something of a nag and Barry makes the odd joke about ‘old married couples’, which disturbs you. Though you’ve played kissing games, you aren’t Vanda’s boyfriend. She develops a serious plague of spots.
One lunch break, Marie-Laure Quilter, who hasn’t really tried to kill herself, whatever they say, is hanging around with you for no real reason. Paul, athletic enough to make the junior football side, has brought a couple of his soccer mates, Vince Tunney and Dickie Kell. There’s an irritating barking in the air, the constant yapping of a dog that belongs to a pensioner whose garden backs on to the school grounds. Marie-Laure claims it’s trying to chew through the fence to get her. You pelt the dog with small stones and are hauled up
en masse
before Mr Taylor, the Head. Marie-Laure and Vanda get the slipper, and the rest of you the belt.
The ‘slipper’, the ‘belt’. None of you – and, more significantly, none of your parents – questions the propriety of corporal punishment in school, administered with instruments as fetishist and symbolic as the top hat or old boot in Monopoly. The Bash Street Kids in the
Beano
usually wind up with throbbing cartoon bums and the frequently televised
Bottoms Up!
features a gowned Jimmy Edwards shouting ‘Whacko!’ as he humorously thrashes recalcitrants. You’ve learned from James that it’s not true that pupils at Dr Marling’s can be beaten by sadistic prefects, but the cane is still used there as an instrument of chastisement. If and when any of you has a twelve-year-old, the idea of ritual child abuse as disciplinary tool will seem as obsolete as public executions or ducking witches. You’ll wonder if ‘the belt’ – three mild lashes administered by the tweedy and unenthusiastic Mr Taylor – could possibly have hurt as much as you remember. Even a hardnut like Dickie Kell is reduced to helpless tears almost before the first lash.
The shared punishment makes you a proper gang. Before, you all drifted around the playground as free agents. Marie-Laure, who has an alcoholic mother, introduces you to smoking. Tension develops between Marie-Laure and Vanda, much like that Mary and Vanda. Mary got her way through violence, terror and cunning, but Marie-Laure prevails by being dependent, clinging and desperate. Vince’s great obsession is American comics and he encourages your own budding interest. You hunt around newsagents’ together for stray issues of
Batman, Doctor Strange
and
The Streak
, and build collections through swapping and delving.
* * *
By 1973, Hemphill is falling apart. After next year, it won’t even exist. Rumours go round about which of the staff will get the boot. Vanda frightens you all by claiming that at the new school you’ll have to do the difficult work her brother Norman does at Marling’s. Again, it’s repeated that grammar-school kids have five hours’ homework every night. You remember the panic spasm that made you botch your Eleven Plus. James does under an hour of homework an evening, but the prospect of giving up television and loitering-and-smoking-in-Denbeigh-Gardens is frighteningly real.
Increasingly, you feel you have no control over your life. You used to have choices. Now, you have a trap. It is slowly closing.
Read 18, go to 23.
12
I n the first form at Dr Marling’s, you put on a spurt of growth, shooting up six inches. Your parents spend a fortune on new school clothes. Then have to do it again, twice, as your trouser-cuffs rise above your socks. They threaten to put you back in shorts. You say you’ll go on hunger strike if they send you to school dressed like an infant. The uniform is okay, except for the blood-red cap, which makes Marling’s boys look from a distance as if they’ve been freshly scalped.
Your long legs make you a runner. The school tries to get you to play fly-half in rugby, but you don’t like the idea of twelve larger boys running after you, jumping on top of you. For you,
One lunch break, Marie-Laure Quilter, who hasn’t really tried to kill herself, whatever they say, is hanging around with you for no real reason. Paul, athletic enough to make the junior football side, has brought a couple of his soccer mates, Vince Tunney and Dickie Kell. There’s an irritating barking in the air, the constant yapping of a dog that belongs to a pensioner whose garden backs on to the school grounds. Marie-Laure claims it’s trying to chew through the fence to get her. You pelt the dog with small stones and are hauled up
en masse
before Mr Taylor, the Head. Marie-Laure and Vanda get the slipper, and the rest of you the belt.
The ‘slipper’, the ‘belt’. None of you – and, more significantly, none of your parents – questions the propriety of corporal punishment in school, administered with instruments as fetishist and symbolic as the top hat or old boot in Monopoly. The Bash Street Kids in the
Beano
usually wind up with throbbing cartoon bums and the frequently televised
Bottoms Up!
features a gowned Jimmy Edwards shouting ‘Whacko!’ as he humorously thrashes recalcitrants. You’ve learned from James that it’s not true that pupils at Dr Marling’s can be beaten by sadistic prefects, but the cane is still used there as an instrument of chastisement. If and when any of you has a twelve-year-old, the idea of ritual child abuse as disciplinary tool will seem as obsolete as public executions or ducking witches. You’ll wonder if ‘the belt’ – three mild lashes administered by the tweedy and unenthusiastic Mr Taylor – could possibly have hurt as much as you remember. Even a hardnut like Dickie Kell is reduced to helpless tears almost before the first lash.
The shared punishment makes you a proper gang. Before, you all drifted around the playground as free agents. Marie-Laure, who has an alcoholic mother, introduces you to smoking. Tension develops between Marie-Laure and Vanda, much like that Mary and Vanda. Mary got her way through violence, terror and cunning, but Marie-Laure prevails by being dependent, clinging and desperate. Vince’s great obsession is American comics and he encourages your own budding interest. You hunt around newsagents’ together for stray issues of
Batman, Doctor Strange
and
The Streak
, and build collections through swapping and delving.
* * *
By 1973, Hemphill is falling apart. After next year, it won’t even exist. Rumours go round about which of the staff will get the boot. Vanda frightens you all by claiming that at the new school you’ll have to do the difficult work her brother Norman does at Marling’s. Again, it’s repeated that grammar-school kids have five hours’ homework every night. You remember the panic spasm that made you botch your Eleven Plus. James does under an hour of homework an evening, but the prospect of giving up television and loitering-and-smoking-in-Denbeigh-Gardens is frighteningly real.
Increasingly, you feel you have no control over your life. You used to have choices. Now, you have a trap. It is slowly closing.
Read 18, go to 23.
12
I n the first form at Dr Marling’s, you put on a spurt of growth, shooting up six inches. Your parents spend a fortune on new school clothes. Then have to do it again, twice, as your trouser-cuffs rise above your socks. They threaten to put you back in shorts. You say you’ll go on hunger strike if they send you to school dressed like an infant. The uniform is okay, except for the blood-red cap, which makes Marling’s boys look from a distance as if they’ve been freshly scalped.
Your long legs make you a runner. The school tries to get you to play fly-half in rugby, but you don’t like the idea of twelve larger boys running after you, jumping on top of you. For you,
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