Life in the bottom English group wasn’t all bad, but it was mostly bad. We weren’t allowed to read proper books. No Shakespeare for us, or Dickens, Austen, the Brontës, Orwell, or anyone else you might want to read, they were all thought too complicated for us thickos. Instead, we were given books written by American educators that were aimed at children with a limited vocabulary and were heavily didactic. Brad might be a cool kid with ripped jeans and a leather jacket, and he might get the class hotty, but by the end of the book the studious nerd will have outsmarted him and be in the arms of his hotty and Brad will be in juvenile detention centre. Moral: rebels are losers. Hard work and doing what you’re told will eventually pay off. We all saw through these books immediately. They were boring, condescending, and badly written.
The walls of my school were made of plasterboard. The school, a failing comprehensive on the outskirts of Salford, was built on a marsh and was, literally, sinking. A few inches each year. You could easily kick a hole in the wall or even headbutt through, and people did, frequently. As I sat in these classes, experiencing a boredom so profound it hurt, I would be able to catch snatches of books being read out by the teacher next door in the top English class: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred in their bones.’ I learned later that this was Marc Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but then it just sounded like the coolest thing I’d every heard. How I wanted to be in that class, with that book and with those people, instead of in my class, with this book and these people. I started to deliberately and ostentatiously deviate from what I’d been asked to do. An essay on the Norsemen, became a story about a tribe of people called the Nose Men, whose olfactory protuberances were so long, they had to be supported with crutches. The women of the tribe would compete for the man with the longest nose. An essay on Caligula and how he won some battle, became a piece of improvised jazzed up fiction that bore no relation to the real Caligula we had been made to read about in History. A diagram of the pig iron smelting system, we had to do in Geography, became a sketch of a giant chimeric beast, part man, part pig, part metal. A study of a fruit bowl in Art, resulted in a picture that did indeed include apples and pears, but also grotesque, macabre goblins and demons.
It wasn’t long before I was sent to the headteacher to get the cane. Once, twice, thrice, I forget how many times. I became very acquainted with his office and with his fine collection of walking sticks that he liked to use to beat the worst pupils. The punishment was meant to put you back in line, but it had the opposite effect on me, making me more defiant, more wayward, with each slashing stroke. I became best friends with one of the other naughty kids, a tall gangly lad with a mop of dark hair, called Simmo, and together we egged each other on to take bigger risks, to do worse things, to outdo each other’s bad behaviour.
Queueing outside class one day, waiting for the geography teacher to arrive, Simmo dared me to set the fire extinguisher off that was fixed to a nearby wall. I had always wanted to do this and didn’t need much encouragement. I pulled it from its harness on the wall and hit the top hard to set it off. White foam spurted from the hose and I clutched the hose in one hand and the body of the extinguisher with the other, aiming it at some of the kids lining up. Some screamed and some shouted. The noise got the attention of another teacher next door and he came out to see what all the fuss was:
‘Stewart! What are you doing with that?! Give it to me, NOW!!’
Oh, I gave it him alright, right between the eyes. He flapped and flayed around, trying to grab the thing off me but I was too quick, too nimble. I danced around him, spraying him in the face, and all over his body. I was having a whale of a time. Some of the kids were laughing now. I can’t remember the full sequence of events, but someone must have gone to fetch my old friend, the headteacher, because the next thing, he was looming over, trying to grab the extinguisher too. So I gave it to him too. Eventually the foam ran out, and I handed it over. The headteacher marched me up the corridor, holding me by my ear, until we got to his office. He slammed the door behind and started searching through his fine collection of canes. I held my hand out and took the blows as they rained down on my palm.
‘That’s it, Stewart. You’ve really done it now. One thing. Just one more thing, and I’ll have you expelled for the rest of the year.’
It was late June, only another few weeks of the first year left. I kept my head down and got through it without further reprimand. That six week summer holiday was great. Freedom. The weather was mostly clement, characterised by one long hot day after another, and I spent most of the holiday playing out with my mates. Climbing trees, building dens, making tree swings, playing curby, wally and knifey. The memory of school quickly diminished. When we came back in September, into the second year, I decided to turn over a new leaf, make things easy on myself. The first two weeks were uneventful. There was a new film in the cinema that everyone was talking about, called E.T. Me and Simmo, during the last week of our summer holiday, snuck into Unit 4 cinema in the town centre and watched it for free. The film wasn’t very good, and the American kids were really annoying, but what impressed both of us were the bikes they were riding. A new kind of bike called a BMX, that you could ride on or off road, that you could do tricks with and stunts. We both agreed that BMXs were the coolest, but there were none in the shops where we lived. Then at the start of that third week of term, during dinner break, we’d walked past a bike shop called T Brooks, and there in the window, suspended by chains was a Raleigh Gold Burner: a gold-coloured BMX. We stood at the window looking at it. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Eventually we walked back to school, talking all the way about how, we had to get that bike.
I can’t remember who came up with the plan, but one was soon formulated. We couldn’t wait to enact it, so the next day we went back to the shop. I was the talker, the chatterbox, so I agreed to distract T Brooks, involve him in conversation, while Simmo, quietly, stealthily, unhooked the bike from its chains. He would then give the whistle and we’d make a run for it. The plan worked beautifully. I got talking to T Brooks easily, getting him onto the subject of puncture repair and the best method. I watched in the corner of my eye, Simmo get to work. Then he was on the bike and whistling for me to join him. I legged it, jumping onto the back, standing on the back wheel gold bike pegs and clutching Simmo around the waist. He rode fast, down a hill, and I turned to see T Brooks running after us, his brown chore overcoat flapping like wings behind him. We soon lost him and made our way back to school. We went to the bike shed and dumped the vehicle. We’d done it! And we loved it when a plan came together.
I think the first afternoon class was double Maths. We were both in the bottom group and we sat at the back playing a sneaky game of hangman. About halfway into the class there was a knock on the door, and in walked the headteacher and by his side, T Brooks. T Brooks quickly scanned the room, then pointed us out and we were marched once again to the headteacher’s office.
Did you have to read Tyke Tyler? Crikey, Simmo. Vaguely remember going on a school trip with him. Wales?