Ragged Clown

This is chapter three of my memoirs.
You can find chapters one and two here.

— 1977 —

My first year at Chis and Sid (aged 11-12) passed without incident apart from an impressive number of detentions. Detentions at Chis and Sid were a serious business where you had your name read out in morning assembly, and you went to the front of the assembly hall to get your little lecture from the headmaster. The list of names was always some permutation of Monroe, Harding, Winch and Lawrence.

Three detentions in a single term and you got the cane. My record was six. My detentions were never for properly naughty stuff. They were mostly for not doing my homework or for talking in class. The naughty stuff came later.

At the end of every school year, we had a few weeks of exams. They were a kind of warm-up for the O-level exams that would come at the end of the fifth year. After the first-year exams, they put us into “streams” according to our results. I should have been in the top stream but was put in the middle stream — perhaps it was all those detentions dragging me down.

— 1978-80 —

I was very happy with the middle stream, though, because my classmates were the best a teenage boy could wish for. I fell in love with a girl in my class in the very first week (more about that here), and we were all best friends (almost everyone — sorry, David) and we hung out together all the time. Birthday parties on Saturday night with a bottle of cider and a Party Six of Heineken. Ice Skating at Queensway, in London, on Sundays. We even took the train for a day trip to Margate (John’s mum didn’t trust him to take the train on his own, and she watched us all the way to Dartford). Most of us boys went to the Good News Christian summer camp at Winchester School where we spent a week singing Jesus songs and getting up to mischief. I’m still friends with several of my classmates 40 years later, and we still meet up for the occasional beer.

We were a lovely bunch, but we often pushed our teachers to the edge and beyond.

We were well-behaved, for the good teachers. On the first day with Mr Carlisle, we were our usual unruly selves when we entered the room, but Mr Carlisle made us all go out and come back, one by one, in silence. We were never unruly again. At the other extreme was Mrs Timm. Mrs Timm would drone on about the English Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, and no one paid even a smidgeon of attention to her. We took a cassette recorder to her class one time to record the lesson and the whole period was just mayhem with everyone talking and walking around the room while Mrs Timm droned on and on. I wonder if all her classes were like ours, or if we were just especially unkind to her. I wonder what her memories of teaching are like.

I’ve always loved history, but Mrs Timm made everything so grey and tedious. We had a history essay for homework every week, but I never scored more than 4 out of 20. Except that one time, when we had an essay on Lord Nelson. I got 19½ out of 20. I got 19½ for an essay on Captain Cook the week after too. But then I went back to 4 out of 20 for the rest of the year. Why did I do this? I don’t know. From the very beginning, I wanted to be myself and demonstrating that I could get any grade I wanted was important to me. Most days, I just didn’t want a good grade.

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Several teachers had a way of getting our attention. More than a few had perfect aim with a blackboard eraser thrown at the head of any student not paying attention. Mr Williams would slam his metre-long ruler down across your desk and if you didn’t move your fingers fast enough… too bad. Sore fingers. “Basher” Lewis slammed Martin’s face down into the bench in biology, and he beat me and Paul around the head over and over and over until half the class were in tears. The Terrible Mr Gooden deserves his own story

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It was about this time that my refusal to do homework became a problem. Julie and I were put on Homework Report, which meant our teachers recorded every homework assignment on a card and our parents had to sign it. We had to come to school 30 minutes early every day to show our completed homework to Mr Durbin, the head teacher. The homework was easy, so I didn’t stay on Homework Report for very long, and I was soon back to my old ways.

At the end of every term, we were given a report card, and Julie and I took turns to come last in our class, but when the end-of-year exams came around, I came top or thereabouts in nearly every exam. I won a prize for my exam results and bought a book on computer programming with the book voucher. That was the book that changed my life.

My history exam became something of a legend, because I answered every question as a joke. In the essay question about the Suffragettes, I wrote how the Suffragettes were a bunch of silly women who didn’t do as their husbands told them. In the Reformation question, Raquel Welch was a Buddhist. The teacher marking my essay wrote STUPID BOY! in huge letters diagonally across the page in red ink and gave me a zero. Why did I do this? Who knows? Maybe I thought it was funny at the time. Martin still has my essay.

— 1980-82 —

For the next two years of school, I did practically zero work and never even took a book home. Still, when the final exams — O-levels — came around, I came first or thereabouts in most of the subjects and won another prize. I shared the top spots with Alison, Corrine and Roger, and they all went to Oxford and got their names in gold lettering in the school lobby. I quit school and joined the Royal Navy.

— 1982-86 —

I thought I’d get more of a challenge in the Navy, but what a joke that was. The academic work in the Navy was so easy I felt like my brain was rotting.

— 2024 —

Epilogue
I am finally doing the degree that I should have done forty years ago, but now my brain is rotting for real. I wonder if I’ll finish my degree in time.

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