Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (18 page)

Later on in my time at Parmiter's, the Headmaster ordered that the playground be marked out as a tennis court and a net purchased. This was to allow Graham Stilwell to practise after and even during school time. Graham was in the year above me and became one of Britain's best tennis players, winning the under-18 and under-21 British titles and finishing runner-up at the 1963 junior Australian Championships after losing out to the great John Newcombe. As an adult, for a while he was ranked the number-two British player. Mr Hopkins was very proud of him and, whenever he was playing in a tournament, he would keep the whole school updated on Graham's progress at morning assembly. Graham left school when he was sixteen but that didn't stop the announcements and we all knew what was coming when the Headmaster began his normal morning assembly talk with the words: ‘Some of you older boys will remember Graham Stilwell…'

We had another well-known sportsman at the school in my time, boxer Mickey Carter, who represented Great Britain in the 1968 Olympic Games, losing in his third-round tie to the eventual gold medallist, Valerian Sokolov. Not bad going for a school not noted for its sporting prowess.

My own school career progressed fairly steadily. I remained in the A stream but, unlike Rushmore, I was not at the top of it, managing to hold a comfortable middling position in the class. My friend Murray was generally top, along with a few others who were obviously destined for university. The problem for me really was that I didn't get on with science and, as I've said, one subject that I might have been interested in, Geography, was completely ruined by Mr Hume's method of teaching – or non-teaching.

I was quite good at arithmetic and algebra but geometry completely floored me. By the time we got to study for our O-levels, we had a new Maths teacher, Mr Beighton, whom we nicknamed ‘Streaky' as a sort of play on Beighton sounding like bacon. After a while, we were told that in his previous school he was known as ‘Jif', though no one knew why. Very loud, he was not averse to throwing blackboard rubbers at pupils he felt weren't listening to him. Sometimes he would prowl round the class while we were working and, if he thought you weren't working hard enough or he spotted you talking to your neighbour, he'd quite likely clip you round the ear with a ruler. If you felt hard done by and protested at either of these forms of punishment, his stock answer was: ‘Who do you think you are, a sea-lawyer or something?' In spite of his attempts to make us pay attention, I still never managed to get to grips with geometry and I failed my Maths O-level because of it, though I did manage to pass the Oxford University Proficiency in Arithmetic exam with a high mark.

At the end of the fourth form, there was the not-so-little matter of at last being able to dispose of our school caps. Until then we all had to wear them on the way to and from school. In the morning we had to put them on as soon as we left home and in the evening we weren't allowed to take them off before reaching home. Because this rule applied to the first four forms, it meant that most of us were fifteen, and well past the age when we thought we should be wearing school caps on our heads before we were allowed to leave them off outside school.

We all hated it and most boys took the chance that no teacher would see them and took them off once they were on the bus.
If you were seen without your cap, it was instant detention. No appeal, straight in the next day. As we came out of school on our last day at the end of the fourth year, a large number of us threw our caps into the air and cheered. They landed in the road outside. To the applause of the rest of us, someone then lit a match and set fire to them, creating a big bonfire of caps in the middle of the public highway. Naturally, a few of the more daring boys waded into the pile to pick up some burning caps and hurl them around. A blazing-cap fight ensued until some of the teachers came out and put a stop to it. A spectacular end to the hated cap-wearing rule!

Given how my future turned out, it is not surprising that my favourite subjects were English and History, and at the end of my fourth year I gained four O-levels in English Language, English Literature, History and, in spite of, rather than because of, Mr Engledow, French. Part of the O-level exam was an oral test when we had to speak to the examiner and answer questions in French. To prepare us for this, the school engaged a French student, whom we had to see once a week for about half an hour or so. During this session, we were only allowed to speak French. The problem was that she was an extremely attractive girl, only a couple of years older than us, and it was very difficult to concentrate on talking about Mrs Travendamp and her lost umbrella or whatever it was. Whoever thought that appointing a good-looking eighteen-or nineteen-year-old girl to engage with a group of spotty sixteen-year-old adolescent boys in an attempt to help them with their French obviously had no idea what thoughts went through the minds of such youngsters.

I now had to make a decision about whether to continue at
school or leave. Even though my friend John had gained seven O-levels, he decided it was time to get out and earn some money. It sounded quite tempting and I talked it over with Mum and Dad. They said it was up to me what I did but Dad in particular advised me very strongly to stay on as he hoped I would follow my brother John and go to university. His view was that he didn't want me to finish up like him doing hard manual work all my life and that I should continue with my education to ensure this didn't happen, something that was denied to him as he had had to leave school at the age of fourteen to earn money to help support his parents with their large family. After considering my options for a while, I decided to take Dad's advice and stay on. The fact I only had four O-levels meant it was a bit touch and go whether I would be allowed to go straight on to take my A-levels but in the end the school agreed and I chose, not surprisingly, English, History and French. And so I moved on to the sixth form and became one of those six-foot-tall boys with whiskers and a deep voice who had so overawed me on my first day, all those years ago.

Although now we were treated much more like adults and generally had an easier life, I became more and more disinterested in schoolwork. For me there were a lot more interesting things to do. French was still a bit of a problem, thanks to Mr Engledow, whom I thoroughly loathed, and English was good but a bit touch-and-go because one of our set books was
Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding, which I found unutterably boring and difficult to read. As it happened, the film
Tom Jones,
starring Albert Finney, came out while we were studying and was on at the Hackney Pavilion. Another friend
of mine, Herb Tyler, was also doing English A-level and so we asked our teacher, Mr Quincey, if we could go and see it one afternoon instead of doing an English Literature lesson. We said it would help if we could visualise it as the book was so difficult but he refused. So, the next day, we went anyway. On our return to school the following day, Joe Quincey (as he was known) asked to see us and wanted to know why we had deliberately disobeyed his order.

‘I'm sorry, but we just felt it would help us pass our A-level,' I said.

Somewhat surprisingly, he merely replied, ‘Don't be sorry.'

There followed a strained silence as we didn't know how to respond to this. Eventually, Mr Quincey broke it by saying, ‘Never say you're sorry. If you do something, stick by it. If you think you are doing something wrong, don't do it in the first place.' After another short silence, he added, ‘Did the film help?'

‘Yes, I think I have a better understanding of what the book is about now,' I told him.

He told us to go back to our class and that was that.

Although in fact I never really did get to grips with
Tom Jones,
Joe Quincey's little discourse on ‘never saying sorry' has stuck with me right until now. While I can't agree that you should never say sorry, I have always taken the point that you shouldn't do something in the first place if you feel you might be sorry for it later.

History was my best subject but even here there was a problem. We were studying for three papers, the first two on Modern British History and Modern Europe, both of which
I felt very comfortable with, but the third paper was on Roman Britain. Our main book for this was
Roman Britain
by Professor Ian Richmond. Early on in the book, describing the position before the Roman conquest, Richmond wrote that the leader of the Catuvellauni tribe, Cunobelinus, held ‘virtual suzerainty of south-eastern Britain'. I had no idea what this meant as I had never come across the word suzerainty before and it just made me lose all interest in the Romans. This might sound very silly, looking back on it. I could have guessed what it meant from the context; I could have looked it up in the dictionary; I could have asked Mr Simms, but, because I was rapidly losing interest in school, I couldn't really be bothered even with a subject I enjoyed.

One thing I did like about History was our visits out to various places, though two of these were a bit fraught. The first was when Mr Simms arranged for the History A-level group to visit Parliament. This was due to take place on 21 January 1965. A few days before the due date, it was announced that Sir Winston Churchill was very ill and it was expected that he could die at any time. We were hoping and praying that he would last out till after 21 January for we knew that, as soon as he died, Parliament would be suspended and a period of mourning announced. As it happened, he lived for a few more days, dying on 24 January, so we got to Parliament and saw the House of Commons in action, something I did find very interesting.

When Churchill died, there was lot of discussion among us about his contribution to the War effort. I knew that people of my parents' generation greatly revered Churchill as the
man who won the War and that without his foresight, energy, tactical planning and morale-raising speeches we would surely have lost to Hitler. And this went for everyone, even Labour supporters: Dad, for example, who I am certain voted Labour in 1945, nevertheless gave the Conservative Churchill full credit for winning the War. However, the general opinion among my generation when he died was that others could have done the same job – Labour leader Clement Attlee, for example. Although I personally did not agree with this view, I think it proved a significant watershed in the post-war era in lessening the impact made by the War on our everyday life. In the 1950s, it was all-pervasive, but now the generation of political satire and Beatlemania had found its own voice and a new era was dawning, ‘forged in the white heat of technology', as our new Prime Minister, the Labour Party's Harold Wilson, put it, that owed nothing to the Second World War.

The other visit was to the Roman Villa at Lullingstone in Kent. Before we went, Herb and I asked if we were covered by insurance in case anything happened to us while out on the trip and we were told we wouldn't be. We decided not to go and instead visited the London Museum on our own. On our arrival at school the next day, Mr Engledow, who was by then our form master, asked where we had been the day before and we told him we'd been to the London Museum. He said that counted as an unauthorised absence and demanded a letter from our parents, telling him where we were.

I had, over the years, given Dad the benefit of my views on Mr Engledow and he saw this as his opportunity to get even with him on my behalf, so he wrote a letter back demanding to
know why he was asking for a letter as I had already told him where I was and he wanted to know why he didn't believe me. He then added a few more comments about his opinions on Mr Engledow's teaching skills just for good measure. The next day, Mr Engledow told me that the Headmaster was dealing with my father's ‘objectionable letter'. I shrugged and said I knew nothing about it. The following day, Dad received a letter from Mr Hopkins, which started by saying, ‘I must say quite plainly that never before can I remember reading such an objectionable letter from the parent of a boy in my school…'

Dad opened and read the letter in front of me and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He went into a sheer paroxysm of rage and bellowed, ‘How dare he! Who does he think he is? If he thinks that letter was objectionable, wait till he sees my next one!'

He immediately reached for a piece of paper and I think I could literally see the sparks flying from the pen as he wrote back. It began,

After a few more pleasantries of this sort, Dad finished up by saying,

Neither Mr Hopkins nor Mr Engledow ever mentioned the matter again, either to Dad or me. Funnily enough it reminded me of my last year at Rushmore when Dad had had the argument with the Head over my non-prize and the 11-plus result. What a way to finish up at both schools!

In the second year of sixth form, we were allowed some special privileges. One of these was the use of Room 24. Although we had a form room in the main building, there was also a basement room, set aside as a more casual common room for us in the house next door to the school at 24 Approach Road, where the caretaker lived. It was supposed to be used as a place for quiet study but I can't remember anyone ever actually studying in there. We used to go there when we didn't have any lessons and used it mainly to discuss sport or politics, listen to music and have a cup of coffee and a fag. I don't ever remember a teacher venturing down there, which is why we were left free to do much as we liked there.