School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 2

In order for everyone to benefit from the same anonymity that I enjoy, the names of people and places have been changed. Rather worryingly, the events have not, and happened exactly as described…

It's now 1978, I'm fourteen years old, and anxious to enjoy the benefits of mixed-sex education after three years in an all-girls school. The lads who'd come up from the boys school had been just as frustrated by their segregation as we were, and we spent much of the first term at Hardley Upper School gazing with interest across the desks at each other - talent spotting could easily have been the most popular sport in the school.

Sadly for me, spot spotting might have been more apt. I was shadowed for nearly a year by two boys who were so plagued by acne that I could almost hear them erupting, but they dripped sex-appeal compared to my sixteen year-old neighbour, who was just a drip. A lanky lad with a chipped tooth, it would have taken surgical removal to part him from his snorkel anorak, even on days when temperatures were in the eighties. For some reason I fascinated him, and every time I put my head out of my front door, he'd be there. Often my sister would act as a decoy while I made my escape, but I was on my own after the time he kept her talking for so long that she came in with a suntan on one side of her face.

Compared with the prospect of spending two years in the company of the sorry specimens of noble manhood that I was attracting, getting down to some actual work would have seemed quite appealing, were it not for the teachers. The dippy lot who staffed the girls school definitely had their faults, but with the exception of the headmistress, they had our interests at heart and did actually manage to teach us something during the time we were there. Sucking up to the troublemakers seemed to be the order of the day for the staff of the Upper School, and only occasionally did they make any effort to educate any of us.

It was largely down to this that I'd lost interest in the school within weeks of starting there, and mostly I was just content to hang around with my mates and let it all go over my head, but there were times when it did get to me. The most memorable of these caused a run-in with my geography teacher, who I think I'll call Mr. Sole, in order to protect the guilty - Mr. R. Sole. Filing into class one day, we were all about to take our seats, when Eva Lardnut decided to take mine instead, and pinched my chair. I'd had dealings with Eva before, and this didn't at all bother me. I'd just asked her for my chair back when Mr. Sole came over to us and yelled in my ear that I should go and find another one. Now this really did rub me up the wrong way - Mr Sole had seen the entire incident, yet was having a go at me instead of the girl who'd started it all, and all because she was known to be difficult and he obviously regarded me as less of a threat to his authority.

I kept a lid on the urge to say something to this effect, which was probably a mistake, and went to get myself a chair as he had asked. But the rage I felt at his attitude wasn't going to let me do this without making some form of protest. 'Well, if it's O.K. for Eva,' I was thinking, 'then he can hardly object if I pinch his bloody chair…' Mr. Sole was livid. Turning purple with rage, he strode towards me, bellowing, "Put down that chair!" I wasn't going to give in that easily, and within seconds we were grappling over a lump of L.E.A. furniture, with myself trying to compensate for the difference in our physical capabilities by whacking him round the head a few times with the copy of 'Trinidad Today' (paperback, fortunately for him), which he'd helpfully left lying on his desk.

Mr Sole relinquished the chair, and surprisingly our disagreement was never mentioned again - if the headmaster was told, I didn't hear about it. He did refuse to enter me for my geography 'O' level, but I think this had more to do with the fact that I truly believed at the time that Plymouth was on the coast somewhere not far from Newcastle.

Because our teachers were generally so spineless, the exception that proved the rule had to be really exceptional, and our Commerce teacher was certainly that. Mrs Moore* was a tiny woman, and to all appearances well past the age of retirement, but the Eva Lardnuts of the Upper School held no terror for her. She ruled her class with an almost despotic-like control, and would seem to stick forever with each area of her subject until everyone had grasped it. In spite of her dictatorial reputation, she was always fair and had a wonderfully quick sense of humour.

Other teachers I remember well include my history teacher, who laughed like a drain when he passed me as I walked to school in a rainstorm with my younger sister, who'd unwisely decided to dye her hair with water-soluble red food colouring - but laughed on the other side of his face after my best mate brought her dog into the school playground and it bit him, myself and a few other kids and we all ended up piling into the school mini-bus for a trip to casualty and a tetanus injection; a teacher with incredibly greasy hair that hung like heavy black curtains at the side of her face and was not known for taking classes in anything, but seemed only to patrol the building constantly knitting a grubby article that never grew any bigger, only filthier by the day; and my poor misguided maths teacher, who really believed he could teach something to a numerically challenged person like me, much like small children believe in the Easter Bunny.

It's probably becoming obvious by now that I wasn't exactly enchanted with Hardley Upper School, and the truth is that for most of the last year I stayed away from the place as much as possible, returning for little more than the time it took to sit my exams. It's nothing short of a miracle that I passed any of them - of the ten pieces of coursework that had to be written through the school year and handed in as part of my English Literature exam, seven were cobbled together in the school car park before I went in. I had, however, written many works of fiction which the teachers had found acceptable, as my mother discovered, when on going through my schoolbag she found a bundle of letters that had yet to be handed in, each excusing me my absence from school, and each bearing a strikingly accurate copy of her signature. Oops…

One of the alleged highlights of the final year was the school movie. I turned up on the appointed evening with my best friend and our sisters, who were a year younger than we were. My friend's sister had a face like thunder because she had her heart set on Ivor Coxwell, the captain of the school rugby team, but he'd made it quite plain that he fancied my sister instead. Apparently he was regarded as some kind of wondrous love-god, but not being the sporty type, I'd never heard of him. Oh well, they might be at each others throats all night, but at least I was unlikely to get into any trouble here…

We took our places in the darkened drama hall, and the Robert Redford film 'The Sting' began to roll. Suddenly, I felt the hand of the lad sitting next to me on my thigh. I turned to him, gazed deeply into his eyes and said softly, "Piss off!" Startled, he withdrew his hand, but moments later it was back again. I picked it off my thigh and passed it back to him, just as my mate passed a bag of sweets to me. Like a homing pigeon, the hand returned, and its owner said, "Give us one of them sweets. Aw, go on!" Two warnings seemed more than sufficient to me, so I stood up and thumped him. A massive gasp went up, and my heart sank as I remembered that we were in the front row. I fled to the girl's toilets with my friend and our tearful sisters, who informed me that Mr Wandering Hands was none other than the idolized Ivor Coxwell. To this day I've never seen that film in its entirety.

The love of my life at the time went to a different school, but we'd discovered that a few of the lads of Hardley were a good laugh, and some of them became quite good mates. I was bothered enough by the absence of one of them on our last ever day there to drag my mate round to his house to say goodbye. He took so long to answer the door that we thought he wasn't in, and when he eventually did appear I was so surprised that I fell backwards over his dustbin, leaving me looking very undignified, and him passing comment that there was no better memorial to Hardley than the sight of the school drawers! Hmmmm, my thoughts exactly - "knickers" to the place!

School Daze - Girlie Learning

School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 1

School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 2