It's Not What You Think (3 page)

10 Little and Large (I don’t care, I loved them)

  9 Abbott and Costello (Saturday mornings, there was little else on television)

  8 Bodie and Doyle (the kings of cool)

  7 Pixie and Dixie (left-field, and nowhere near as predictable as Tom & Jerry)

  6 Ernie and Bert (I wanted to be Ernie but fear I will end up becoming Bert)

  5 Morecambe and Wise (of course)

  4 Zig and Zag (…more later)

  3 Lennon and McCartney (they wrote the only songs I really know)

  2 Tom and Max (my cousins, both international rugby players and top boys all round)

  1 Mum and Dad (a loving but lethal combination)

Dad never once hit me—he didn’t have to
, I was scared enough of him as it was, not all the time, just when he wanted me to be. Is that what good parenting is all about? Scaring your kids half to death at precisely the right point for precisely the right amount of time—selective scaremongering at will, if you like? Is this how parents get their kids to behave? With the threat, tacit or otherwise, of physical violence? It definitely worked in our house.

In Dad’s case the simple raising of his voice or the odd glare in my direction was enough to instil the fear of God into me—I don’t know what I feared, I just did. I wasn’t scared of my mum at all but I didn’t have to be, she had figured out the genius and infallible Mum and Dad combo threat. How about this…

Mum (If I had done something wrong sometime in the afternoon):

‘You mark my words (another one of those phrases I’ve never really understood) your father is going to want to hear about this when he gets home.’

My goodness me, those words still send shivers down my spine even today. The Mum and Dad dreaded combo—just the threat of the man who never hit me was enough to make me conform.

I remember waiting and listening when Dad arrived home after such an episode to see if Mum would carry out her threat and tell him. More often than not it looked like she hadn’t, as the evening would continue as normal, first around the dinner table and then another relatively uneventful family night around the telly. With each passing minute I would become slightly more relaxed about the fact that I was probably in the clear. The thing was, though, I never knew for sure, not even the next day, whether I was definitely off the hook or not. This was the master stroke.

Had Mum told Dad? Had Mum told Dad and Dad had decided to let it go? Had Mum told Dad so he knew what had happened and then Dad told Mum that he would pretend he didn’t know what had happened; making her look more compassionate in the process?

Whatever the scenario, it worked like a dream. I remember Mum would often sit there for the rest of the night and every time I glanced her way she would give me one of those motherly knowing looks, the count-yourselflucky look. She would then also go on to benefit from several days of me loving her even more for not grassing me up to the big guy.

Our dinner, or tea as we referred to it, was often prefixed with the phrase, ‘Your tea’s on the table!’

And it would be, literally. We would join the dinner table at the last possible minute where we would remain for not a second longer than it took to wolf our food down. We were not a family who sat and chatted, at least not over tea, not much over anything to be honest. My poor mum would make a proper full-on meal every night and we would all reward her by sitting down for no more than seven or eight minutes before leaving her as quickly as we’d arrived with the ingratitude of a huge heap of dirty plates and pans to wash up. No wonder she’s never been that impressed when I cook her a meal!

I don’t know when Mum and Dad did their chatting—if they ever chatted at all. I’m guessing they did, but maybe not—my sister and I were pretty much around all day, every day, and I can never remember them having any private time whatsoever to speak of. I never heard them argue, that’s for sure—not the once. Maybe there wasn’t that much to discuss or argue about. We were a simple family unit with simple family needs. Maybe they really were the happiest couple in the world or maybe Dad did have a secret life and thought the less he said about anything the better.

When it came to ‘S-E-X’, for example, the mere suggestion of any of our family talking to teach other about such a subject would have caused us all to flee the house screaming. Most families that I knew were the same.

All of my friends and I, without exception, had absolutely no formal training in the science or art of anything to do with what goes on between a boy and a girl down below from any of our parents. Now, I really loved Mum and Dad, but come on guys, you have to tell your kids about the thrills, the spills and ultimately the pills that surround the desires of the flesh.

I didn’t get the information from my parents, I didn’t get it from my elder sister or brother and I didn’t get even get it from school—well, not really. I had to fumble around and figure the whole tawdry affair out for myself. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun or exciting, but a guiding hand would not have gone amiss. If you’ll forgive the expression.

10 Mr Warburton, the school caretaker, who looked like he’d been cast from
Grange Hill.
He was perfect: brown overall, flat cap, pipe, black plastic specs, the works

  9 Mr Antrobus, our headmaster saying, ‘If you can’t say anything good about a person don’t say anything at all’

  8 Going swimming once a week on a big red Routemaster bus, never having enough time to get dried properly afterwards and wondering how come the other kids didn’t seem to have this problem—did they have special quick drying skin?

  7 The hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming

  6 The first day I told my dad it would probably be a good idea if he stopped kissing me goodbye outside the school gates when he dropped me off

  5 Making plasticine puppets that took me ages to produce and then performing a play with them on a stage constructed out of a crisp box (they’d fall to pieces before the end of the first page of dialogue)

  4 The kid who thought it was hilarious to defecate anywhere but in the toilet cubicles—his tour de force was to do it in the pool when we were swimming

  3 Competitions to see who could keep their hand on the hot radiators longest

  2 Amanda, my first kiss

  1 My packed lunch

School is in many ways the beginning
of those shark-infested waters we call real life—when people, young innocent children in this instance, are hauled out of the utopia that is the family unit, hopefully full of love and warmth and protection, to be thrust instead into a whole other world where they are instantly told what they are and are not good at, who’s better than them and why they need to change immediately.

What a particularly stupid idea. Within days, the humiliation begins. There are sports team selections that you do or don’t make, the latter always being the case where I was concerned. Immediately you’re made to

feel like a loser and maybe, like me, then start to consider the rounders team as an option as long as it means you might get picked.

Then there’s the endless giving out of gold and silver stars and house points and merits and the ticks and the crosses and all manner of other things that start suddenly coming at you. All designed to let you know whether you are currently a chump or a champ—so many things that can cause a kid to become paralysed as the first pangs of the fear of failure begin to set in. How many self-help books have been written on the selfsame subject? Yet it’s something that’s bred into us almost from the word go. And how about the poor kids who never get a mention?

How often do we hear of a professional sportsman who suffers career-threatening dips in confidence because of a run of poor results? Think
about the poor little kiddies peeing their pants waiting for the humiliation of another set of spelling test results.

Then there’s the social aspect of the pecking order, evident nowhere more than at lunchtime.

• There’s the kids that go home for lunch—does this mean their parents love them more than yours love you?
  
• The kids that bring packed lunches—does this mean their folks can’t afford school dinners?
  
• The kids who receive free school dinners—surely this should be kept a secret?!
  
• The kids who go back for seconds—is this the only meal of the day they’re getting?
  
• The kids whose mum is a dinner lady and get extra chips as a result. (Not that we ever had chips at our school, not once—we had scooped mash that tasted strange, nothing resembling any other mash I’ve tasted before or since!)
  

For the record I was a packed-lunch child, not for any other reason than that I didn’t like school dinners. My packed lunch was without doubt the pinnacle of my school day, it truly was manna from heaven and the thought of it was one of the few things that kept me going through the interminable hours that made up my morning lessons. Cold toast was included for break, an item of fruit, a choccie bar, usually a Breakaway but sometimes a Kit-Kat, a Blue Riband or a Penguin, a flask of soup
*
and the unquestionable stars of the show: two pasties for lunch that Mum had cooked from frozen in the morning and then opened up so she could fill them with ketchup before resealing them again. Absolutely mouthwatering.

10 Chips and Tyne-brand tinned stewed steak with heaps of mint sauce and tinned peas

  9 Bovril crisps dipped in tea or tomato soup

  8 Ham on over-buttered floured baps from Greggs the bakers

  7 Tinned toms and bacon with as many rounds of white bread and butter as it will stretch to—minimum five

  6 Soggy tinned salmon sandwiches on white bread with white pepper and too much vinegar, hence the ‘soggy’

  5 Meat and potato pie sandwiches with ketchup—making my mouth water now as I think about them

  4 Beans on toast, plain and simple, no poncey Worcestershire sauce or anything lke that

  3 Fish, chips and gravy—gravy on chips (it’s a Northern thing)

  2 Dad’s gravy dip chip butties—sublime

  1 Mum’s hotpot from the war, again, with added miracle margarine pastry
*
—there is no better thing to put in your mouth on planet Earth

When you’re a kid, there are hierarchies and
lowerarchies
(a word that doesn’t exist but common sense says it should) springing up everywhere you look. Who’s hanging out with whom in the sandpit? Who’s always at the top of the climbing frame? Who’s on their own in the corner of the playground?

The argument that all this is a good idea, I suppose, is that these are the situations that will help prepare children for similar environments they may encounter when they are re-released into the free world. Well, how about the fact that the future adult environments may only exist because of the creation of former childhood ones? Sure, it may have always been thus in the past, in caveman times, but shouldn’t we be doing something to change that now instead of perpetuating them—at least honour the worst kids with something if only to stop the tears. Awards for one, awards for all, that’s what I say. We’re all good at something; it’s up to the schools to prise out of us what that may be.

My infant/junior school was St Margaret’s—absolutely run of the mill. Old Victorian classrooms complete with ornate, rain-echoing verandas somehow linked clumsily to a new unimaginative square concrete building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed there by mistake.

From the off we had the good teachers and the bad teachers as most schools do, those that could and those that could not when it came to communicating. There was Mrs Clark, the old Ena Sharples battleaxe type who would scare the living daylights out of us—although I can’t remember exactly how. There was the glamorous Mrs Johnson who looked like she should have been on one of those ever so slightly risqué
Top of The Pops
album covers and there was Mrs Smith who always reminded me of Virginia Wade for some reason. But my favourite was a supply teacher we had called Mr Hillditch. He was born to teach and took us to the Robinson’s bread factory one afternoon where he used to work. When his two weeks of deputising came to an end I remember being genuinely sad that he was leaving. I even wrote him a song and stood up in class to sing it to him.

Mr Hilditch we think that thee Is no good at being referee.

The only thing you’re good at is baking bread Also we’d like to thank you For giving us such a lot to do Mr Hillditch we love you And good bye.

(I was also pretty pleased with the tune I came up with for this ditty—on the audio book I will give it plenty, don’t you worry.)

During breaks it was conkers, the climbing frame, a game of footy, or British bulldog, or you could, if you wanted, while away the hours clinging to the school fence, pretending to be a prisoner, dreaming of freedom and rueing the crime that put you inside. I did this quite a lot.

Prizegiving was one of the few highlights, as was sports day, mostly because it meant no lessons. Rarely did I feature in either of these annual events—from the first year it was obvious which three or four kids would rule the roost in both categories and after that the rest of us were demoted to mere bit-part players in the predictable soap opera of typical primary school education.