Chapter Five - Shake the Tree

The Old Chestnut
Throw the stick and shake the tree,
stand well back as missiles fall,
Split and cleave their fulsome pods,
what lies within birth can't recall.

Deep polished hue, soft virgin white;
separated by decree,
From whence a mighty presence flows,
calm and serene, eventually.

Root and branch, leaf and bough,
time alone will tell what truth,
Depends upon the seed and ground,
that makes a man out of the youth.

John Lowday ran a tight ship. As headmaster of Rossway County Primary much was expected of him. Purpose-built to serve the expanding and affluent community of North Wykeham it was well resourced and attracted the best teachers and students in the area. A bluff Yorkshireman he was a pillar of the local community and his tall lean frame supported a head and face that was both stern and serious but equally affable when required. His voice, a resonant baritone, could penetrate a noisy playground with ease and his word was law within the confines of the splendidly modern school that sat comfortably amidst the neat bungalows and houses that ringed its perimeter in the centre of the suburban estate.

With an attached infants school to feed the larger and well equipped primary, there were almost four hundred students in his care and he was proud of the school’s excellent reputation for providing a higher than average number of ‘scholarship’ students to the local Grammar school. Standards were high and he intended to maintain them until his dream of retirement to the North Yorkshire coast could be achieved. He had been an ambitious teacher and quickly became management material. He’d never been afraid to express himself on matters of education and Rossway was to become the model school to match his vision as a young man in his twenties of a flagship for education for the nineteen-sixties. As he strode purposefully around his domain his appearance in any given classroom would immediately excite the shuffling of chairs as the pupils made to stand uneasily at attention before his impassive gaze.

Most of the teachers were similarly disposed to deference in his presence, and at six foot four, with chiselled features and a crown of long-since thinned silver-grey hair, he might even be considered distinguished when compared with the other crumpled and care-worn members of his profession. He commanded respect and Gerry and Glenn’s father, himself of distant Yorkshire ancestry, took to him immediately.

“I think that you’re going to be much happier at your new school.” he told the boys with complete confidence, satisfied that this particular thorn in his side would now be eased. He was very concerned about the reports from the boys’ mother about their experience at the church school, but he was a busy man with an expanding workload and many responsibilities. He’d thought on first hearing that they needed more time to settle in, but at any rate, didn’t really want the trouble of relocating them to who knew where, not to mention the unwelcome expense of two more uniforms. In the event new ties and jumpers were all that were required and the boys were so evidently relieved to have the chance of a new start that all seemed now to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. After all, if his wife was unhappy it usually led to one of their rows, and he’d enough on his plate with the new bungalows he was building without having to contend with what he referred to as her “mithering at him”.

It was settled, the boys would go to Rossway, and that was that.

Ecstatic though the boys were at this hoped for development they were bemused as to why it would take a further week. A week of potential canings and humiliations at the hands of Mr. Richards and his staff who would, no doubt, resent their imminent defection to the upstart academy, as Rossway was thought of by the management of All Saints. What could these two boys possibly prefer about transferring to a school with such little history Mr. Richards had enquired of Mr. William Hood who had the temerity to sit in his office in working men’s clothes smoking a filter-tipped cigarette of all things. Clearly uneducated himself whatever made him think himself capable of such an important decision thought the head teacher to himself, and feeling his disapproval, William blew one final cloud of Virginia tobacco smoke in his face and ended the conversation with the words “they’re my lads, not yours” before rising and leaving the office without so much as a handshake, if you please. William’s mind had in fact been far from made-up when he had arrived and been shown into the tatty office, but the arrogant demeanour of the stuffy old head teacher had done little to dissuade him from his wife’s entreaties to take the boys away from what she referred to as ‘that bloody prison camp’. What had clinched it though was when he spied the hated cane, propped ostentatiously in the corner, directly in his line of sight. His sympathies for the boys, based as they were on his own brief experience of village school-life with its floggings and humiliations, came flooding back to haunt him and, as he later reported to his business partner “I’d half a mind to bend the old bastard over his own desk and give him six-of-the-best to see how he liked it!”.

In the event, the last few days of their confinement passed quickly and without further incident. The boys mused to themselves about whether their father’s infamous temper had cowed the ageing head into submission, but it was more likely that his arrogant disdain had simply put the boys out of his mind. With few new friends to say goodbyes to the boys ran happily home on the final day of the school week and the appearance of their new dark green jumpers and neckties confirmed their escape from the loathsome academy. They were free and would never again set foot inside the school, at least not as pupils though they did both have one further opportunity for revenge when, as pupils of Rossway, they roundly defeated All Saints in the annual six-a-side football tournament in front of their despised former teachers. Glenn even had the pleasure of scoring the decisive goal which he celebrated extravagantly in front of the man who had once threatened him so unnecessarily. Such moments were rare in life as they would soon discover.

Rossway was a very nice school and both boys were immediately befriended by the Simpson brothers, Chris and Les. Similar in age, if not background, the Simpsons were the sons of an RAF Chief Technician and his alcoholic wife. Their home life, though middle class and apparently affluent, was a parody of petty tyranny and arbitrary discipline. Their father, Derek, was a very pretentious man who felt thwarted by the fact that he was not an officer, although his manner affected just that. Dorothy, the inebriated mother, smoked fancy Dunhill luxury-length cigarettes, purchased duty-free on her husbands occasional postings to Cyprus. These would protrude from her manicured fingers which were generally clasped around a whisky tumbler full of amber liquid as she slurred her petty imprecations at her admittedly mischievous sons. “Wait until your father hears about this!” was a common threat which the boys generally ignored confident that by his return she would almost certainly have forgotten whatever incident it referred to, not unlikely in a woman who seldom knew what day of the week it was.

Derek’s presence however was a greater cause for concern. Gerry could not ever remember seeing him smile and he took a sinister pleasure in catching the boys out in some petty infraction or other. His punishments were legendary and pusillanimous. The frequency with which Les or Chris were told to “Go to your room!” was ludicrously high but he reserved a special degree of cruelty for the public humiliation of his hapless sons. A broken glass once earned Leslie the insane sanction of scrubbing the footpath at the back of their house with a toothbrush! Gerry and Glenn quickly concluded that Derek was, if anything, the maddest of the two parents which may have explained Dorothy’s descent into institutional insanity from which she never completely recovered, but which allowed Derek the perfect excuse for the divorce he soon obtained. He was what was commonly referred to as a git, and Gerry and Glenn made themselves scarce whenever he was around.

Les Simpson however was the conduit to Gerry’s first larcenous adventure. Dorothy would often command the boys to go to the nearby shops and purchase sundry mixers for her daily tipple. Unsteady enough on her feet by nine in the morning during her husband’s protracted absences, the boys were her fetchers and carriers. Her purse was often open to their access and on this particular day Leslie helped himself to a pound note, a princely sum in the sixties with which he and Gerry immediately went on a spending spree. Their visit to the city of Lindon resulted in many purchases including a fishing rod apiece but their enjoyment was cut very short on alighting from the bus home to discover that Derek was waiting and somehow had learned of the theft. It may well be that a jealous Christopher (Derek of course insisted that the boys were always addressed by their full names) had ‘shopped’ his sibling, but Gerry didn’t hang around long enough for the inquest, abandoning his share of the booty to his miscreant friend. Luckily news of Leslie’s willing accomplice never reached the Hood household where there would certainly have been ’hell to pay’!

The temptation to revisit the Simpson household was therefore minimal and it was around this time that Gerry befriended Ralph Ireland-West. Newly arrived in the area, Ralph was the eldest son of the local Police sergeant recently promoted to this important new post. Gerry and Ralph shared a passion for football and mischief and they were soon to be found clambering over the police station wall into the bottle store of the adjacent pub. Bottles were at this time subject to a returns deposit and the boys soon discovered a profitable little sideline of returning crates full of emptied bottles, directly to the next door off-licence from whence they came. Ralph seemed to have little inhibition about the frequency or quantity of this scam and would brazenly return the very same bottles time-after-time, night-after-night until the arrival of a German Shepherd dog signalled the abrupt end to this enterprise. In time Gerry would realise that Ralph’s lack of caution knew no bounds and that ambitious policemen are not the most trustworthy individuals, but it would take many years for him to fathom this very simple but extremely hard lesson.