The Sound of Laughter (6 page)

'No we're not,' I said, but I could feel the group glaring at me.

'It's supposed to travel thirty feet,' said Fingers.

But before I could answer him, I was distracted by the sight of the Lord Mayor's car pulling into the staff car park.

The assembly hall was packed with proud parents and dignitaries as they strolled round the room with plastic cups filled with fair trade coffee. Each group had been designated a table allowing them to display their designs and plans with pride. I noticed some of the groups had coloured charts and elaborate files filled with notes on technical data. We were huddled around a single piece of A4 with a sketch of the contraption in blue biro. I was so embarrassed, I wouldn't even let my mum come over for a chat.

We drew the short straw and were last to go, which only added to the pressure. Each of us made several uneasy trips to the toilet. Fingers was in such a state of despair that he climbed out of the bog window and never came back.

Red Rum and Co. rolled their wooden ball across the floor to rapturous applause. I thought that they should have been disqualified just for being smug.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, it was our turn. Mr India made his announcement:

'Last but by no means least, would you please show your appreciation for "The Very Fast".'

There was some sarcastic laughter at the mention of our name, but I was confident that would cease once they'd witnessed our endeavours.

The room watched on in silence as we pushed each other forward as group leader. I swear if Mr India hadn't deliberately cleared his throat a fight would have broken out between us.

Reluctantly I was pushed to the front and all I could hear was the sound of my Adidas Kick trainers squeaking as I walked to the centre of the hall. I took up my position, grabbed the pitiful contraption with my hands, and then with all of my might I threw it across the hall floor towards the finish line.

Now, you're not going to believe this but we came second. I swear to God. We were totally shell-shocked when the judges announced their decision. I still can't believe it twenty years later. I just flung the contraption across the floor and we came second. I don't think the wheels even touched the ground and
the spring flew off halfway down the hall and caught a nun on the shin.

Red Rum and Co. beat us with their smarmy wooden ball but we couldn't have cared less, The Very Fast had come second. And as if things couldn't get any better we were given a Double Decker each and a five-pound voucher for WH Smith's. Brilliant!

Some of my favourite memories of school are the occasional trips that we went on. Every year on the last Friday in May eight coaches would leave the convent packed with hyperactive children and head for Alton Towers. (In case you're unaware, Alton Towers is a successful theme park in the heart of the Staffordshire countryside that will hopefully now furnish myself and my family with a few free passes for giving them a mention.)

The nuns sent us away on that particular day because traditionally it was the same day that the fifth-years left school and they liked to celebrate by throwing eggs and flour over each other in the front street. That's why the nuns thought it best to keep the rest of the school out of
the way. Damage limitation I think they call it now.

I was always very excited and found it hard to sleep the night before the annual trip to Alton Towers. My head would be crammed with plans, such as which ride we should go on first and the curious expectation of what the new ride would be like. Because a new ride was unveiled every year, which usually meant some obligatory horror-story gossip regarding a friend of a friend's cousin's nephew's brother who'd had his head cut off while riding this new ride, but whatever the rumour it wasn't going to deter us from queuing for three hours and going on it eight times in a row.

That was the only thing that bugged me about theme parks, the bloody queuing. On a bad day you'd spend most of your day queuing and would end up going on only a few of the rides. These days you can pay more and get one of those special 'fast track' passes that allow you to go straight to the front of the queue. It'd be great if the management at Alton threw in a few of those free day passes as well.

We'd be put into groups and designated a teacher as an escort. I used to enjoy the teachers' attire on school trips because they would always turn up in their play clothes. We'd be in hysterics at some of the fashions they'd arrive in. The bluest blue jeans in the world, I'm talking sky blue now with gigantic turn-ups, so big, kids
could have hidden in them and been smuggled into the park for free.

Another memorable school trip was to the Isle of Rhum in third year. I wasn't actually supposed to be going on that particular trip but I got a phone call from Mr Fitzpatrick, my History teacher, telling me that Paul Jarvis had just been suspended for headbutting a nun, so a vacant place had come up.

I was keen to go but the problem was I'd never been on a hiking type of trip before and I didn't have any of the right equipment. Well, I had a woolly hat and some fingerless gloves, but that was about it. Mr Fitzpatrick said he could lend me some hiking boots out of the school store but what I really needed was a good, strong, waterproof coat ideal for walking up mountains in the November rain. I rang round a few friends but most of them wouldn't be seen dead in a waterproof coat. It was late Friday evening, all the shops were shut and we were going early Saturday morning.

Luckily my dad overheard my plight as I chatted on the phone in the hall. He said he'd have a word with my Uncle Tony. They were going out for their usual Friday-night game of snooker and if anybody could lay their hands on anything at short notice my Uncle Tony was the man.

Time was getting tight, I wasn't holding out much
hope and then I got a call from my dad. He was phoning from the payphone down at the Labour Club.

'Peter, it's your dad.' (He always said that in case I didn't recognise his voice.) 'I've got you a coat. It'll be there for you in the morning.' Then the phone went dead.

I got up early, it was about half three, went downstairs and got the shock of my life. True to his word my dad had got me a good waterproof coat – it was hanging off the kitchen door in all its glory. The only problem was it was a luminous Day-Glo orange and had 'Motorway Maintenance' written on the back in big yellow letters.

I charged upstairs, two steps at a time and burst into my mum and dad's room.

'BLOODY HELL!' my dad shouted. 'Turn the light off.'

But the light wasn't on, it was the glow of the coat lighting up the bedroom.

'I can't wear this,' I said.

'Why not? It's a bloody good coat, that,' said my dad. 'What else do you want on a Friday night? Millets was shut! Now bugger off, I'm trying to sleep here.'

He was right. I had no choice. I had to like it or lump it.

Everybody had a good laugh at my coat. I wasn't
surprised. I stood out a mile wherever I went. When we pulled over for a brew at Carlisle Services a foreman in charge of a motorway road gang tried to give me a written warning for playing Pole Position in the mini arcade.

By the time we reached Scotland and the Highlands, where most of the land is National Trust, it had gone beyond a joke. There was I strolling around a conservation area wearing a luminous orange coat with Motorway Maintenance written on the back of it. It certainly got a few of the locals' tongues wagging, especially when I pretended to gesture the layout of a new four-lane bypass.

On the way to Rhum we stopped off to get some food rations and unbeknownst to Mr Fitzpatrick we hid three boxes of ribbed Durex in the bottom of his shopping trolley. I'll never forget the look of embarrassment on his face when he got to the checkout and the cashier tried to swipe them. He was mortified, particularly as he had three schoolgirls bagging up for him. We made the rest of the journey in complete silence.

I also went to France with the school. Now that was a hellish journey – it took us two days and four nights (you do the maths). I was just grateful that the coach had a video player on board to help pass the time. It was wall-to-wall films the whole journey. We watched the lot: two
Karate Kids, Teen Wolf, Back to the Future, Grease
(four times – which is probably the reason why I dislike the film so much today). Well, I think you'd have felt the same as me if you'd have had Catherine Profitt and Fiona Sedgeley singing 'Summer Lovin'' in your ear at half five in the morning. I even tried to bribe the driver into leaving them at Watford Gap to no avail.

I'm surprised he didn't take the money in hindsight, as he was a dodgy bugger. We hadn't even finished boarding the coach in Bolton and he was already on the mike reading out the obligatory list of coach rules.

'Don't even think of using the toilet on board unless it's an emergency and even then, if you do, no solids. I don't want any of you messing about with the emergency exit at the back of the coach. I had one young boy fall out en route to Legoland and he's now fed through a straw, so think on,' he said.

Don't breathe, Don't smile – you'd think we were going on holiday or something. It was one rule after another, but the rule he kept banging on about at every opportunity was, 'Don't bring any cans of pop on board the coach as they can easily roll under my foot pedals and cause a major road accident.' Then the cheeky snake pulled over for a toilet stop right in the middle of some barren French desert, in the arse-end of nowhere,
opened the boot and began to sell us 'warm' cans of Rola Cola for a pound each.

Later in the journey we managed to talk the teachers into watching
Beverly Hills Cop,
but we only got three minutes into it before it was hastily ejected by Miss Hofflestien (our Jewish French teacher) after she heard 'Get the fuck out of here' three times. She replaced it with a punishing double bill of
The Jazz Singer
and
Yentl.
I was just grateful
Schindler's List
hadn't been made otherwise we would probably have had to sit through that too.

There was another uproar when we watched
The Terminator.
It came to the classic sex scene between Sarah Connor and 'the goodie' bloke from the future – I forget his name now but he was in
Aliens.
They started to shag and you could have cut the atmosphere with a special atmosphere cutter. The teachers all started to cough nervously and look round at each other and then Mr Almond (the French Geography teacher) climbed down behind the driver in an effort to turn off the video. The video player was situated on a shelf directly behind the driver's seat. Mr Almond had to pull back a pair of curtains and stretch over the driver's shoulder in order to work the controls.

The screen went blank and there was a huge boo from everybody on board. But the boos were replaced by
cheers when the picture flickered back on and they were still mid-shag. Then the picture paused and all we could see was 'the goodie' fella left holding Sarah Connor's breasts in mid-air. There were more cheers and then the whole coach exploded in hysterical delight when they started to shag backwards in slow motion. The noise of wolf whistles was deafening. Then the driver came on the microphone.

'Hey, keep it down, I'm trying to drive here,' he shouted.

Mr Almond got back into his seat, saw what was on the screen, turned red with embarrassment and climbed back down to the video recorder shaking his head.

The screen went blank again for a few seconds and then the picture came back on but now they were shagging forward in slow motion. The bus erupted once again with wolf whistles and cheers. We overheard the driver on his mike telling Mr Almond to 'leave it alone and sit the fuck down before we crash'. Poor Mr Almond reappeared looking more defeated than ever, having subjected us to the longest sex scene in motion-picture history.

Mr Almond was dogged with bad luck on that school trip. Unbeknownst to him he was robbed outside the Eiffel Tower when a thief unclipped his bumbag and ran off with three hundred quid's worth of traveller's
cheques, then he got his genitals stung by a jellyfish on a day trip to the beach and had to be rushed to Le A&E because his balls were swelling up to the size of grapefruit.

I don't know if it is just the Catholic religion but I was brought up to believe that sex is a sin. It was always an awkward subject to discuss in front of adults, even worse in front of nuns. I'll never forget the excruciating experience when the time came for sex education at school. I knew there was going to be trouble when I noticed all the science textbooks had been glued shut on the chapter entitled 'Reproduction'. Then the nuns made us take notes home in order to get our parents' permission before we could learn the facts of life.

Personally I thought having nuns teach sex education was a bad idea to begin with. I mean, let's be honest they're hardly experts in the field, are they? I wish I could say the same about priests but hey . . . let's not go there.

The nun that we had taking us for our painful journey into the facts of life was Sister Act II. She opted for the slide-show technique, but I've got to tell you, 'What Mr Bee and Mrs Flower got up to in the garden' was one of the most embarrassing things I've ever had to sit through. Not only was it dated, juvenile and patronising, but it was confusing too.

Afterwards she turned off the projector and flicked on the lights. 'So is that all clear to you now?'

Clear as mud. There was a stunned silence. I mean, how you could get a lady pregnant by hovering round a daffodil was beyond me. She'd lost us and she knew it.

'It's Mother Nature,' she said, desperately attempting to elaborate. 'All God's animals "do it" . . . some of you must have witnessed dogs doing it in the street.'

'You mean shit, Sister?' said Clive Whitworth, sticking his hand up.

'No,' said Danny Thorncliffe, 'She's talking about shaggin' aren't you?'

But by now Sister Act II seemed unsteady on her brogues and had moved over to the science lab window for a little fresh air.

Things weren't much better for me at home when it came to the facts of life. My mum had sent away to the
Daily Mirror
for a leaflet by Claire Rayner. Occasionally when we were all watching television as a family a sex scene would rear its head and my mum would say,

'That reminds me, I must let you read that leaflet I got off Claire Rayner . . .' (as if she was a personal friend of hers).

I could have died of embarrassment. I just smiled politely and uncomfortably reached for something to read, the back of a box of tissues, anything just to distract
me from the sex scene on the TV. Equally embarrassed, my dad would be quickly flicking over to something less provocative on the other channel, usually two rhinos shagging on BBC1.

I ended up reading the Claire Rayner leaflet myself one weekend when my mum was away at my Auntie Barbara's in Milton Keynes. I found it hiding at the bottom of my mum's knicker drawer one Saturday night after
Tales of the Unexpected.
I lay on the bed reading it, but I was still none the wiser. It was full of foreign words I'd never even seen before like 'labia' and 'clitoris'. I couldn't even pronounce them let alone find them on a woman. Hopefully I wouldn't need to for some time, I was only eleven and I didn't fancy burning in hell just yet.

But just when I'd given up any chance of discovering the truth about the Facts of Life good old Channel 4 decided to start screening adult films late on Friday nights. It was known as the 'Red Triangle' film season because they had a red triangle in the corner of the screen throughout the film to let viewers know the material was X-rated.

Millions of confused adolescents like myself gave a resounding sigh of relief as the season became a haven for us. With black-and-white portables flickering in bedrooms up and down the country, suddenly, between
the subtitles, it all made sense. I wrote a letter of gratitude to Gus McDonald at
Right to Reply
but he never read it out.

Meanwhile, back at school, the nuns decided to follow up on sex education by taking us into the hall and making us sit through a slide show on abortion. I still recoil now when I think of the graphic images they forced upon us that day. Mr Bee and Mrs Flower were replaced by coloured slides on a twelve-foot screen of aborted foetuses (and just before dinner too). They even passed round a plastic replica of an aborted foetus so we could see the size for ourselves.

At the time we all just accepted it as the norm (and I don't mean that fat bloke off
Cheers),
but looking back the nuns were completely out of order for subjecting us to that. Not only were we eleven years old but the thing that infuriates me the most when I think about it now is they never gave us both sides of the story. It was just one biased opinion after another. Clearly the nuns were against abortion but instead of shocking us into having the same opinion as them they should have given us all the facts. They knew that those images would have an impact on us at a tender age, and believe me, they did.