Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (17 page)

Science was never really my forte, though I was vaguely interested in biology. Along with physics, this was taken by Mr Martin, whose nickname was ‘Genie'. No one knew why, it just seemed to be a school tradition that went back many years. Having said that science was not my thing, it was quite exciting at first to go into a proper science lab and see all the test tubes, scales, Florence flasks, evaporating dishes and the rest – objects most of us had never come across before. But most exciting were the Bunsen burners, which you could use for boring experiments or they could be put to much better use, when the teacher wasn't looking, by pointing one at a fellow pupil and having a Bunsen burner fight.

For some obscure reason best known to himself, our chemistry teacher, Mr Thrasher, didn't approve of this behaviour and, in his own words, ‘would come down like a ton of bricks' on anyone caught doing it. Mr Thrasher's nickname was ‘Noddy' as he was always nodding his head. He also had a bit of a speech impediment, which meant he sprayed out a stream of spit whenever he used the letter ‘s'. As far as I was concerned, though, the excitement soon palled when we had to perform experiments like seeing whether the litmus paper turned red or blue and so on. I much preferred Mr Simms and his cavalry charges or Daphne's quizzes.

Our music teacher was Mr Taylor. Sadly, he never actually
seemed very interested in the subject and it was all just a repeat of learning to sing the folk songs we had already learnt at Rushmore. Fortunately, however, we did have one teacher, a Welshman called Mr Leonard, whom we nicknamed ‘Curly' because he was completely bald. Even though his actual job was teaching Maths, he had a real passion for music. He decided to make it his mission to create a choir worthy of the best school choirs in the country and held auditions after school. Although I had been one of Mr Brown's ‘growlers', I nevertheless decided to go along and see if I could get into the choir. Mr Leonard's opinion of my voice was completely different and he gave me a place straight away.

We used to meet once a week at the end of a school day and, when rehearsing for a special event, on Saturday mornings as well. Mr Leonard taught us much more interesting songs and quite complicated choral pieces. Until he came along, the school choir consisted solely of boys whose voices hadn't yet broken and their function was mainly to sing at morning assembly. The choir also sang on a couple of special occasions: Speech Day, when the end-of-year prizes were given out, and the Christmas Carol concert. But Curly kept boys on into their tenor, baritone and bass years and taught us how to sing harmonies and much more difficult pieces. The most demanding piece we ever learnt was ‘Sleepers Awake', a Bach cantata, written in four-part harmony – a bit different from Tennyson's ‘The Owl'! Mr Leonard was finally given the accolade of seeing us, his choir, out of all the schools in London being chosen to sing on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall at a special Christmas Carol concert.

Physical Training and Games were taken by Mr Hollyhock,
probably the most unfit teacher in the school. Often he would set us off doing some exercise in the school hall (which doubled as the gym, with wall bars and vaulting horses, etc.) while he went outside for a fag. He was also a noted visitor to The Approach, the pub across the road from the school, at lunchtimes and after work. While in the hall, he would bark out orders – ‘Running on the spot, begin!' and so on. He never actually taught any techniques of how to do anything but expected us to be able to vault over a horse, climb the wall bars or do somersaults just because we were boys, I suppose, and we should know that sort of thing. One thing he wouldn't stand was backchat. If he gave an order, he expected it to be obeyed without question. If he saw two boys talking, his favourite rejoinder was to say, ‘What was that little remark?' It was a catchphrase of his that was used throughout the school and indeed is still fondly remembered to this day by Old Parmiterians.

For Games, we used to have to take a special coach to our school sportsground, which was situated in Higham's Park, just at the back of Walthamstow Greyhound Stadium. This was a big area comprising about four or five football pitches on it, with, during our first year, a dreadfully decrepit changing room that looked as though it had been thrown up in a couple of hours sometime in the 1890s. There were no proper wash facilities and certainly no showers or baths. During the summer holidays at the end of our first year, new brick changing rooms were built with communal showers. Most boys took the showers in their stride but, for some, at the age of twelve and just entering puberty, there was certainly some embarrassment and a reluctance to enter the showers with other boys with no clothes
on. At first, some tried to go in with their shorts still on, but Mr Hollyhock wouldn't have any of that nonsense and made them take them off. I suppose for many of us it was the first time that the question of sexuality reared its head, something which, of course, was to happen a lot more as we came into our early and mid-teens.

Once we'd got dressed, we went into a small canteen, where we could buy either orange squash or lime juice plus a biscuit – Wagon Wheels were the favourite. I always had lime juice but nearly everyone else had orange squash. I could never understand this because a) lime juice tasted so much better to me and b) we could get orange squash any time we liked, being the staple drink in most homes. After that, it was time to get the bus back to school. Depending on the driver and the mood of Mr Hollyhock, you could get dropped off near home if you asked nicely.

The Games afternoons were arranged on a whole-year basis rather than just one class, so several matches took place – either football or cricket depending on the season. Because of this, other teachers came along, mostly the younger ones, and, although they might be Maths, Science or English teachers, they all looked much fitter than Mr Hollyhock. As with gym, there was never any instruction or coaching, we just had to get on with it. The only break in the football or cricket routine came when the school sports were held or when we had to go cross-country running.

The week before the school sports were held, each house had its qualifying events to see who would represent them in the finals. As at Junior School, I was usually one of Carter's
two representatives in the sprint, now extended to 100 yards, but again never actually managed to win (I think second place was my best). In the second year, I discovered a talent for the triple jump; although there was a certain amount of technique required, the event did favour the faster runners to get speed up on the runway before the jump. This was an event I did win several times over the years and eventually went on to represent the school in inter-school matches and championships.

Cross-country running was always held in the worst months of winter. We had to run up the road from the school ground across the level crossing at Higham's Park Station and then into Epping Forest, squelching through the mud and decayed leaves in the pouring rain, or, worse still, sometimes in a snow blizzard, before returning along the roads. It was torture of the highest order and sometimes made you think that it might be better just to refuse to go and face detention or six of the best. Teachers would sometimes be stationed along the way to make sure you ran the course, though more often than not they didn't bother, especially if it was raining. Mr Hollyhock in particular preferred his fag in the warmth of the pavilion.

The other two subjects it was my misfortune to have to take part in were art and woodwork. Woodwork was carried out in a special workshop in another school, Mowlem Street School, about a ten-minute walk away from Parmiter's. Now you would have thought that with my father being a woodcarver by trade I might have made a good fist at woodworking, but as it happened I was completely hopeless. The first thing we ever made was a pencil sharpener. All this consisted of was a piece of sandpaper stuck to a wooden block, on which you rubbed your
pencil up and down to sharpen it. I just about managed this but the items we had to make afterwards got progressively harder. The following week, there was a toothbrush rack, then a pencil box and a ship!

As the projects got more difficult, my efforts looked less and less like the object they were supposed to be until my teacher, Mr Gibson, just gave up and didn't really bother any more. After giving me some wood, a plane, a hammer, some nails and some glue, he told me to do what I liked. Fortunately, Murray was as good as I was, so we spent the lesson playing around with the wood and chatting. Mention of the glue reminds me that this was probably the most interesting part of woodwork classes as Mr Gibson used to boil up some concoction – ‘horse glue' he called it – in a big pot, which he decanted into smaller pots to dole out to everyone. The pot boiled away throughout the lesson emitting a very powerful, though I have to say not unpleasant odour.

As for art, I still hadn't progressed much beyond the stage of a circle for the head, a bigger one for the body and limbs sticking out at forty-five-degree angles. Mr Williams, the art teacher, also despaired and gave up teaching me at an early stage. I just wasn't very good with my hands.

As well as staying behind once a week for the choir, I became interested in another after-school club – the archaeology club, run by Mr Gibson. I found this really intriguing as it continued my interest in history in a very practical way. As well as meeting after school, we would sometimes go out at the weekends, either to visit a museum, especially the London Museum, or even to look round old archaeological sites such as Ambresbury
Banks, an Iron Age settlement near Epping, an Iron Age fort near Loughton and a Mesolithic site at High Beech. On this last visit, Mr Gibson told us to bring trowels so we could have a dig round. It was here that I found a Stone Age scraper. I took it home and put it into the cupboard in the big room. A few days later, it was missing so I asked Mum and Dad if they'd seen it. Mum said she'd thrown it away because she thought it was just an old stone from the garden. Aaaarrrgggghhh!

We also visited the big Roman site at St Albans, where I bought some Roman artefacts from the souvenir shop. This time I made sure I explained to Mum and Dad what those rusty old nails and bits of bone were.

The late 1950s and early 1960s was an exciting time in archaeology as it was in 1959 that the husband and wife team of Mary and Louis Leakey discovered the remains of what became known initially as ‘Zinjanthropus Man' in Olduvai Gorge, East Africa. The specimen's age of 1.75 million years radically altered the accepted ideas about the timescale of human evolution. Mr Gibson made sure we were kept up to date with all the latest developments. I was absolutely fascinated by news of these discoveries and it became my ambition to one day visit Olduvai Gorge, something I eventually managed almost fifty years later, in 2006.

Finally, of course, there was the Headmaster, Mr A. Hopkins. He never taught any classes but stayed in his office all day, every day apart from taking morning assembly. The reason he hardly ever came out of his office was well known to the whole school. It was because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler, even down to the small moustache. We were sure he must be in
hiding and that's why he never came out. The clinching piece of evidence was his initials.

Parmiter's had a large playground but, unlike Junior School, we only had playtime in the morning, though it was now called ‘break'. As most pupils stayed to dinner, it was much more used in the middle of the day than Rushmore's had been and at first we continued to play the same sort of games. There were the seasonal games like conkers and marbles, plus football and cricket. Although War and Cowboys and Indians dropped out of the picture very soon, we did manage to find other ways of having mock fighting games, especially when Robert Kitchen, who was nicknamed ‘Feg', formed his gang. I can't remember the origins of this now, but the Feg Gang was opposed by me and my friends, and, in the early days we used to run around firing our pretend guns and so on. The older boys never joined in this sort of thing and for us it also gradually petered out as we grew up.

There was a much quieter air about break time generally and groups of boys would be seen all round the playground just talking in pairs or groups. Some of this discussion was about schoolwork and trying to extract some information about last night's homework before it had to be handed in; a lot of it was about sport; but more and more as we entered our teenage years, it was about girls. Having left them behind at Junior School, many of us had not really had much to do with them other than female relations but there was a growing realisation among all of us that there was more to girls than cissy games and having the odd tomboy over to make up the numbers at birthday parties. There were a few rude jokes and poems but the real breakthrough came when Terry Gregory announced to a group
of us one day the sensational news that he had actually touched a girl's breast. He said he had been out with his (female) cousin and some of her friends in Epping Forest and had slipped away with one of the friends for a ‘snog'.

‘And then,' announced Terry to his stunned audience, ‘I put my hand down inside the front of her blouse.'

We listened open-mouthed, itching to hear where this was going to lead.

‘Did you actually touch her tits?' asked someone.

Terry grinned. ‘What do you think?'

‘What were they like, Tel?'

‘They were very soft,' he replied.

‘Did you get a look?'

‘No,' he said, ‘she wouldn't let me undo her blouse, so I had to touch her up outside her bra.'

Although we all felt this was a bit of an anti-climax, nevertheless Terry had managed more than any of us had done so he was still someone to be looked up to as the first of our group to have any real sort of sexual experience with a girl.

The first boy to claim that he had actually seen a girl's naked breast was Ronald Dibley, but no one believed him. I think this disbelief really arose from the fact that he was a bit of an outsider to our group and wasn't particularly popular so we thought he was just trying to make himself sound big to ingratiate himself with us but, for all we knew, he may well have been telling the truth. However, this dismissal of his claim didn't stop other boys making various assertions about how far they'd gone until the novelty wore off a bit as we grew up and discussions turned to other matters.