offered a visual reminder that they were more intelligent than us.

The Masters, including the Head, exhibiting their obvious superiority, kept the school to a very high standard of discipline and achieved terrific academic results for the boys under their care. I cannot understand how a teacher today can wear a floppy sweater, frayed jeans and dirty shoes and expect the same respect from the pupils.

Every Master was distinct with his own special character. Pietrowski, Polish by birth, French by education and English by choice, walked with a kind of hunched shoulder. One of the boys took the mickey out of his physical condition as he followed him down the corridor one day. Pietrowski happened to glance behind him and saw the boy copying him. The Master swiftly grabbed the pupil, ramming him against the wall and quietly explaining that as a member of the French resistance he
had been shot and buried alive. Having waited hours for the Germans to leave, he had then dug himself out from his own grave. His wounds had festered and had resulted in a deformed shoulder. We all stood in horror as, having finished his gruesome description, he dropped the boy and carried on walking down the corridor.

Our Art Master had been ‘hung’ at the National Gallery and the legend surrounded him of having painted his daughter in the nude. Our little boys’ minds thought that he must have kept his socks on, or where else could he have kept his brushes!

Little Billy Pearson was the most loved of our Masters. It made a great impression on me, that despite the fact that he was so tiny, whenever he came into the room, all the boys immediately stood up. We also shut up. Upon entering the room he would walk over to his high stool, put his feet on the desk and speak slowly. We all thought he was in danger of falling off, but leaning on our wooden desks, we listened to every word he uttered.

‘I am William, known popularly amongst you as little Billy.’ He then turned in my direction and snapped, ‘You! Tell me the square root of 64.’

I soon realised that the maths Master was loved because there was no malice in his abruptness and chose this technique to keep his lessons interesting. And he was deadly accurate with both the chalk and the blackboard cleaner when he spotted you talking in class.

Maths was a difficult lesson to keep lively and the homework was even worse. Once more I fell back on my dad’s ability to overcome hurdles. Even though Hughie had left school early in order to work and help support his family, he was able to help me with the most difficult of homework problems. The oddity about him was that he would solve the puzzles by using logic. Even algebraic equations were answered in this way, without
him having to follow the correct mathematical formula.

‘Shiny’ Williams sat for an entire term building a strange unidentified object, which turned out to be a television set. As he sat there fiddling with the intricate mechanism, he would expound all types of wondrous and outrageous concepts.

‘Today I will tell you how to get electricity for free,’ announced the Nutty Professor. ‘First of all, you must rent a flat in a high-rise building. Buying a generator, you connect it to a battery, which will give you all your lighting for free. Attach a four-bladed paddle wheel to the generator and place this outside your high-rise building, just underneath your lounge window.

‘Next, you write away to all the brick companies for samples. When they send you their bricks, the postman will carry them all the way up to your door. As soon as he delivers them you throw them out of the window one by one.’

We sat staring at him in stunned silence.

‘Make notes, boy! Make notes, or you will not be able to take advantage of my intelligence,’ he suddenly announced glancing up from his mass of wires and knobs.

‘The bricks will hit the paddle, which will generate the electricity and recharge the battery. When the postman arrives at the bottom of the building, he will think that another lot of parcels have been delivered for you and he will pick them up and carry them back upstairs when you simply repeat the process.’

This strange, round-faced, mad scientist would give a repeat performance each week. ‘Today I will tell you how to get gas for free.’

We all sat in wonderment, notebooks at the ready.

‘First of all you have to buy a gas fridge and some plasticine,’ he began. ‘Now what you do is this: locate your gas meter, probably found in your understairs cupboard. An oddity of these meters is that they all “dimple” down at the bottom of the
coin-collecting box. Find the lowest point and drill a very fine, pinpoint hole, in the bottom of this metal box.

‘Take your plasticine and, after warming it up, place your shilling coin into the surface, press it down to make the shape of the coin. After carefully removing the shilling from the plasticine, fill the mould you have made with water and place it in the freezer part of your gas fridge. Let it freeze for several hours before easing the ice shilling out of the mould and quickly place it in the coin slot of your gas meter. Once inside, the ice will melt, leaving no trace as to how you got your free gas.’

We all sat with eyes wide open.

‘Finally, I will give you some additional advice. Put the shilling mould underneath the hole you drilled in the meter, so that when the ice melts it will drip into the mould and you won’t run up your water bill!’

We left the lesson in stunned silence and how many boys actually went home and tried to put his ideas into practice I shall never know.

I think our woodwork Master had the right idea, when he showed us how to turn, carve and create wooden items, which he then used to furnish his own home. As I lathed knobs for his dressers, other boys would be working on another part of the project and it all reminded me of a construction factory. It was a good way to teach, simply because we were all involved in creating something that was going to be put to good use. I hated the thought of spending time making something just for the sake of it, only for your item to be thrown away or sat in a cupboard. Construction lessons were such fun, that I began to consider training as a woodwork teacher. It would certainly be following somewhat in the footsteps of my greatest hero, my dad. But then he was good at everything!

English Literature was my favourite subject and essays were my favourite homework. I just rattled them off, almost without
thinking, and somehow managed to balance them into correctly sized paragraphs. Reading this book you may disagree, but remember, the young are always cleverer. Just ask them.

We got a new headmaster at the school – Mr Barker – who came from the military education system, or so the rumour had it. He gave the appearance of being a big, strong man, although in retrospect I think he was just one of those wide men. Not fat, just wide.

After a few weeks of his lessons and his giving me full marks on every essay, he was giving a lesson on Shakespeare and was discoursing on how Shakespeare rewrote his works and honed them down to make them perfect in metre and tone and balance and so on. To my amazement, I heard my voice saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ The world around me faded away into total silence as Mr Barker, interrupted in full flow, slowly turned to look at the minuscule, newly professed genius on Shakespeare. I did my best to become even more minuscule under his gaze but I didn’t manage the disappearing act I longed for.

‘And how, Daniels, have you arrived at this observation?’

My mouth went to work again. ‘Well, that’s more or less what you said I had done in an essay a few weeks ago, and I didn’t. I just wrote it that way first time because it felt right. I think that sometimes academics try to discover too many hidden meanings in what people like Shakespeare just felt like saying at the time and just felt it was right to write that way.’

Total silence and then, ‘Interesting. You may well be right.’

What a teacher. No put-down in front of the class. He let me think and later I admitted he might be right as well.

My love of English led to early appearances in front of an ‘audience’. One of the competitions between the school’s houses was for selected members of the house to sight-read from books chosen by the Masters. You were assessed on your ability to understand instantly the words on the page at the
exact moment you opened the book. You had to speak clearly and with meaning in such a way that the entire school, sitting out front, would be able to appreciate what you were reading about. Despite being timid, I somehow enjoyed the opportunity to stand in front of the school and communicate the written word. There was even applause at the end, and somehow these few moments gave me a sense of achievement.

Some lads, of course, decided to start smoking, hiding around corners and in the toilets and pretending to be grown up. I tried it. For the life of me I couldn’t see any sense in setting fire to money to get a taste of old smoke in your mouth and on your clothes. It didn’t seem very grown up to me and, now that science has shown us the odds against you living a full and active life as you get to old age, it seems the silliest of things for young people to do.

Notwithstanding my admiration for the teachers and the system at Coatham, I generally disliked school and yearned to escape into a world that seemed to offer much more fun and usefulness. One of the main problems was that most of the teaching was performed by rote. Mechanical repetition of a subject in no way interested me. If I had been given the reason why I should learn logarithms, trigonometry and geometry, I might have learnt them, but I failed to see what use any of these skills would be in my life. I wish their usefulness had been outlined, as I would have grasped their importance and perhaps would have become something better than I am today.

Equally, I am astonished at the incredible amount of ‘man-hours’ that are wasted in school teaching children things that are never used again. By all means acquaint them to just above the basic level, but if their chosen occupation requires them to use these ‘fringe’ skills, then let their employer teach them and in so doing save the nation money. Even back then I used to think, about many things, ‘I’ll never use this; why am I learning it?’

It’s rubbish when parents suggest that our schooldays are the best years our lives. Life is much fuller and far more interesting in later years.