51. Butterflies

...being a reminiscence of schooldays and some of the teachers of my early youth

Back in the 1970s, adults liked to tell kids like me that schooldays are “the happiest days of your life”. Wondering where the quotation came from, I have just looked it up.  It was a apparently first used in 1813, in a journal called “The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and instruction”. 

A few years later, it could found in another fantastically named publication - “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction”, in an article by one John Timbs - who had also produced a book called “The Schooldays of Eminent Men” (which featured chapters on the schooldays of William The Conqueror, Lord Byron and Horatio Nelson amongst many others). I couldn’t find the exact article, but just looking at scans of those magazines and related bits and pieces just cost me a couple of hours of the time that I usually devote to writing these little essays. Time well spent. 

I doubt that any of the adults around in my childhood had ever read the Lady’s Monthly Museum, or the Mirror of Literature. They would have been much more familiar with Woman’s Own and the Daily Mirror. However they had probably seen the 1950 film The Best Days of Your Life with Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford which was a sort of pre St Trinian’s farce, based on a successful 1947 BBC television play.

To us 70s kids, it seemed ridiculous to suggest that our schooldays would be the best days of our lives. It seemed an obvious lie to me then, and my opinion has not changed now that I can look back on them from a safe distance. Did the adults believe it when they said it? Had the minds of the adults who told us that lie been addled by rose tinted reminiscences of their own experiences of school? Had they not been overwhelmed just as we were by the excessive demands of their teachers, by the constant threat of corporal punishment, actual violence, from those teachers if they did not comply to their demands by standing in line, by remaining silent for most of the time, by attempting the seemingly pointless tasks that were set before them? Not to mention the threat of actual violence which came from the other kids, who needed to assert their supremacy and exorcise their own demons by picking on those who they deemed inferior in some way. I really don’t remember schooldays as being any more free of stresses and demands as adult life is with the need to work, to pay the bills, to cope with the expectations of other people. Perhaps the concerns of schoolkids seem trivial in comparison, but that didn’t make us any happier. 

And yet I do look back on those days fondly. Partly because I am no longer living them. All those threats and anxieties are things of the past and I can focus on the happier stuff - the fun and games, the silly pranks we played on the teachers and each other. The long holidays. The good teachers and the good lessons, prominent in my memory now, but at the time, few and far between in a sea of awful teachers, and terrible drudgery. Copying nonsense off the blackboard. Shivering outside in my PE kit with a real hatred of the idea of competitive sport. The indignity of having been caned for something that wasn’t my fault! No wonder I generally bury the bad memories and focus almost exclusively on the good ones. We all do. 

When I started at Wilberforce Junior High school in 1970, I remember sitting behind a wooden desk (with a ceramic inkwell still fitted in the top right hand corner of it, under a sliding brass cover) and feeling very nervous indeed. It was nothing like the Park Road School for Infants that I had left just a month or so before. There had been boys and girls there, We would sit around communal tables, or on the floor, in the care of motherly lady teachers who were nothing like like the stiff male figures in front of us now, with menace in their deep voices. 

I remember thinking that it was like Greyfriars School where Billy Bunter had attended along with Bob Cherry and co in the stories that I had enjoyed reading with my Dad. They were still available in Hull Central library in bright yellow hardback reprints taken from the 1930s Magnet and Gem magazines that he had read as a boy. Thankfully, Wilberforce Junior High was not a boarding school like Greyfriars, it was only a short walk from my house, but it seemed very similar in its formal atmosphere, its hierarchy, its system of discipline, and even its stern, old fashioned architecture. 

These days, Greyfriars is no longer the paradigm of an old fashioned school. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts has supplanted it. What I have seen of the Harry Potter films does take me back to the atmosphere of Wilberforce Junior High School. But there are differences. If I am right, Hogwarts did not have a system of corporal punishment, and there were even girls there, and lady teachers. But there is the familiar air of menace exuded by some of the teachers, just like there was in many of the ones that I faced in my own school days. The sort of schoolmasters who might easily be imagined to dabble in the dark arts and doing their best to snuff out any opportunity for the children in their charge to enjoy a happy, carefree existence. One such man, the much feared Mister Kennedy¹, mentioned in the poem, once saw a friend of mine give me a mint as we walked upstairs together on the way to some class or other. We were both slippered for it². I still don’t really understand why.

The Poem, Butterflies, is one of those had been distilling in my mind for a long time before I wrote it. I had a strong image of the teachers from that time as specimens of butterflies pinned inside a case of glass and wood, in a style that would not have looked out of place in the science laboratory at Wilberforce Junior High. If I was more of a visual artist I might have created the case, with the specimens within bearing the names of some of those teachers. I would have ensured that no butterflies were harmed in its creation, just as none were harmed in the writing of the poem…  

Butterflies

It was a Junior High School, a middle school, for boys
I went there when I was nine 
I stayed for the first five years of the 1970s
One more year than any of the other kids I knew
because whilst I was there
they changed the date that they counted your age from 

It was an old-fashioned school, even by 1970s standards
Most of the teachers had come from a military background
Many of them had fought against Hitler’s armies
They ran the place on military lines
Demanding unquestioning obedience
Holding marches, parades, and inspections

All of those teachers are vivid in my memory
They exist there, just as they were in those 1970s days
As fascinating as a case of dead butterflies pinned to cork 
Long gone, but ever preserved in their pomp
Their details, their idiosyncrasies
prominently displayed in the gallery of my mind

Johnson, the art teacher, ex RAF
once created a watercolour horse in ten minutes
so realistic that it could have galloped off the page
He could always be distracted by a question on aeroplanes
He would spend the next hour in reminiscence
and we wouldn’t have to work on rendering our disfigured mares

Kennedy, Killer, Science, deputy headmaster
We feared every inch of his diminutive figure
His deep resonant, stentorian tones
once made us rote learn Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
I never realised that there was a comma in that line

Beevers, Mathematics
He seemed absolutely ancient to us 
We thought that he might have fought the Kaiser’s armies
He would stand before us, unabashed
Absently rubbing his crotch against the tall tables in "the maths lab"
I for one had no idea why

There were one or two younger teachers
Noticeable for their long hair
Their more fashionable clothing, watches and jewellery
The older ones must have rolled their eyes in dismay
Wondering what the world was coming to
Rueing the abolition of National Service

When I left for the Senior High School for boys and girls
With its beige brickwork, 
Bright white soffits and fascias
And large window walled classrooms 
I soon found the old place hard to believe
It seemed as much an anachronism then as it does now. 

Thatcher was about to transform the Conservative Party, 
and then the country
I prepared to step into a world that was changing 
even more rapidly than I was.
Me, with that case of dead butterflies 
permanently installed in the gallery of my mind

For better or for worse

1. Mister Kennedy was the Deputy Head, and left Wilberforce to take up a headship elsewhere, just before I left the school. Although he was the strictest of teachers and meted out almost random corporal punishments, it is amazing to remember the outpouring of love that we all seemed to feel for him when he went. I suppose that some of it came from the fact that we had known where we stood in his lessons. He would suffer no nonsense. And as we got older, and used to him, he had seemed to soften and treat us with some humour and respect. I remember him asking some young ruffian “Swear for me boy - I don’t know the words”. And on entering a class finding a group of us crowded around some pop music magazine, looking at a page that was out of his view, asking “Has she got any clothes on?”

2. It seems strange to feel that I have to explain the concept of being slippered. Slippering was a form of corporal punishment, seen as slightly less unpleasant than caning. Being caned meant having to hold out your hand and being struck forcefully across the palm, with a stick, usually a piece of springy bamboo. The amount of force used, and the number of strokes depended on the severity of the crime. A severe offence might have been punishable by three or more strokes on each hand, sometimes leaving red welts. The severity was decided by the teacher, it sometimes just depended on how angry he was, and looking back this probably had more to do with how stressed he was at work , or even in his life outside of work, than the actual behaviour of the unfortunate boy before him.

The slipper was less painful, and involved having to bend over and be whacked on the arse, again the amount of times and the severity of the strokes being dependant on a number of factors. Some teachers actually used a slipper. But most use a gym shoe, otherwise known as a pump, or a sannie (sand-shoe) by us boys.

When he wasn’t wielding the cane, Mister Kennedy used a sannie and threatened us with being induced into the Dunlop Slipper Club. Members of this exclusive fellowship, he would tell us “had been slippered so hard that the word ‘Dunlop” was printed on their backside in reverse”.

Many of the teachers named their slippers “Fred” or “the Peacemaker” or some nonsense. One master would cradle his slipper in his arms and stroke it like Donald Pleasance as Blofeld with his cat.

I remember once being punished by a PE teacher who used a table tennis bat.

Caning on the arse was an even worse punishment than being slippered.