There was, and remains, a commonly-held belief that sending one’s children to school is important. It was certainly considered important enough to Gerry’s parents and so, in September 1962, Gerry was prised from his mother’s grasp by the forces of state education. He wasn’t very enthusiastic and recalled his first day to consist of children’s screams reverberating throughout the echoing pink-walled classroom. His own terror was however eclipsed by those children whose incessant screaming drowned out the commands of the teacher and her assistant who seemed to spend the most part of his first day either servicing the toilet needs of his hysterical classmates or providing them with clean institutional pants where their intervention arrived too late.
He noted the shame felt by those who had inadvertently burst their banks, too timid to even signal their imminent disaster, but was curious as to why it was deemed appropriate to make them finish their day with the ;walk-of-shame’ as they clutched the transparent bags full of their disgrace, and trudged unhappily toward the school gates and their awaiting, anxious parents. He didn’t remember whether his mother was awaiting him at the school gates at the end of the long and traumatic day. Perhaps he walked home with his big-brother, who was now used to this experience, but as one day faded into another, Gerry acclimatised himself to this new, though unwelcome routine change.
He made friends quickly and was popular with the girls, which was an unexpected development, but it held interesting possibilities. His playtimes were largely spent with the twins and their tall and ever-smiling friend Claire. Playtimes were largely spent running around the tarmac square where hopscotch was a popular and intensely competitive distraction. On sunny days they were allowed to extend their playground onto the grass and Gerry’s memories would forever be scented by newly-mown grass from which they would scavenge the daisy-heads into daisy-chains that would hang limply around the necks of the girls for whom he took pleasure in fashioning them.
A new game, kiss-chase, would soon dominate his time and it was after the long-legged and lithesome Claire pursued and then caught him that he shared his first lingering kiss. He liked it and the game grew in intensity to such an extent that Miss Sowerby, the head mistress, had to discontinue its popularity by forbidding it during one of her assemblies.
Assemblies took place in the school hall, which was also a gymnasium. Its walls were taken up with the newly installed ‘apparatus’, climbing frames to which could be attached polished wooden beams and up which Gerry and his classmates would be allowed to swarm once a week. There were also climbing frames adjacent to the playground but these were mysteriously ‘out-of-bounds’ and in his entire time at the school, Gerry never saw them being used. Similarly, the sandpit outside of Miss Miller’s classroom remained empty, though provided an endless temptation at which Gerry and his classmates would stare during dull moments in their day.
Lessons weren’t too difficult and the teachers were widely liked and respected in equal measure. The school was modern, and like the new housing estate it served, part of the new era of public housing and services ushered in by the post-war population boom. PE, which largely consisted of competitive games involving small bean bags - which could be used for catching, running around and collecting - were an opportunity to be outside and Gerry favoured this over the sometimes stuffy atmosphere in the classroom. Twice a week there would be an assembly where those children fortunate enough to have birthdays on this day would be invited to go to the front of the hall and ring a small bell, held out to them by Mrs. Sowerby. The number of years that their birthday conferred were rung aloud on the high-pitched bell with a wooden handle. Having completed this small public celebration, Miss Sowerby would then produce her ’sweetie-tin’, an elaborately patterned container with a tantalisingly creamy interior, which contained unimaginable delights to those who could only peer from a distance and imagine the joys of the birthday boy or girl as they plucked luxuriously wrapped sweets from inside.
She was a kindly and smiling lady, Mrs. Sowerby, and Gerry never once saw her show irritation or raise her voice in his entire time at the school. One curious fact about her was that her feet ballooned and bulged out of her low-heeled court shoes, which she wore with her elegantly neat twin-set skirts and jackets. Gerry was at a loss to explain this phenomenon and wondered, sometimes out loud, whether she put her shoes on first and then inflated her feet somehow to create this extraordinary effect. Kindly though she was he realised the impertinence of such a question and confined his speculations to his brother and close friends.
He recalled, through his missing teeth, the visit of the group who had come to educate them about the importance of oral hygiene. Sweets and toffees were extremely popular during his childhood and what was known then about eating a balanced diet was far from public knowledge to a population so recently acquainted with rationing. Penny Arrow Bars, Gob Stoppers, Black Jacks and Fruit Salads were amongst Gerry’s favourites and were four-a-penny at the local shop where Gerry and his brother would rush to spend their two-shillings of pocket money. They had also rendered an entire generation the victims of rampant tooth-decay and so the consecutive governments of Harold MacMillan and subsequently Harold Wilson had tasked the National Health to encourage the idea of regular teeth cleaning, if not abstinence from sugary confectionery.
The group arrived with a fanfare of music and free gifts of miniature toothpaste tubes and tooth brushes. It was their cheery song that would stick with Gerry however which delivered the happy message:
Clean your teeth, clean your teeth
Keep them clean and white
And you’ll always feel quite fit
Clean Your teeth, clean your teeth
Keep them clean and white
You’ll feel better you’ll admit
Look after teeth and gums as well
And your lips will always tell
The entire school were inculcated to this cheerful mantra, before leaving school and visiting the local sweetshop, where they happily traded their new toothbrushes and paste for a sherbet fountain.
But it wasn’t all cheery games and treats at the school. Every day there were school dinners to contend with. Aside from the popularity of mashed potatoes made even soggier by lashings of gravy, there were sago and tapioca puddings to be faced. But all of these loathsome creations paled into insignificance when compared to the daily ritual that preceded dinner itself. (lunch was not a working-class term and the evening meal was always referred to as tea-time)
Before dinner could even be consumed it was compulsory to queue outside the school toilets and await an encounter with Mrs. White. Mrs. White was the school dinner lady that every child would never forget. She stood, dressed in a black crimplene dress, with her steely-grey hair and painted-on eyebrows, at the entrance/exit to the boys toilets. Under her arm she clasped a pile of paper Cresco towels, which she would tear in two along their length as the frightened children emerged wet-handed from washing their hands. Gerry knew all-too-well what this might entail as both his brother Glenn, and cousin Drew (also a pupil) had taken great pleasure in alerting him to on his arrival at the school. As she handed him the towel she firmly seized the sideburn of hair in front of his ear, and pulled it painfully upward and toward her to prevent escape. “Think-on!” she then grimly intoned in her gruff Yorkshire dialect.
Gerry wasn’t quite sure what this philosophical discourse was intended to achieve, and it never entered his head that this may not have been approved of by Mrs. Sowerby or indeed his parents, but nevertheless, this relentless brutality occurred every day of his time in this school, leaving him forever indisposed to school dinners and creating an irrational hatred of dinner-ladies.
Providing that one ate one’s dinner and pudding, there remained some time for playing outside afterward, but Gerry was well aware that Mrs. White was also on playground duty, happily inflicting indignities on those who crossed her path. His cousin Drew became something of a folk-hero by the expedient of being caught by the tyrant herself in the act of singing:
Mrs White, had a fright, in the middle of the night
Saw a ghost, eating toast, halfway up a lamppost
He thereby ensured a swift and summary punishment of a clip round the ear, but his fame grew with the popularity of the song and Gerry enjoyed the reflected glory of his naughty cousin’s sudden and deserved celebrity in confronting her in such a novel and cheeky way, every time he heard it being enthusiastically sung, just out of her earshot.
The teacher most fondly remembered by anyone who was lucky enough to have been in her class was Miss Brown. Her lessons, always peppered with fascinating stories and anecdotes (frequently featuring her reminiscences about a trip to the United States of America) were legendary. An example of this was the day she brought in a can of sweet corn, at the time an unheard of and never before experienced delicacy. Using a simple primus stove, Miss Brown cooked and then shared - using cocktail sticks - the contents, leaving Gerry and his classmates with a never to be forgotten flavour and, as she regaled the class with stories of Indian Tribes and the Yosemite National Park, a thirst for knowledge and adventure.
This lovely woman, with her blonde-hair arranged in a bun, and wing-tip blue spectacles, was never without a smile or word of encouragement, and Gerry looked forward to her lessons, hanging on her every word and growing with her careful encouragement and kindness. He never wanted his time in her class to be over and was always happy to complete whatever carefully thought-out task she offered the class. There was never a sharp word or even rebuke that he could remember and he flourished, as his cousin had before him, under her excellent tutelage.
Many years later his cousin recounted the tale of how, in an attempt to increase his growing celebrity, he had invented a pet pony, with which he would regale her class about imagined adventures. The ruse was so successful that he was mortified one morning to discover Miss Brown’s intention to take the entire class to meet the mythical pony. He only confessed his artifice when they were all in their duffle-coats, balaclava helmets and mittens, duly assembled at the school’s gate in anticipation of a trip to the field which existed only in his fertile imagination. That she found a way out of this situation that left his dignity entirely intact was a measure of this wonderful persons compassion and understanding.
Mrs. White excepted, school was a wonderful time for Gerry. He never saw or heard about anyone being beaten or threatened with a beating, and always felt entirely safe and secure within his own identity. It was a magical time of learning and playing, a time that was about to be shattered with the upward mobility of the Hood family and their impending move to suburbia.
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