The school’s crest was a white vertical stripe sandwiched between two green vertical stripes. In the centre of the white stripe stood a crude tree, embossed in green and brown, the symbol of Westeven Grammar School’s lofty academic ambitions. Opened in 1961 its head, John Winwood, was a quiet but solemn custodian of whom it could never be said took his responsibilities lightly.
A slight man in his early sixties, he wore the drab suit of a man who placed service to the community and duty above personality, favouring instead the half-moon spectacles and clipped moustache that had been symbolic of Nazi officer, the Gruppenführer of whom he apparently affected to emulate. His withering glance and whispered words of caution were to unnerve many-a-student, and no doubt teachers under his command, were similarly exposed to his hushed and menacing scrutiny. His was a very carefully contrived version of the all-powerful despotism that seemed to be de rigueur in powerful leaders of institutions of the time and he wore his whispering tyranny like a cloak of darkness as he silently trod the corridors and hall stage of his kingdom. Never a dramatic man he imposed his will with carefully chosen pauses and withering looks which could cede a confession from the innocent in a cadence of hushed glares.
His staff, carefully chosen to ensure his school’s reputation continued to benefit from only the brightest students, never questioned the iron will of their quiet, self-effacing leader and woe-betide the child who should come under his scrutiny for challenging his not-entirely benign modus operandi, Latin Grammar being the very core of the lofty beliefs he instilled throughout his proud academy. The tree of knowledge, his personally chosen symbol, perfectly represented his and therefore the school’s aims. Children came here to learn and he would personally make sure that, one way or another, they did so.
Life in North Wykeham continued to provide many changes. A local superstore was under construction and, as Gerry walked anxiously toward his new school, the throng of pupils from Westeven Grammar and the nearby secondary modern, the Robert Patterson (always referred to as the Robert Pat) cast cursory glances at the ever changing landscape of their altering world. Gerry, in his new black blazer, green v-necked jumper, green, red, and white diagonally-striped tie and grey flannel trousers felt somehow smarter than the blue-blazered students from Robert Pat, a distinction the respective schools seemed keen to foster, and an uneasiness with this visible difference persisted on the footpaths and pavements of walking, running and cycling children who converged on these two adjacent but very separate educational institutions. It was an article of faith at Westeven Grammar school that the nearby Robert Pat was the school for ‘thick-kids’, a delusion which the two institutions passively seemed to accept and which would boil-over into physical disputes from time-to-time. Gerry, who had made friends with children from both sides of this metaphysical divide remained sceptical about such notions and continued to flout the unspoken school rule which frowned on fraternisation between the two distinct cadres.
Induction into the modern complex of buildings that comprised the school was not too difficult. The school consisted of a main building, a three-storey monolith of faded-blue laminated glass and wood panels that had two staircases which led, via the cloakrooms to the dining hall which itself was annexed to the main hall where assemblies and occasional performances would be played-out. The far side of the hall gave way to the gymnasium and changing-rooms, themselves with their own entrance and exit and whose pavilion gave access to the pathetic and somewhat dilapidated plastic shell swimming pool where Gerry had so recently practiced his imitation of a feeding duck. Beyond this main building were a series of double portakabins the oldest of which featured coal-fired stoves, though Gerry never once saw these lit. The school had a large recreational field upon which stood several H-shaped posts declaring the school’s adherence to the spirit and laws of Rugby Union, but there were also hockey goals where girls in swirling skirts would hack and thrash at one another in tempestuous abandonment of anything remotely ‘lady-like’ when not engaged in the more gentle pursuit of netball. Several rather run-down tennis courts would become the daily scene for games of ‘soccer’ a game held in scorn by Mr. Winwood, although the recent success of Alf Ramsey’s England team of 1966 had compelled the scornful head to concede that his school should really be able to field teams in this discipline and, in 1967, goalposts had quietly been erected on the school field, albeit the game was only to be played after Christmas - perhaps in imitation of the frozen model of Soviet necessity, but more likely out of a perverse desire to please everyone and satisfy no-one, the common institutional solution to diversity.
Gerry’s form teacher, Miss Tennant, by dint of her specialisation being DS as Domestic Science was then known, could cook and sew sufficiently well to be entrusted with teaching her girls - her classes were gendered - how to care for their men. No-one questioned the way in which such a gendered approach robbed generations of clueless boys of the essential skills for cooking and food preparation stuck as they were in some previous model of domestically blissful ignorance. But the school was co-ed and aside from domestic and sporting matters girls and boys were roughly equal. Classes of around thirty in number were growing in size as the post-war ‘baby-boom’ asserted its demands but Gerry didn’t notice too much difference apart perhaps from the slightly increased scale and size of the furniture. He quickly became used to moving rapidly around the school in a river of bodies as the six-hundred or so pupils swapped rooms for their various subjects and teachers. The chaos, preceded by the ringing of the school’s various bells, would lead to temporary pandemonium as the children filled their straining satchels, or leather brief-cases with text and exercise books, retrieving their pens and pencils - the biro form of which had only recently been held to be a satisfactory replacement for nib pens and now redundant ink wells - before heading off for numbered rooms in distant blocks or huts. The classrooms themselves were pleasant enough and Gerry soon looked-forward to his weekly spell in the Art room with its remarkably affable and ever-tolerant teacher, Mr. Cant.
Aside from the all-too-obvious possibilities of mispronouncing this gentleman’s name, he had a soft southern drawl, long hair, and wore cardigans, jumpers and affected a pencil-behind-the-ear approach to his teaching. Everyone was a potential convert to Art, and Colin Cant missed no opportunity to identify incipient talent where before none had been noticed. He was firm but scrupulously fair and his smiling, joking and coaxing method imbued Gerry with a desire to paint, sketch and mould the various materials that were placed before him for two rapturous afternoon hours each week.
There were lots of new boys to get to know, and some familiar faces, such as Ralph Ireland-West whose newly promoted Police Inspector father had now moved the family to a grander house atop the limestone ridge which looked down upon Wykeham and its surroundings of low fields, dormitory villages and the River Withern which wound and snaked its way like a grimy eel from the city of Lindon to the port town of Boston, thirty-five miles distant. No-one knew what had drawn the calm and enigmatic native of Essex to the flat landscape of Lindonshire, but Colin Cant was a legend at Westeven school and Gerry already knew why. He could teach anyone and Gerry wanted only to learn from this charming and talented man who would produce his stub of a 2B pencil from behind his hair-covered ear and with a single flourish describe a curve that could transform Gerry’s one dimensional sketches into multi-faceted pictures of depth and perspective they had previously lacked.
Not all teachers at the school had such mesmeric qualities however. Gerry’s long love affair with words and music were to suffer a significant setback upon his arrival at Westeven Grammar. His English teacher, a dark and wizened creature who wore pink-knitted cardigans and begonia-print dresses inspired only tedium and her lessons, sometimes double-periods of mind-numbing duration, were otherwise unremarkable. Miss Markham was an unremarkable person who never once evinced any love of her subject. Gerry could not remember learning anything in her lessons apart from a deep dislike of this lonely and atrophied spinster whose sole pleasure seemed to be handing out arbitrary punishments to her charges. Miss Markham loved lines. Lines in exercise books had to be religiously adhered to and the slightest flaw in the accuracy of one’s handwriting style - content was less carefully scrutinised - would earn a public rebuke for what she would condemn as ‘messy writing’ although her own spider’s scrawl was utterly indecipherable. This mean pedagogue, who punished the slightest infraction, such as a muttered word to a classmate, with implacable severity, would frequently issue Gerry with ‘one hundred lines - ‘I must write more carefully in my exercise book!’ - never once noticing when he had attempted, with copper-plate calligraphic care, to achieve just that. After many baffling evenings of wrist-numbing, mindless copying Gerry invented a labour-saving device - a six-inch ruler onto which were secured with elastic bands five ballpoint pens - the design of which he generously and perhaps unwisely shared with his friends.
He tried several enhancements to the design but soon discovered it to be uncontrollable at its extremities and therefore learned it was better to write in this multiple twenty lines during his form’s registration period. It was his discovery whilst thus completing this pointless performance that first brought him to the attention of the Deputy-Head teacher to whom he was sent with his invention on discovery by Miss Tennant. Mr. Straun carefully turned over the device in his hand as he looked severely at its youthful inventor.
“I suppose you think you’re very clever boy?” he asked, appending the inevitable ‘humph’ from which he had earned the eponymous soubriquet that all naughty boys referred to him by.
“Not very clever sir, I’m sure someone else thought of it before me” rejoined the slightly embarrassed boy, realising he had hitched a ride on the coat-tails of the superman on whose shoulders he knew himself to be stood astride.
“HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT?” bellowed the enraged deputy.
The volume and tone was so intense as to make Gerry recoil from it, temporarily terrified by the sudden and dramatically dynamic shift in the discourse’s volume level.
“I’m sorry sir - I meant no harm, it’s just that I am always getting lines from Miss Markham, for no reason at …”
The unfinished sentence was punctuated by a new, yet more menacing broadside from the apoplectic Mr. Straun.
“DO NOT ANSWER ME BACK BOY!” screeched the enraged teacher, eyeballs bulging from behind the thick and dark frames of his glasses and causing a number of involuntary ‘humphs’ and other guttural noises to escape his oesophageal tract.
Gerry, rooted to the spot on one of the black tiles where Mr. Straun had carefully demand he stand felt like a sapling in a hurricane and fought hard to control his emotions. Had his inventiveness really deserved such an excoriating attack as this he wondered, no longer willing to share his thought processes with the railling behemoth who stood now before him waving his glasses to make his next telling point.
“We will not suffer such impertinent insolence in this school Hood. Do you understand me?” his interlocutors tone falling now to a dark groan of compliance-seeking invective.
Gerry was far from certain of the meaning of either impertinence or insolence but felt certain that any word other than ‘yes’ would demonstrate his profound ignorance and send ‘humph’ back up the volume scale, so he replied in the affirmative. Telling him to repeat the lines but this time without the aid of his invention Gerry returned to his class chastened, but Mr. Cant had a supply of pens, rulers and elastic bands and Gerry repeated his little act of insurrection and before Miss Markham might become even dimly aware of his ingenuity, dismantled the tool to avoid further future detection. Impertinently insolent as he had now learned he was he didn’t see why this should return him to the stone-age stupidity that it would require to write them out in full and nothing he had experienced that day in ‘humph’s’ presence had altered his attitude to authority with its many random and intimidating methods.If this was the trunk and branches of the tree of knowledge then Mr. Winwood and his officers were no more than the hissing serpent of calumny and, mused Gerry, the tree itself was in need of several milk-bottles full of sodium chlorate to encapsulate its stinking and rotten roots.
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