The Best Years of Your Life

This posting was prompted by reading an 8th Grade Meme on Martyn’s Blog.


School, at least of the Secondary variety, was always something to be forgotten about as frequently as possible and, PE / Sports teachers were totally anathema. Perhaps I was a little unfortunate in changing schools at the end of my first year, when my parents moved from a little village in North Yorkshire to Sunderland (then County Durham, now Tyne and Wear I think).

Only two people from the C of E village school (catering for pupils aged 5 to 15), that I had attended for the previous couple of years, passed the eleven plus exam, so when I went to the small grammar school at Thirsk it was a case of getting to know people all over again. That in itself wasn’t too bad but, after one year, to move to a Grammar School where there were as many boys in each year as the total male & female school population at Thirsk did prove a little traumatic.

My loathing of PE teachers is one of my most enduring memories of that new environment. At Thirsk we had no access to a swimming pool whereas, in Sunderland, all the pupils had learned how to swim in the first year. When I said that I couldn’t swim, the nice Loughborough trained teacher took me to the deep end of the pool and held me under. You can be sure I found excuses to avoid going to the swimming baths and, the bastards gave me a fear of even walking close to water which I didn’t overcome until I was in my thirties. At Thirsk, a games lesson involved kicking a football around but, at the Bede Grammar School in Sunderland, the school game was Rugby Union and everyone was supposed to partake in that game. No one took the trouble to explain the rules or objectives of the game and, I was given the position of hooker. I never had any idea what I was supposed to do apart from allowing myself to be kneed and pushed around in the middle of a “scrum”. To this day I don’t understand what a “scrum” is!

In lieu of PE / PT at the village school we did things like country dancing, now that was both exercise and enjoyable; at the Bede, PE was circuit training involving, benches, beams, ropes and all the the most alienating devices of torture one can imagine. The two highlights of time at Secondary School were being in hospital with appendicitis and, having my leg in plaster, from groin to ankle for twelve weeks. What joy, not having to forge a letter exempting me from the punishment (called Rugby or PE) around these periods of time and, I played it to the maximum. I’m sure that the worst Nazi Kommandant had nothing on those hearty fellows called PE teachers!

I wasn’t by any means averse to exercise, enjoying walking, cycling, jiving and other such joyous pursuits but, I never have had much desire to yield to the whims of sadists.

Another happier memory, of those days, was the extra-curricular activity (with my friend Wally) of going down to the docks and buying Polish, East German and American cigarettes from crew members of the Polish fishing fleet; 1 shilling (5p) per twenty pack of the East European ones, 2 shillings (10p) or half-a-crown (12 and a half pence) for the American variety. They made themselves some spending money and, we had a ready market amongst fellow pupils.

With all my enjoyment of the schooling experience, it was even difficult getting any assistance with my self-directed “library” project – a sympathetic study of the Bolshevik revolution, I managed to attain two whole GCE ‘O’ levels from this ‘academic’ school, thus necessitating my having to take entrance examinations to enter my Nursing training and, later, for entrance to the Civil Service.

Only when I went to University, at the age of twenty-eight, was it discovered that I had an examination-phobia and, I definitely wasn’t the idle irredeemable pupil that many of the masters thought. The phobia related to the crowded hives of activity called exam rooms and, having walked out half-way through each of my first year exams (still passing all but one of them), I was subsequently allowed to take examinations on my own, or with one other person, and went on to obtain an excellent honours degree. It was only at this later date that I was able to recognize the high standard of the general education I had received from the grammar school but, quite simply it was the wrong environment for me; unbearably too middle-class and reactionary (the League of Empire Loyalists were allowed a candidate in the school’s mock election, the Communists weren’t) for my taste both then and now.