I made a new friend in the second year at Chis & Sid (age 12/13). Paul and I already knew each other a little bit because we were always in detention together, but we sat together in Mr Gooden’s class and soon became best friends.

— 1979 —

We were always in trouble during those years, but I was just a naughty boy. I talked too loudly in class. I rarely did homework on time. My worst crime was arguing with teachers. I was just a naughty little boy; nothing worse than that. I never stole anything… or broke anything… or hurt anyone. Still, I got lots of detentions. Paul did, too.

We both liked to make people laugh. In the first few years of school, we put on a play for the drama festival. My class chose a comedy about two football hooligans who were always in trouble with the law. Guess who played the hooligans!

But Paul was something more. He wrote graffiti on the walls and stole motorbikes. He occasionally came over to my house to give me a ride, but I was never interested in stealing motorbikes myself.

Still, we were naughty, and we had a rule at Chis & Sid: if you got more than three detentions, you got the cane. But our headmaster was a nice guy and didn’t whack us, so Mr Gooden, our form teacher, did the whacking instead with his size-13 Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes. He’d make us come down to the teacher’s changing room and stare into his eyes while he gave us our lecture. Then we’d take off our purple blazer, and he’d hit us as hard as he could. Three times. I got lots of those.

One time, we were a bit rowdier in French class than we should have been. Miss Furey was quite young — probably new to teaching — and our class wasn’t the easiest class to handle. She would shout “Taisez-vous!” (“Be quiet!”) over and over. I spent much of her class writing “Le silence aide le travail” a hundred times in the corridor outside her classroom, because je ne me taisais pas.

Martin and David caused some commotion in French class when Martin looked out of the window and shouted, “Look at that!” The whole class ran over to look out the window, and there was nothing that poor Miss Furey could do to regain control.

“Asseyez-vous! Asseyez-vous!” Ms Furey shouted.

There was nothing poor Miss Furey could do to regain control. She just broke down and burst into tears. She ran out of the classroom crying and didn’t come back for days.

The deputy-head master came in soon after to tell us what naughty children we were, and Mr Gooden beat us with his tennis shoe. Paul and I had nothing to do with this particular commotion, but he beat us anyway.

I like to think we were kinder to Miss Furey after that.

Another time, Mr Gooden made us come up to Room 51 to get the cane, long after everyone else had gone home. I forget what our crime was — maybe there was no crime at all — but Paul went in first, and I stood outside, waiting for my turn.

Back in those days, we put our wooden chairs on top of the wooden desks, so the cleaners could do their cleaning, and before long, Paul and Mr Gooden started shouting at each other and throwing chairs. Naughty little boy that I was, I sat outside, terrified that I was next.

Mr Berry, Mr Gooden’s boss, came out of his office and asked me what was going on. Why was I sitting there so late in the evening? I explained that Paul and Mr Gooden were in there, throwing chairs, and that I was next.

“Oh,” said Mr Berry.

Then he grabbed his coat and went home.

After a bit more banging and shouting, the uproar calmed, and Mr Gooden drove me home. When we got to my house, he made me stay in the car while he went to talk to my mother. After maybe fifteen minutes, I went inside and told Mum that I wanted to go to a different school. “I know”, she said.

There was a military school in Greenwich. Maybe I could go there.

— 1980 —

While I continued getting in trouble for stupid little things, Paul upped his game. He made a bomb with gunpowder and aerosol cans one time and tried to blow up Five Arches bridge over the Cray River.

One weekend, Paul broke into the school chemistry lab and stole half the chemicals — sodium, phosphorus, sulphuric acid, magnesium dust — and a whole lot more. Boxes and boxes of dangerous chemicals. Not long after, Paul was hanging out with friends, and he threw burning phosphorus at someone. They called the police, and Paul went to the juvenile detention centre.

I never saw him again.

A lovely lady left me a comment a little while ago to say she was having lunch with Mr Gooden next week, and “Would I like her to say anything to him for me?”

I wrote him a polite little note, reminding him what a great chemistry teacher he was, but what a hard time he gave us as a form teacher. He wrote back, and now we are planning to meet for dinner one day soon. What a world, eh?

Thanks for reading The Ragged Clown!
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