Infants & Juniors
In Erdington. I attended the local Infants and Primary School from the age of 5 until 11, as did my sister, albeit from the luxury of the year above me. Apart from the first day, these were happy times. On the first day at Infants I had that feeling of being abandoned that many kids must share. The feeling of being discarded by your mom, never to be collected again. Dumped into a world of complete strangers, all of whom were bigger than me. Indeed, this was a common occurrence in my early years - people being taller than myself. My mom is only 5 feet and 4 inches. My sister is about the same now, and my dad is just 5 feet 9 and an important half inch. Hardly “Land of the Giants”. And so, I was often at the smaller end of the school height line until I suddenly began to sprout up around the age of 16 or so. It must have been something in the illicit bags of chips or chunks of coconut ice from Granny’s Sweetshop just up from Grammar School I attended. I used to spend my dinner money on such treats instead of the proper school lunches that it was intended for. Sorry mom. Sorry Jamie - Oliver that is. I'm with you. I always want to slap the parents of fat children when I see them. It is child abuse abuse! Drag them off their computers, tie them to a stake in the garden and let the neighbour's rottweiler chase them for an hour or two - they'll thank you for it in the end.......
Anyhow, I can clearly remember my first day at Infant School. I bawled and I bawled and when some boys laughed at me for bawling I ran to hide in the wendy house, and balled. Don’t ask me why the wend y house was there but I was glad of it. A place of refuge. Here I met the beautiful CT. My first love. Blonde, blue-eyed and stunning. Or, as stunning as any 5 year old girl can be. She was stunning when we left Junior School at the age of 11 too. By all accounts and, according to a couple of old schoolmates with whom I have since exchanged emails via Friendsreuinted, she remained pretty damn stunning thereafter too. Quite aptly, CT now runs a number of small beauty salons.
In the wendy house, CT took pity on me. Being bigger than me, of course, she sat me on her gorgeous lap, put her arm around my shoulders, and, told me that it would all be alright. And, at that very moment it was.
Incidentally, CT, who I also contacted via Friendsreuinted, has seemingly no recollection of this momentous occasion in my life. Indeed, I’m not actually convinced that she remembers me at all. I suspect that she may have me confused with my best mate from those days, CJ.
Such memory loss in your First Love is pretty hard to swallow. Unrequited. How could she? I mean we must have been “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” off and on for nearly 3 weeks in total during our 7 years of school together. Surely, such a relationship must have had an unforgettable impact on her, as it has on myself. And, she even wrote to me once after I had gone to Grammar, asking if I wanted to go out with her. I declined. I declined because by that time she had become a Goth. Fashion has eluded me for most of my life, until quite recently, so I am not sure if I even knew what a Goth was back then. But I knew that I did not like the smell of pituli oil. In any case, this happened at an age when I wasn’t really interested in girls and certainly did not want to be tied down to any one girlfriend – no, that time probably hit me about a fortnight later. And so, I chose not to reply to CT’s letter. It is probably this rejection that caused CT to erase the wendy house incident from her own memory. It was clearly too painful for her. However, I was dead jealous when “Granty” declared via another Friendsreuinted exchange that he had got to "go out with" (I’m being very polite with my phraseology here) CT at the much more interesting age of 18. Apparently she had grown out of the Goth thing by then but was still stunning. Lucky bast*rd!
Junior School was a happy place and time. I don’t really remember very much at all about the academic side of things. This was a time of free school milk with stripy paper straws, of softball and rounders on the playground, of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat played on an old gramophone after Peter and the Wolf, of football and cricket, of mittens connected by string through your sleeves so you wouldn’t lose them. Every piece of clothing had your name sowed into it. This was a time of grandma’s knitted balaclava in winter (for me to wear, not her), of school trips to Burton-on-the-Water miniature village and butterfly park, or, to Alton Towers. This was before the theme park of today had been built. There was still the ruined castle, the odd slot machine, and, the best “big” ride was a giant slide, which you went down in a sack. Junior School was sports days and inter-school “Its-a-Knockout” competitions (Jeux Sans Frontiers as foreigners called it) complete with greasy poles and swimming pools – we won! Junior School was cruises on the SS Uganda - an old WWII corvette convoy escort vessel which was converted into a school cruise ship in the 1970s and turned up again as the hospital ship in the Falklands War of 1982. The SS Uganda took me to Santander, Oporto and Lisbon via a hurricane in the Bay of Biscay – which caused me to fall out of the top bunk – and an alarming incident with a tug in Liverpool docks.
This was a time of innocence and innocent girlfriends. Holding hands, “Kiss Chase”, “Postman’s Knock”, giving presents, and, being forced to hold the end of a skipping rope while the girls jumped up and down to stupid rhyming songs. Girlfriends. There was CT (blonde), of course, and MD (brunette, who only finished with me when her parents moved – or so I have chosen to remember it), Samantha (blonde), Julie (brunette, a teacher’s daughter), Heidi (blonde) and GT (brunette). Boy was I promiscuous in hindsight. GT’s mom was a receptionist at the local doctor’s surgery – a position of considerable power and influence in the local community. GT, like all my girlfriends of course, was gorgeous. She was tall (of course!), slender, with long dark hair. She also gained particular notoriety by being the first girl in our class to develop breasts. Boobs. Tits. Melons. Baps. Bazookas. (Now that must be worth a few interesting hits on Google!)
Up until this particular day (it happened so fast!) boys and girls had happily stripped off in the classroom in front of each other to change into PE vests, shorts and plimsolls (Christ, plimsolls – how old am I?). Not an eyelid was batted at the sign of bottle green undies or white y-fronts. But, all of a sudden, at the very first sign of mammary development, GT had to go and get changed in the store cupboard, where we kept the paints, jam jars and sweet wrapper collection (for making collages), away from the preying eyes of "the boys". She was soon followed by a growing collection of other maturing young ladies. We boys had no clue what was going on. After all, this was in the days before even an involuntary erection in your PE shorts was a source of embarrassment! Happy days.......
Showing posts with label School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label School. Show all posts
Monday, 5 February 2007
Thursday, 1 February 2007
Early Education Part 1
On the whole I enjoyed my schooling. And, when I didn’t enjoy it I was at least sufficiently scared enough of a particular teacher, prefect or other dealer of retribution not to rebel against the System. And so I was pretty good at “knuckling down” and “applying myself”. Also, the status and accolades that accompanied my academic success helped to keep me motivated. Being good at something is very rewarding.
My first memory of "school" was a brief one. I guess I must have been aged just 3 or 4 when I went to Raddlebarn Road Playgroup in Selly Oak – which would probably be called a “Day Nursery” today. It was just up the road from the off-licence managed by my mom and above which we lived. And what a small world. We recently re-visited the “Threshers” on Raddlebarn Road – it was a “Victoria Wine” in our day – as my youngest sister-in-law lived in the same street while in her final year at Birmingham University.
I only remember visiting the playgroup one time. I came home distraught because I had not been allowed to wear the batman cape. I have always been a wannabe super hero. The trauma of it all. I hope it didn't have a lasting effect. Perhaps I should consider suing? In any case, I don’t think that I ever went back. But, this may have had more to do with the fact that we moved to Erdington on the other side of Birmingham at about the same time. Erdington was not as posh as Selly Oak but was much, much closer to dad’s work at Fort Dunlop.
Come to think of it my memories of the off-licence could be indicative of the “late starter” of my families new academic mythology. Recently, my family have begun to describe me as a "late starter" at school. This was not my recollection. My recollection is that I won maths and English prizes while at junior school; I passed my 11 plus and so attended a local grammar school where I was top of class every term throughout my 7 years there; I took two "O" levels a year early, and passed; got straight "A's" in my "A" levels and won a scholarship to Oxford University. Late starter my eye!
Admittedly, the “potty training incident”, which pre-dated even the off-licence years, was not the most promising of starts. I had a slight mishap which required cleaning up. My mom’s back was turned for just two seconds and she found me, still sat on potty, glugging back a bottle of Domestos bleach. Kills all germs dead, or so the advertisement used to claim. But not this kid! There followed a trip to the local hospital and the pumping of a tiny stomach but all was well in the end. But, I feel this is less indicative of a “slow starter” than it is of my early inquisitiveness and willing to experiment (and a later ability to drink hard liquor!).
That said, I certainly was not demonstrating much intelligence in those first tender years in the off-licence. There is an old family cine film, subsequently converted into video, which shows how I used to peel off the wallpaper in my bedroom from the wall alongside my bed. Presumably the wallpaper paste contained some valuable nutrient that I was otherwise lacking (so, intelligent after all). It probably saved my life by fending of the growth of the "auburn"gene that my mom passed to my sister, who has passed it on to both nephews. If not for the late night snacking on wallpaper I might have been a "Ginga". What a lucky break!
There are other old stories from the off-license of me being “a little devil” for constantly stuffing full rolls of toilet paper down the toilet. There are faint memories of falling down the stairs while wearing a pair of mom’s high heels. I ncidents of cross-dressing are thankfully few and far between in my personal history – although I did once skipper a rowing eight at Oxford called the Transvesteight. But, it was for charity!
More scarily, there are recollections of far more dangerous pastimes than this. My dad once caught me feeding bits of the frayed landing carpet into the electric bar-heater at the top of the first flight of stairs (In later years, when alone, I would often amuse myself by picking my toenails and flicking them into the gas fire in the lounge to watch them catch fire and burn away to nothing. I am a fire starter. Twisted fire starter!). Also, I remember quite clearly being thrown across the living room once, while mom was asleep on the sofa. I had been fiddling with the electric plug socket, edging it out little by little until it would spark and fizz (if you are interested, you can get a very similar if somewhat less dangerous effect with a pull-cord light switch). I must have got one hell of an electric shock. In retrospect, it seems that I was lucky just to survive past the age of 3!
Well, let’s assume my early years at the off-licence in Selly Oak were a mere aberration. I can remember only a handful of similar stupid episodes in later years, such as setting off caps (little exploding caps for toy guns) with a glass jam jar. I still bear the scars on my hand today!
My first memory of "school" was a brief one. I guess I must have been aged just 3 or 4 when I went to Raddlebarn Road Playgroup in Selly Oak – which would probably be called a “Day Nursery” today. It was just up the road from the off-licence managed by my mom and above which we lived. And what a small world. We recently re-visited the “Threshers” on Raddlebarn Road – it was a “Victoria Wine” in our day – as my youngest sister-in-law lived in the same street while in her final year at Birmingham University.
I only remember visiting the playgroup one time. I came home distraught because I had not been allowed to wear the batman cape. I have always been a wannabe super hero. The trauma of it all. I hope it didn't have a lasting effect. Perhaps I should consider suing? In any case, I don’t think that I ever went back. But, this may have had more to do with the fact that we moved to Erdington on the other side of Birmingham at about the same time. Erdington was not as posh as Selly Oak but was much, much closer to dad’s work at Fort Dunlop.
Come to think of it my memories of the off-licence could be indicative of the “late starter” of my families new academic mythology. Recently, my family have begun to describe me as a "late starter" at school. This was not my recollection. My recollection is that I won maths and English prizes while at junior school; I passed my 11 plus and so attended a local grammar school where I was top of class every term throughout my 7 years there; I took two "O" levels a year early, and passed; got straight "A's" in my "A" levels and won a scholarship to Oxford University. Late starter my eye!
Admittedly, the “potty training incident”, which pre-dated even the off-licence years, was not the most promising of starts. I had a slight mishap which required cleaning up. My mom’s back was turned for just two seconds and she found me, still sat on potty, glugging back a bottle of Domestos bleach. Kills all germs dead, or so the advertisement used to claim. But not this kid! There followed a trip to the local hospital and the pumping of a tiny stomach but all was well in the end. But, I feel this is less indicative of a “slow starter” than it is of my early inquisitiveness and willing to experiment (and a later ability to drink hard liquor!).
That said, I certainly was not demonstrating much intelligence in those first tender years in the off-licence. There is an old family cine film, subsequently converted into video, which shows how I used to peel off the wallpaper in my bedroom from the wall alongside my bed. Presumably the wallpaper paste contained some valuable nutrient that I was otherwise lacking (so, intelligent after all). It probably saved my life by fending of the growth of the "auburn"gene that my mom passed to my sister, who has passed it on to both nephews. If not for the late night snacking on wallpaper I might have been a "Ginga". What a lucky break!
There are other old stories from the off-license of me being “a little devil” for constantly stuffing full rolls of toilet paper down the toilet. There are faint memories of falling down the stairs while wearing a pair of mom’s high heels. I ncidents of cross-dressing are thankfully few and far between in my personal history – although I did once skipper a rowing eight at Oxford called the Transvesteight. But, it was for charity!
More scarily, there are recollections of far more dangerous pastimes than this. My dad once caught me feeding bits of the frayed landing carpet into the electric bar-heater at the top of the first flight of stairs (In later years, when alone, I would often amuse myself by picking my toenails and flicking them into the gas fire in the lounge to watch them catch fire and burn away to nothing. I am a fire starter. Twisted fire starter!). Also, I remember quite clearly being thrown across the living room once, while mom was asleep on the sofa. I had been fiddling with the electric plug socket, edging it out little by little until it would spark and fizz (if you are interested, you can get a very similar if somewhat less dangerous effect with a pull-cord light switch). I must have got one hell of an electric shock. In retrospect, it seems that I was lucky just to survive past the age of 3!
Well, let’s assume my early years at the off-licence in Selly Oak were a mere aberration. I can remember only a handful of similar stupid episodes in later years, such as setting off caps (little exploding caps for toy guns) with a glass jam jar. I still bear the scars on my hand today!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
