The following were written for my own entertainment.  Hopefully there is entertainment to be had in reading them.

1. On The Buses
2. Educating Memories

After leaving Art college I became a bus conductor, a job I did for three years.  They were eventful years – artistically (as described on the History page: Chapter 2 – Recovery) but anecdotally too.

It was 1966 and I’d been a bus conductor for three weeks or so.  My driver, Dave, was in his first week. We had one final run to do: the last bus of the day to the village of Croston from our base at Chorley in Lancashire.  Our bus was one of the old fashion type with the doors at the back and I was thus isolated from Dave in his cab at the front.

All went well until we reached a place called Spiby’s Corner and a signpost for Croston pointing left. Dave quite reasonably turned left. But he was wrong; that wasn’t the way we were supposed to go.

The two passengers on board cried out, I rang the bell and Dave stopped.

“You should have gone straight on!” I shouted over the noise of the engine, having gone outside and round to his cab.

“Straight on?” he called back.

“Yes,” I replied and went to the back where I banged the side of the bus to signal that he should start to reverse.  But he didn’t reverse, he carried on – ’straight on’ I realised – leaving me in what would have been total darkness were it not for the eerie light from a keep-left sign in the middle of the road.  I wasn’t too worried by this turn of events; the road he was on did go to Croston.  He’d find out soon enough what had happened from the passengers and pick me up on the way back.  Nor would he be long; the village was fairly close, by bus.  It was, in fact, about ten minutes before his headlights broke the darkness.  Reunited, we headed back, empty, to finish our shift.

It was in the canteen the following day that my experience was given it’s final gloss.

“Spiby’s Corner?” said one of the drivers, his raised eyebrows indicating something between surprise and horror. “At Midnight?”

“Well almost,” I admitted, noticing a similar expression on other faces. “Why?”

“The Ghost,” he explained.

It was, it emerged, widely believed amongst the bus crews at Chorley that there was a ghost at Spiby’s Corner.  Many a driver, the legend had it, had stopped for a woman at the bus stop there, only for the back doors to open on nothing.

Thus did I become the man who had braved the ghost at Spiby’s Corner and lived to tell the tale. An undeserved accolade, certainly, but nice to have when you’re an ex art student only two weeks into the job.

I was to be there for three years.

It was a time I look back on with some fondness.  I considered myself to be an artist in those days.  I still do of course, but not with the all consuming passion that I did then. Bus conducting was merely the way of earning a living, but it also provided a rich source of artistic stimulus; watching the world go by from a moving platform with picture windows at the front (on the newer buses at least).

And there was time to stand and gaze.  The actual conducting bit took up only a fraction of the time.  Rush hour apart we ran half empty. Which is why the company would soon begin to introduce driver only buses and begin cancelling many of the less profitable routes.

But for my three year stint there were two of us on every bus, and we were together for a week.

You get to know someone well in a week, a week of seven to eight hour shifts, riding around on a partially empty single or double decker bus and occasionally parking up for an hour in some village in the middle of nowhere waiting for the timetable to say it’s time to return to base.

They were a mixed bunch these drivers.  And that’s how most of them saw themselves – drivers.  Not bus drivers specifically.  They were men of the road, driving articulated lorries one month, buses the next and maybe back to trucking a year or so down the line. The advantage of the buses, they would tell you, is that the load walks on and off. But loads on lorries don’t complain, moan or expect you to remember which stop they’d booked to half an hour earlier in the midst of the other thirty-odd passengers.

“That was my stop!” a voice would say, coming from some able bodied individual, still sitting comfortably halfway down the lower deck (there were no bells for the passengers to ring in those days).  The unreasonable ones were a minority, admittedly, but they undermined your attitude to the travelling public as a whole.

“A’ll give thee a fortnight,” my first driver told me a couple of days into the job.

“A fortnight?”

“Before thar treating ’em like cattle like rest of us.”

And he was, alas, not too far wrong.

That driver was Bob, a deeply rooted local whose accent must have been impenetrable to anybody who wasn’t born in the area. “Her’s exed us fert pick lass up,” he once said to me.  He meant that his wife had asked him to collect their daughter from school, which I understood, having grown up hearing such accents, though few quite as broad as Bob’s.  Much more clearly spoken was the Estonian refugee who had, he told me, been in the both the German and Russian armies during the war, one of them twice.  Before the war he’d seen his uncle shot by the Russians for the crime of owning his own farm. In retrospect I wished I’d grilled him more about it. My guess is he didn’t want to go into too much detail. Most of his generation, whatever their nationality, didn’t talk about the war.  Whether they were protecting us or themselves I’m not sure.

But there were other stories to tell.

There were at least two bankrupts amongst the fifty or so men operating out of Chorley bus station whilst I was there, working every hour they could to pay off their debts.  One of them – I’ll call him Frank – had bought two lorries with a friend and gone into business.  They had put the deposit together for these expensive new vehicles by first saving up for a couple of years and then, having run out of patience with that tactic, taken the hard earned contents of their collective biscuit tin to Haydock Park.  They lost on the first five races at which point the friend put the lot on the last race.

It won and the lorries were theirs.

But Lady Luck turned out to have a darker side; the following year was 1963 and the worst winter on record.  Many of the country’s roads became impassable for several months. They couldn’t keep up the payments and bankruptcy followed.  Frank ended up doing double shifts on the buses – I don’t know what the friend did. Frank may well have told me. I’ve just forgotten.

Because you did learn so many of their secrets during the forty-odd hours you spent together.  The triumphs and disasters, the affairs and separations, their interests and obsessions. One driver was responding to the break up of his marriage by building a half life-size, working model of a Stuka dive bomber in his bachelor flat.  He’d had to move into a new flat at one point because the plane had outgrown the old one.  I found him examining my cheap ballpoint pen one day. Could he have it? he wondered.  Sawn off pieces of the octagonally shaped barrel would simulate the nuts on the model’s fuselage perfectly.  I don’t know if it ever flew, it still wasn’t finished when I moved on.

He wasn’t the only hobbyist.  There were two model railway enthusiasts, one of whom lovingly described how his track crisscrossed and circumnavigated the marital bedroom; there were hinged shelves which folded down into place when the door was closed.  I don’t know what his wife felt about this arrangement – maybe he used the train to deliver cups of tea in bed.

A driver called Arthur had been a private detective for a time.  It wasn’t by the sound of it either as glamorous or lucrative as the films make out – hence Arthur driving buses instead.  The only case I remember him sharing was of a chap who had got himself into a relationship with a rubber fetishist and wanted out. She insisted he dress top to toe in black latex and cavort on a rubber topped mattress. The poor fellow was struggling to cope.  Arthur couldn’t help him.  “What did he want me to do, kidnap her?”

“She’d have just bounced back,” I suggested.

But they weren’t all kings of the road with interesting back stories and hobbies.  One who definitely wasn’t was Bert.

These days Bert would be described as intellectually challenged. But politically correctness hadn’t yet been invented in 1966. “Bert would make a good wardrobe,” was how one canteen wit described him at the time.  His limitations were legendary.

He had been driving the region’s roads for over twenty years by the time I joined yet he still got lost if you didn’t watch him. I did wonder if it was his eyesight as much as his lack of brainpower that was the problem. I once returned to the front of the bus after taking some fares to find him hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering myopically at the windscreen.

“It’s bloody foggy out theer,” he said.

I wiped my finger across the front window on my side, removing a line of condensation.  It was dark and wintry outside but there was no fog.  Bert, grunted, wiped his windscreen with the top of his uniform cap and pushed the bus back up to a normal speed.

But poor eyesight didn’t really explain all his behaviour.  He didn’t, after all, drive into things.  But things did drive into him, thanks to his tendency to pull out into the flow of traffic without checking. He famously pulled away from the bus stop outside Chorley Park gates right into the path of an oncoming lorry.  The lorry driver tried to take avoiding action but still clipped the bus’s front corner.

“Why don’t you look at your ****ing mirror!” the lorry driver wondered, none too quietly.

“How can I?” Bert replied using his own impeccable logic. “That’s knocked bugger off.”

I was actually with him when he pulled out in front of a Bedford van.  This vehicle hit the back corner of our bus.  When we went out to investigate it was to find the van had sustained a crumpled near side wing and a broken headlight but the bus, obviously made of sterner stuff, had little more than the tiniest of dents and a couple of scratch marks.  Bert examined the latter only briefly. “It’ll be reet,” he announced and got back on the bus.  I glanced at the van’s two occupants, standing there in open mouthed shock, and joined him.  And we left.  If there was any comeback, I never heard of it.

Bert and his adventures featured strongly in the fund of anecdotes that circulated around the crew canteen.  The severed wing mirror was certainly a favourite; another featured a set of traffic lights near Leyland.  In those days there were two pneumatic rubber strips just over a bus length from the lights themselves which indicted that a vehicle had approached. Bert saw this system as more sophisticated than it really was, believing that repeated activation would persuade the lights to change more quickly.  On that day in Leyland he put this theory into practice by backing over them, twice.  It was after he’d backed over them a third time that there was a knock on his side window.

“I can put up with you backing into me once,” said the figure standing outside. “Twice even, but three times is taking the piss.”

“Lights ’ave changed,” said Bert and drove off.

I have since wondered what happened to him once the company went over completely to driver only buses.  There was no way he could have managed a bus on his own. Apart from being unable to manage the money, he’d have quickly got lost and taken his passengers on some magical mystery tour – but without the magic.  He was quite old.  They probably retired him

I never, needless to say, developed a rapport with Bert.  Conversation with him was like talking to a rough stone wall – the sound waves might bounce back but not with any noticeable structure.  But with most drivers connecting did have its rewards. With a couple of the younger drivers I developed a definite rapport.

One such was Ronnie.

Ronnie had spent his early years in the army and most of those years trying to get out again – no easy matter back then.  One his friends, he told me, had ’accidentally’ shot the sergeant on the rifle range in the hope that he’d be deemed to be too dangerous to fight alongside and be discharged.  I don’t think it worked.  Others, said Ronnie, used to shoot the sheep on a nearby hillside which the farmer wasn’t too unhappy about because the compensation he received was above the animal’s market value.  But Ronnie did escape eventually and ended up on the buses, where he became someone whom I counted as a friend.  In fact, between you and me, I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. It was Ronnie who first told me about the clitoris, something my so called educated friends had failed to inform me about with the consequence that I’d reached my early twenties in relative ignorance, despite having fathered two children along the way.  Needless to say this was transformative information, and not just for me. (In retrospect, I feel somewhat outraged that this knowledge escaped me for so long.  Not that I’ve since been inclined to sidle up to young men and pass the information on, though I did once get thrown off a sex education working party, as a teacher, for suggesting the subject should be added to the syllabus.  I assume Google have taken on the role nowadays.)

Meanwhile, back on the buses, Ronnie had other stories to tell.  Like the time he was backed into by a lorry loaded with gas cylinders whilst ferrying a group of coal miners to their place of work.  The consequence was that a goodly number of the cylinders came piling into the bus through the front window.  They fortunately missed Ronnie but only just.  A glance at his internal rearview mirror saw the miners making their escape through the emergency exit at the back; a glance to his left revealed the pile of cylinders the top one of which, six inches from his shoulder, had the word ‘DANGER’ stencilled on it in large red letters.

One of the miners stayed long enough to say, “I’d get out of there if I were you mate.  I think they might be about to explode.” Then he, too, made for the emergency exit.

The only way out for Ronnie was over the top of the cylinders, which is the way he went, carefully.

But Ronnie’s main claim to canteen folklore fame involved the last bus back from Liverpool and a low bridge.  Some of the double decker buses were slightly smaller than standard so that they could fit beneath the low bridges that were dotted about the county. The two bus types were known rather unpoetically as ‘high bridge’ and ’low bridge’.  There being no low bridges on the Chorley/Liverpool run Ronnie was driving the high bridge version, which wouldn’t have been a problem had said bus not broken down somewhere near Burscough.  An engineer did come out and fix it without too much trouble but the delay had consequences for the bus’s lone passenger. He had now missed a connection and was facing a long walk between the village of Charnock Richard and his home in Coppull.  Since there were never any passengers from these outlying villages into Chorley at that time of night Ronnie agreed to make the relatively minor detour that would get the chap home. Having successfully dropped him off, Ronnie put his foot down, unaware that he was now heading for a low bridge.  It was the speed that saved him.  The first indication that he was attempting to fit a quart sized bus under a pint sized bridge was a loud screeching sound which he reacted to by keeping his foot on the accelerator and all the other parts of his anatomy firmly crossed.  He got through.

Back at the garage he reported the incident, filled out the appropriate accident form and the left them to sort out the slightly flattened roof.

Unfortunately they didn’t.  They, or more likely their replacements on the next day’s shift, accidentally sent the damaged vehicle out again.

The bus was heading for Blackburn when the oblivious conductor ascended the stairs to collect the fares.  Outside it was raining, inside he discovered the passengers sitting hunched under umbrellas.  The roof hadn’t just been flattened slightly, it had holes in it, which the great British travelling public had responded to with their usual stoicism.

Talking of last buses from Liverpool, I have clear memories of the first time I did it.  Liverpool had a fearsome reputation in those days. Yes it was the home of the Beatles but it was also, by reputation at least, a place of lawless violence, mayhem and general criminality.  As someone once said “The Beatles may have come from Liverpool but they didn’t stay there.” So I was nervous, a nervousness which my colleagues in the staff canteen were happy to feed: sharp intakes of breath and a sympathetic pat on the shoulder from a couple of sarcastic souls and, from a third, the far from calming news that tonight was the night of the derby match – more intakes of breath.  Liverpool were playing Everton.  Violence was almost guaranteed.

The journey in was all right – the match was still underway at that point – but it was the journey out that I was worried about.  By the time we trundled back up the A59, along County Road, the game would be over, the drinking would be well underway and little me would be standing vulnerable and alone at the back of an old fashioned back loader (the driver was OK; he was safely tucked away in his cab at the front).

But in fact, although there were plenty of people around, spilling into the roads even, pints in hand in many cases, none of them attempted to board my bus.

And then one did. He stepped onto the platform and walked straight towards me until his face was no more than six inches from mine.  His breath was distinctive; and strong enough to take me over the breathalyser limit – had there been one in those days.

And then he spoke.

“How,” he demanded, “do you get six hundred Liverpool supporters into a mini?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, as pleasantly as I was able. “How?”

“Cremate the bastards!” he cried happily and staggered off into the bus.

That’s the other thing about the people of Liverpool – they do have an excellent sense of humour.

I fact, I never had any trouble to speak of during my three years riding around the county’s roads. That wasn’t true of everybody. Some seemed to get into confrontations on a weekly basis and demand that the driver take them to the nearest police station.  We were a mixed bunch, which isn’t really all that surprising.

It was, after all, a strange world which the bus crews inhabited, one which didn’t fit into the regular mould of eight hour working days with evenings and weekends off. It therefore attracted irregular people.  Some were just in it for the money, for although it was poorly paid at a basic level, those willing to do enough overtime could make a decent return.  As suggested above it wasn’t unusual for drivers particularly to work double shifts, illegal these days but allowed back then. I remember one driver telling me he hadn’t seen his children for three weeks.  Sometimes they didn’t even go home.  One trick, after finishing a late shift at close on midnight, was to find which bus was going out ten minutes before the beginning of their next shift and kip down on the back seat.  When the bus was started up, at 5.30am say, the sound and vibration woke them up.

But not everybody worked a twenty hour day, catching up on sleep where they could.  Most people did do overtime, because the basic pay was so pitiful (it was about eleven quid a week when I started) but they weren’t getting rich. So there had to be other reasons why people were willing to work such unsociable hours.

These were many and varied, ranging from being unable to get another job (like me) to avoiding the humdrum (also me) or, to be honest, just being odd (no comment).

The transport industry does attract some strange people.  Every bus station in those days seemed, for example, to have its own resident crazy person.  Chorley’s was a little chap with bottle bottom glasses called Gordon. He wore a duffle coat, carried a clipboard plus stopwatch and marched up and down the platform seeing the buses in and out.  Most of the crews used to humour him, giving him a thumbs up, a wave or even a salute.

But there were plenty oddballs on the payroll too.  One such was Sopper.  I’m not sure now if Sopper was his first or second name, I suspect the latter.  He was another of the left overs from the War, originally from Poland.  He was a strange, slightly disheveled little man whom I never saw without his uniform hat on his head, even when eating breakfast.  He seemed to have a permanent smile on his face, which is just as well since his oral communication skills were almost nonexistent. According to Arthur, the ex detective, Sopper had forgotten how to speak Polish but hadn’t yet got around to learning English.  The drivers hated working with him and not just because they couldn’t make conversation.  It was almost impossible to keep time when Sopper was looking after the inside of the bus.

At every stop the little man would leap off and help those alighting with shopping bags, parcels and prams. And then do the same in reverse for those waiting to board. It drove the drivers demented, and not only because of the time it took.  For some of the grumpier of these kings of them road, the passengers were the enemy. They didn’t like their conductor being nice to them.

As he was being when his bus arrived at a stop on the road out of Wigan.  A single woman stood there with a brand new dustbin.  The ever smiling Sopper lept off the bus, picked up the shiny cylindrical container, stowed it away under the stairs and then escorted the woman to her seat. She booked to Chorley.

When they arrived the little Pole extracted the bin and held it out to her as she descending onto the platform.

“It isn’t mine,” she said, for once wiping the smile, albeit temporarily, off the little man’s face.

Fortunately, it was the end of his shift so he had the immediate option of catching the next bus back to Wigan and returning it which, being Sopper, he did. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d picked it up from with the consequence that he and the dustbin spent much of the afternoon catching buses backwards and forwards until he finally identified the spot.

The bus canteen was awash with such stories.  And the undoubtedly star was a conductor called Albert.

It’s difficult to assess age when you’re twenty-three – everybody past their twenties is just old – but I’d guess Albert was around forty.  He was a lightly built gay man in a long term relationship. Nobody seemed to mind that he was gay – a few off colour jokes maybe but no antagonism – but then he was a nice guy and funny with: he had that camp way of talking that lends itself to self deprecating humour.

His account of the boy with the ladder, for example, was a hoot. The ladder was a step ladder, which the young lad had spent a number or weeks making at nightschool. Unwilling to put it on the wet pavement and have its pristine newness besmirched he had placed his head through the middle rungs and balanced it on his shoulders, the body of the ladder sticking out fore and aft.  Unfortunately, when Albert’s bus arrived he couldn’t get it off again.  Most of the conductors would have left him to it but Albert had all the passengers on the lower deck move to one side of the aisle then manoeuvred the boy and his ladder onto the bus and sat them on the other side. He then reversed him off when he got to his destination.

“And, do you know? I forgot to take his fare,” is how he rounded off the story.

Albert was easily distracted.

My first personal encounter with him outside the canteen occurred whilst pulling away from the stand one day.  We were just beginning to build up speed when I turned to discover Albert racing alongside the bus and waving.  He’d been on the bus before me and had left his ticket machine on the luggage rack.

The bus, in the ladder incident, was obviously of the old type with the doors at the back – a ’back loader’ in the jargon – I doubt you could get  the boy/ladder configuration described onto a modern, front loading bus. And many of Albert’s adventures/disasters seemed to involve this type of vehicle.  The conductor, when he wasn’t taking fares, stood in a kind of well, with the bus’s only bell push at his right shoulder, the stairs curving around to his left and a storage space behind him (the place where Sopper had placed his dustbin).

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said a voice above Albert one day as he was standing there, his finger poised over the bell.

‘What?” asked the accident prone conductor, and made the mistake of looking up.  The young boy, leaning over the guard rail at the top of the stairs didn’t reply – at least not in words.

Then there was the time he extracted a pushchair from beneath the stairs and attempted to pass it to the mother of two who had already alighted.  Her eldest child was still negotiating the step down so Albert lifted the chair to pass it over his head.  At which point a nappy fell out of it and onto the luckless conductor’s shirt front.  Needless to say, it wasn’t a clean one.

But the incident which took him to the top of the canteen’s anecdote hit parade, happened on the last bus to Charnock Richard.  Once again the bus was a back loader. This one, like most of those still in service, had doors.

As usual, there were few passengers going out to the village and none at all coming back.  It was a case of turn the bus round and head back.  The turning part involved Albert alighting to make sure they didn’t reverse into anything, and then, with that manoeuvre complete, give two slaps to the side of the bus, jump on and enjoy the ride.  Unfortunately Albert hesitated.  Why he did so isn’t recorded, and it was for only the briefest of moments, but long enough for the driver to close the doors with him still on the outside, choose first gear and set off.

This time, Albert didn’t hesitate.  He grabbed hold of the two vertical, chrome plated handles at either side of the doors, planted both feet on the three inches of platform still visible at the bottom, and hung on for dear life.

It’s three and a half miles from Charnock Richard to Chorley and the driver was intent on covering them at record speed.  And not once did he look in his near side wing mirror.  Until, that is, he pulled into the bus station and looked to watch his conductor get off before taking the bus up to the garage for the night.  What he saw was Albert, still glued to the side of the bus like an insect with its feet embedded in treacle.  It took time, apparently, to get the conductor off his perch and seated on a bench on the bus station concourse and even then it was only after two large scotches and some kind words that he regained full control over all four of his limbs.  Somebody then took him home.

It was a week later that he added an ironic appendix to the affair.  He stepped off a stationary bus, missed his footing slightly, and broke his ankle.

My personal favourite amongst the anecdotes about Albert that circulated around the crew’s canteen didn’t happen when he was working though there was a bus company connection.

One of the drivers, it seems, was getting married and a select few of the staff were invited to the evening reception, Albert and his partner being two of them.  The venue for this shindig was The Seven Stars in Leyland.

Now there are two pubs called The Seven Stars in Leyland. One of them these day is, admittedly, called the Old Seven Stars but even if it was back then the potential for confusing the two is till strong.  It certainly confused Albert and his partner because they went to the wrong one.  For normal mortals this mistake would have been immediately  obvious but the gods treated Albert differently from the rest of us.  Whether it was divine intervention or an enormous coincidence, the fact was that there was also a wedding reception going at this Seven Stars too.  And since Albert and friend had arrived fashionably late the bride and groom had already left for their honeymoon, leaving only the random revellers that are to be found at most after wedding parties. Albert, a chatty, gregarious man, circulated happily, sought out the bride’s father and handed him their present and, once the pub closed, went back to the latter’s house.  He and partner finally left at about four o’clock in the morning still completely oblivious that they had spent the whole evening and much of the night at the wrong wedding.

Some years later I encountered Albert, serving behind the bar at The Imperial, a pub situated opposite the bus station and next door to Chorley College of Education where I was studying for my teaching certificate. I asked him about the wedding.  He confirmed that the story was true, pretty much exactly I’ve described it.

“Oh, but we did have a good time,” he added with a characteristic flick of his wrist.

This  essay began as a successor to the anecdote rich piece about my bus conducting years (see above).  But I taught for twenty-five years – more than eight times the bus experience – so it became a beast that needed taming. It needed structure, which in this case comes at the expense of a strict chronology – but then the vagaries of memory put that in doubt anyway.  

This doesn’t mean there is no chronology at all. I was a very different teacher at the end of my career than at the beginning and it was a very different school and system. But it is, hopefully, an entertaining journey and it is sprinkled with anecdotes though they have been thinned out a bit by the need to introduce the characters. It’s becoming more of a memoir.  Whether it works for someone who wasn’t there (and they’re becoming a bit thin on the ground as far as the main protagonists are concerned) I’ll leave the reader to decide. Think of it as a historical document, or just an act of self indulgence.

It’s finished in the sense that I get to the end (of my teaching career) but it certainly isn’t complete.  Modern writing media allow constant revision whilst the process of writing about memories provokes new ones as you write and, more annoyingly, after you’ve written.  Checking out the staff photos which an ex colleague gave me recently makes me realise how many other colleagues I’ve left out.  So I could add stuff into the main text though in a couple cases (so far) I’ve resorted to appendices. There are links to these in the text.

Note:  when I started my career at Tulketh High School the designation of years was 1st to 5th.  These were later changed to Y7 and Y11.  Since most of the memories/anecdotes hail from the earlier times I’ve stuck to 1st – 5th throughout to keep it simple.

• 1. Happy Times
• 2. Beginnings
• 3. On The Job
• 4. The Department
• 5. Incomers (a small selection)
• 6. Cricket
• 7. The Pantomime
• 8. Drink and Stuff
• 9. Parents
• 10. Ralph Jones (and me)
• 11. Dave Gibbons (and the year that changed everything)
• 12. Terry
• 13. Governor
• 14. Less Happy Times

It’s difficult to believe, given how my career ended, but there was a time when I actually looked forward to the end of the summer holidays and the beginning of the new school year. I actually loved teaching in those days, mainly because I felt competent doing it, in direct contrast to my previous job in the sales offices of a local rubber factory.  I worked in the latter for three years and, despite being promoted several times, felt out of my depth throughout. ’So how come the promotions?’ you and I both cry. Looking back I think the management saw potential in me but could never find a role in their organisation where it could be realised.  I just wasn’t cut out for sales, or management come to that.

Twenty-five kids in an Art room turned out to my managerial level.  In there I was an undeniable expert, I had an intimidating organisation behind me and for the most part I was bigger than they were.

But what I really looked forward to as August drew to a close was reconnecting with colleagues.

They were a mixed bunch, the fifty or so teachers that crammed, each break and lunchtime, into the staffroom at Tulketh High School.  They ranged, in rank, from the Head, Ralph Jones, whose ’door was always open’ (except that it wasn’t – it had two lights outside announcing ’Enter’ and ’Don’t Enter’ operated by a switch on his desk) to an ever changing cohort of of twenty-somethings with an interest in sport, alcohol and each other.

In between were a whole host of characters. There was Ray, the childlike and charismatic Head of PE whose stock of fun phrases enlivened many a dull staffroom moment.  “If I were an ice cream I’d lick myself away,” he would announce for no reason in particular or, referring to (in his eyes) a sexually naive female colleague: “She thinks ’wriggle-it-in’ means corrugated iron.”  The latter usually meant that he would like to ’give her one’, a phrase I wasn’t so familiar with way back then; it conjured up the concept that Ray gave out sex in discrete packages – like quanta.  

Exotic in a different way was the Head of Boys’ Handicraft. One of the older members of staff, Bill Yates had an encyclopaedic practical knowledge and virtually no verbal communication skills at all.  He rarely finished a sentence.  Part way through he would run out of words and just say, “er, there.”  And if that wasn’t bad enough he would often begin talking halfway through a thought which he assumed you’d been privy to.  

I once did a 5th year sub for Bill in the metalwork room.  He’d left them a writing and drawing activity to do.   

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing,” complained one of the boys (they were all boys, the girls did cooking or needlework).

“I’m sure Mr. Yates explained it to you,” I replied.

“Has Mr. Yates ever explained anything to you?” he asked.  Slam dunk, as our American cousins say.

It is interesting that in my earliest memories of the Tulketh Staff Room, women are at best peripheral.  There were probably fewer females teaching in secondary schools back then but still a significant number.  In my earliest days those at Tulketh tended to sit together in the area furthest from the the staffroom door, which my head of department (who we’ll meet ere long) described as ’Assassination Corner’.  It’s fair to say the occupants of this supposed gossip factory tended not be in charge of anything – the Heads of Cooking and Needlework excepted – but there were two powerful ladies on the staff: Brenda and Kay.  Brenda was one of the two Deputy Heads, though she was actually known as the Senior Mistress, a title which tells its own story about the attitudes prevailing and offering the opportunity for misinterpretation by those with a salacious turn of mind.  It was distorted to Senior Mattress by one such individual.  Whether there was any justification for this epithet I can’t personally say – you’d have to ask the Head of Geography.  We will return to Brenda later with the staff pantomime.

The other powerful woman in the school was Kay, a Senior House Tutor.

Yes the school had houses as opposed to the year groups which most other comprehensives preferred even then.  This was because Mr Jones, the self titled Headmaster, obviously fantasised that he was running a more prestigious institution than an upgraded Secondary Modern School – I suspect Thomas Arnold of Rugby was the look he was aiming for. And to be fair to him the school did have a reputation in those early years for excellence, with the brighter kids at least.  I remember Max, the witty, wise and worldly Head of Geography (whoops) bemoaning the fact that his 5th year GCE 0 level class had amongst its number, the Mayor’s daughter, the Chief Education Officer’s daughter and that of Headmaster Jones himself. No set of exercise books was ever so regularly and painstakingly marked as that upper school Geography class’s.  

There were four houses, each named after areas within Bank Holiday driving distance of the less scenic Preston: Fylde, Furness, Lonsdale and Bowland. 

The four individuals who ran these houses – Kay, Eric, David and Gordon respectively – were kingpins in the school organisation; everything, pastoral or academic went through them. They sorted out the third year options, for example, deciding which kids did which subjects in the final two years.  These were important decisions for specialist subject teachers like me; in the Art department there was always the possibility that they would try and dump all the difficult, intellectually challenged and semi illiterate kids on you because it ’was only Art when all’s said and done’ and not actually important.

But, on a day to day basis, their most important role for the teaching staff was as the first port of call for disciplinary matters.  The trouble was that the three males at least were really too nice for this aspect of the job (unlike Kay whom everybody was frightened of including I suspect, the Head).  They were all church goers (Gordon was, if memory serves, a lay preacher) with gentle Christian values, which put them at odds with the teaching staff on occasion.  The staff didn’t want them to turn the other cheek towards the miscreant they’d referred, they wanted for said miscreant to bend over and turn both his cheeks to something fast moving and painful. 

Yes, corporal punishment was still being administered when I began my teaching career.  Admittedly the Senior House Tutors weren’t allowed to administer it – only the deputies and the head could officially beat the children.

I only ever witnessed one such beating.  It was administered by the Deputy Head, Dave Gibbons, on a 3rd year called Andrew who was, I’m embarrassed to admit, being beaten on my behalf. I can’t remember Andrew’s original crime, just that he was on detention for it and mopping the floor of the pottery area in my Art room, whilst I got on with some admin.  Except that it didn’t work out that way.  Andrew wasn’t happy with his assigned task and kept up a monologue of complaint in which he expressed the view, though not in these words, that mopping was a demeaning activity, far beneath his status in the school’s adolescent male hierarchy.  Being new at the job I lost control of the escalating confrontation which ensued and ended up slapping him, following which he ran to door, turned, and through tears of humiliation told me to “Fuck Off!” (a more powerful expletive then than it is now) then followed his own suggestion and did one.

The following day saw us both in Deputy Head, Dave Gibbons’ office where the latter laid into the lad’s buttocks with a half inch thick, bamboo cane.  These were no gentle taps that Deputy Dave administered; they were six full blooded swings, each arriving at the boy’s gluteus maximus at considerable speed.  He took it well, Andrew, considering he was being caned for having been slapped across the face.  In fact, some months later he opted for Art and did quite well, given his limitations.  Several years later an ex Tulketh colleague of mine met him in a pub in Preston town centre.  Andrew recognised his one time teacher and the conversation turned to his school days.  “I bloody hated Tulketh,” the now adult Andrew told him .  “There was only one decent teacher in the place.  That Art bloke, Mason.”  

I see no moral to that anecdote, by the way.  Beating children was barbaric and it’s sobering to recall that I was once part of a system that resorted to it.

Of course it was made illegal eventually, which is not to say physical intimidation of pupils by teachers didn’t continue on a more informal basis. I wasn’t, myself, past pinning the odd wayward adolescent against a wall and asking him to repeat what he’s just said – I didn’t used to do it to the girls, I hasten to add – I used to send them to Brenda to do it. It was certainly said, and widely believed, that headmaster Jones use to lay into the kids in the privacy of his office, protected, I assume, by the little light outside his door saying “Do not enter”.

Ralf, as absolutely nobody called him to his face, was certainly a frightening figure though you wouldn’t notice if you met him outside his personal fiefdom.  He was actually slightly effeminate in manner.  In fact “JONES IS A PUFF” was more than once graffitoed onto the walls of the boys toilets.  Harry Devonport, the then young Head of Chemistry, claims he wrote “TRUE” underneath at least one of them.

But everybody was frightened of Mr. Jones, staff and pupils both.  But he put us first.  “HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO A MEMBER OF MY STAFF LIKE THAT!?” he would scream into some unfortunate miscreant’s face, from all of two inches away.  We were his staff, you see, it was his school, and he ruled it with an iron fist.

Which I suppose is why the Senior House Tutors could afford to be so ’understanding’ of the kids we referred to them; behind them stood Ralph holding a very big stick; albeit, in later years, a metaphorical one.

So the violence wasn’t ritualised any more but it was still there.

Some staff were more prone to it than others.  Head of PE Ray seemed to get into more scrapes than average. It may have been something to do with the subject.  Good discipline does become more critical when you’ve got fifteen adolescent boys chucking javelins about the school playing field, for example.  Ray used to line them up with military precision following which each boy in turn would hurl his aluminium and steel assegai into the empty area of field in front of them. I used to watch them occasionally from my first floor art room.  I wasn’t watching on the day that the boy at the left hand end chose, whilst Ray was momentarily distracted, to throw his spear at ninety degrees to the intended line of flight. It landed on the roof of an adjacent garden shed from which it rebounded and embedded itself, point first in the owner’s rose bed. Whether the owner was in the garden at the time is not recorded.

The incident does serve to illustrate the need for boys’ PE staff to exercise good control and in those far off educational times things did, on occasion, get physical.  Confrontations always seemed to end in the same way for Ray, with him wrestling the boy to the ground and sitting on him.

Which was just what was happening when we in the staffroom heard the sounds of commotion in the corridor outside.  How it started I never discovered but I assume the confrontation began in the gym (the door to which was close by) from whence it had spilled out into the corridor (which ended in the History department and passed the staircase leading up to the Senior House Tutor’s office).  It was near the bottom of this staircase that a crowd had formed, comprised of a smattering  of pupils and growing number of teachers.  Most of the noise, though, was coming, not from the boy on ground who was pinned there by Ray sitting astride him, holding his wrists to the floor, but from his friend. Said friend was currently being restrained by Chris, the Head of History, and one of his colleagues whose clutches he was seemingly trying escape, whilst shouting “GER OFF ‘IM! and “GER OFF ME!”.

We staff looked on with interest, marvelling at the ease with which Ray managed to get himself into these situations and wondering how he was going to get out of this one. No one offered to help (apart from restraining the other pupil), to do so would have been to suggest that the Head of PE wasn’t in control. 

And our interest increased when the doors to the stairs opened to reveal David G the most ’understanding’ of the Senior House Tutors.  David hadn’t come down in response to the kerfuffle but was encountering it on his way to the staffroom for a break time coffee.  He recognised the boy (whom I shall call Wayne) as a member of his house, Lonsdale.

“Now Wayne,” he said in his normal gentle tone. “Calm down.”

“I WILL,” replied Wayne, “AS SOON AS THIS FUCKING CUNT GETS OFF ME!’

Which rather changed the complexion of things.  Calling the Head of PE a ’fucking cunt’ TO a Senior House Tutor was almost certainly a bigger crime than the one with which the fracas had begun and everybody, including the lad himself, knew it. What’s more it put the ball firmly in David G’s court allowing Ray to release the boy, allow him to get up and, resignation having now replaced anger, follow his Senior House Tutor up to the latter’s room.

We all went back to the staffroom to light up a fag, finish our coffees and smile at this latest edition to the Tulketh folklore – the day a pupil told the soft spoken, mild mannered pupils’ friend, David G that the school’s Head of PE was a fucking cunt.

Swearing at a teacher was, even at the end my career, high on the list of unacceptable behaviour despite many of the expressions having lost much of their former power in the world at large.

In Ralf Jones’s day the punishment was swift and decisive: a caning like Andrew’s or, when that was banned, a week’s suspension which is what happened to the boy in the corridor. 

Many years after the events described above, under a different headteacher – an indecisive, buck passer of a man who was a marked contrast to his predecessor – a 1st yr boy called Ray a ’nob head’. No longer allowed to wrestle the boy to the floor and sit on him the PE teacher referred the boy to the headteacher who, in sharp contrast to the retired Ralph J, took the view that a pupil comparing his Head of PE to a penis was not something he need respond to. In the staffroom this was seen as the thin end of a very thick wedge.  And it was. Exactly one year later in an amazing coincidence (the lad couldn’t have planned it – he would have had to have understood how a calendar works) – the boy called Ray a nob head again. In the staff room the day in question was christened ’National Nob Head Day’ and the school continued its slide into chaos.

But we’re getting into the bad the times.  This narrative is supposed to be about the good.  

Secondary Education was experiencing the effects of a 1960s baby boom when I joined at the onset of the seventies.  The consequence of this was that the school was bursting at the seams; to the extent that three temporary extra classrooms were built on the edge of the school playing fields and an O level Spanish group were taught outside my room in the corridor once a week.

But it wasn’t just space that the system needed but people.  This desperate demand for teaching staff had a number of consequences.  Underqualified ne’er do wells like me we’re accepted into the ranks for one thing but, more important for this narrative, was the turnover. The Times Eductional Supplement was bursting with jobs at all levels and many staff took advantage of the fact to move onwards and upwards making space for newer and younger bodies to move in.

Most of these new starters were in their early twenties, fresh out college and university.  On the day I began my career I was thirty.

Given the defining effect that Tulketh High School has had on my life it’s fascinating to look back at the random collection of circumstances that came together to get me into the place. I was in my thirty first year with a CV which had more failure on it than success. I had managed to reverse that trend to some extent at Teacher Training College but I came out of those three years a committed artist rather than a committed teacher.  After the experience of teaching practice I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to teach children at all and nearly didn’t go to the interview. And when the day arrived I only decided to nip over and have a look – if I didn’t like what I saw I could always walk away.

What I found was a relatively well ordered school with a successful Art Department.  What I didn’t know on that first visit was that the department’s success was largely due to the previous Head of Art, an extremely ambitious and capable individual called Nigel Edmondson who went on, eventually, to be Art Advisor for the whole county. The current Head of Art, John McKay, was happy to take the credit for his predecessor’s creation (a trait which I became passingly familiar with in the years that followed). He was also keen to follow his predecessor in other ways.  Edmondson had moved on to take over (or establish) a faculty called Creative Design.

This new buzzword in practical pedagogy was an attempt by the movers and shakers in education to drag Boys’ Handicraft into the swinging seventies, essentially by inflicting the Art Department on them.  In Edmondson’s new school they had obviously gone the whole hog but Ralf Jones wasn’t ready for the faculty system and only agreed to a small change.  That change was me.  They’d advertised for someone to teach Art and some 3D Design work.  I, my art college sculptural background notionally fulfilling the 3D element, in my eyes at least, applied for the job.

I was the only candidate.

This was just as well because I was poorly prepared and gave a dreadful interview. I’m willing to bet that the argument for not appointing at all was definitely put forward but it was a seller’s market for would be teachers in those far off baby booming days so appoint me they did with the consequence that the 1st September 1975 found me standing in the busy Tulketh staffroom, feeling like an underemployed waiter at a wedding, as the mass of happy returnees greeted each other with smiles, handshakes and ’here we go again’ bonhomie. I was finally rescued by Head of Art John McKay who took me off to my first Tulketh High School assembly.

The daily morning assembly was a fascinating example of how Ralph Jone’s educational ideal came up against an unforgiving reality, and his Canute-like unwillingness to accept the fact. Jones and his two deputies, having donned academic gowns in his office, marched the twenty or so paces to the main hall, which they entered, mounted the stage and turned to face the pupil body.  In the school of his dreams the gowned headmaster and his two acolytes would have been facing the neatly seated ranks of pupils and their teachers.  This was not, alas, the case at Tulketh.  With numbers nearer the thousand mark than the five hundred the hall was built to accommodate it was standing room only – less a congregation, more of a tightly packed football crowd, with the significant difference that football crowds are usually happy to be there. 

Staring down on this ocean of resentment Ralph Jones stuck to his personal script.

It was time to sing.  

‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’ might be a joyous hymn when sung by a decent choir. No joy ever emanated from the adolescent vocal cords crammed into the Tulketh assembly hall each morning. In fact there wasn’t much in the way of sound at all really, just a kind of tuneless muttering.

“SING UP!” Headmaster Jones would now cry, often threatening to bring them back at morning break to practice.  This was no idle threat – he occasionally followed through on it – so it did usually result in a slight increase in volume and at least the suggestion of a melody.  The latter was actually being pumped out at compensatory volume by Gordon Little – Senior House Tutor, Lay Preacher and one of life’s natural exhibitionists. (The best example of the latter was Gordon’s rendition of ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ by William Topaz McGonagall of which more, below).

Back at the assembly Gordon would often follow his musical performance with a reading of some sort followed by notices etc from the head himself.  To be honest, I can’t from this distant viewpoint, remember much detail of who said what, when and why because I was usually outside the hall, or at best in one of the open doorways.  This wasn’t an act of rebellion in those days but because of the lack of room inside.  Several plucky (or unlucky) stalwarts were crammed against the wall inside the doors whilst a smattering of dutiful (or overly ambitious) masochists positioned them selves against the wall opposite, on the other side of the carbon dioxide generating machine filling the space between.

It would be interesting to know how much CO2 the kids actually did generate during those daily gatherings; it must have been considerable. Given the slightest change in atmospheric conditions it began to take its toll. My first experience of this was seeing a member of staff inside the doors suddenly launch off into the tightly packed throng only to emerge with an ashen faced girl on the edge of unconsciousness.  Helped through the entrance area which adjoined the main hall she was deposited on a chair outside the main entrance itself to recover.  

On the more extreme humid, muggy days the numbers of such casualties multiplied.  I once counted twenty unhappy souls seated under the canopy outside the school’s widely spread front doors.

Despite its obvious absurdity, not to mention cruelty, this crazy ritual continued to take its daily toll for years following my first encounter with it – Ralph Jones was not a man given to compromise.  I was Head of Art by the time a child staggered unaided out of the packed assembly and was sick on Dave Middlehurst’s shoes.

I had applied for the post of Art teacher.  When I got my timetable I discovered that Art only featured in a relatively minor role.  There was, of course some Creative Design, though that took up even less space than Art – just four double periods with first years in fact.  What filled the remaining time – over half of it – was Technical Drawing, a subject I knew absolutely nothing about.

Too many years separate the first sight of this graphic of my teaching week to remember the details – either of the timetable itself, my first reaction to it or my preparation for executing it.  I assume I had some preparation for the Art lessons from my three years of college – well the teaching practices anyway (I spent most of my time in the resource rich environment of the college itself just making Art – see History Chapter 3).  I do remember finding a really good book about Creative Design, full of ideas which I found exiting and inspirational, so I was fairly well prepared for that. 

What I was unprepared for was the Technical Drawing. I was also unprepared for the teacher in charge of Technical Drawing – the Head of Boys’ Handicraft, Bill Yates. 

As I’ve mentioned above, Bill had a communication problem.  This didn’t mean he was stupid. In practical matters he was not only highly intelligent and encyclopaedically knowledgeable but better organised than God.  Every single object in both the Woodwork and Metalwork rooms was numbered, colour coded and catalogued; each had it’s place and each had better be back there, undamaged, unsullied and in sequence at the end of each and every human interaction – particularly adolescent boy interaction.  I used to say of Bill’s teaching spaces that it wasn’t for the kids they’d be perfect.

He was a frightening little man, the strength of his vocal cord/lung combination easily making up for his lack of stature. But his most important weapon was his thoroughness; when Bill accused anybody of anything, be they pupil or staff, he always had the evidence to prove it.  His practical knowledge about the fabric of the school and all the equipment within it combined with a dogged determination that would have made a Canadian Mountie look lacking in commitment.  Basically, if Bill said you were responsible for something you were definitely bang to rights.

He once summoned me (via pupil messenger) to the small dining room where I taught most of my Technical Drawing (it was next to the woodwork room).  There I discovered a trio of quaking second year boys facing the brown overall clad Mr. Yates standing in front of them like a malevolent drill sergeant.  Next to him was the trolley, built by him to house the drawing boards, T squares and other equipment, which I wheeled in and out of this temporary classroom several times a week.  I knew it was the equipment that I used because the drawing boards had blue edges.

“Compasses,” he said to me as I approached this little tableaux.

I’d known Bill long enough by this time to recognise this utterance as the first clue in a slowly unravelling mystery – talking to Bill was at times like interpreting coded messages from an Enigma machine.

He turned to the table next to him and pointed at three of the blue edged drawing boards laying upon it.

“Full of ‘oles,” he said, and made a rapid stabbing motion. “Compasses,” he repeated.

It took a closer inspection to see the cloud-like clusters of tiny holes he was referring to.

The layman reader may now think that Bill was being absurdly picky in objecting to this minor, barely perceptibly damage to three drawing boards.  Teachers of practical subjects know better.  They learn through bitter experience what twenty-five adolescents per hour can do to a department’s materials and equipment; a plague of locusts might beat them on speed but, left unchecked, the adolescents will win out in the end.  The only antidote is to tackle the wedge at its thinnest edge: stamp on the tiniest acts of vandalism or negligence as soon as they appear and you cut the big stuff off at the knees.  Teachers, particularly practical subject teachers (well the good ones anyway) invented the concept of zero tolerance decades and more before the phrase was coined in 1990s America.

Given this minor act of vandalism to the drawing boards most teachers, assuming that they noticed it at all, would have reacted by pointing out the damage to every class they taught and threaten dire consequences to any pupil caught doing the same.

Not so Bill.

Bill had tracked down not just the class but the individual perpetrators.  He’d done so by going through all the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year drawing sheets until he came across the ones with compass holes matching the patterns on the boards. It was left to me to punish the boys and recognise the unspoken message – that the Head of Boys’ Handicraft hadn’t gone to all that trouble just to catch them, he’d caught me as well.

In the end I developed a good relationship with Bill despite my shortcomings as a Technical Drawing teacher and the fact that I had been employed as a kind of fifth columnist whose function was to inject some much needed creativity into his department’s activities. I think he respected my practical expertise – unlike a surprising number of my fellow Art teachers I had actually mastered the basic skill of my subject; I could actually draw.  And if I do say it myself, I did produce some innovative stuff with my little first year pupils – thanks mainly to the book on Creative Design I mentioned earlier.  And I did it under difficult circumstances.  Most of the time I was crammed, along with twenty-odd first years into a tiny room near the Art department which in later years was used as a two person office.  And whilst in there I was restricted to using paper, cardboard and a tiny supply of balsa wood; the only equipment we could use were Stanley knives, scissors and glue.  We (or rather, they) solved problems like building the best weight bearing 16cm high tower out a single sheet of balsa wood measuring only 15 x 8 x 0.7cms.  One of these towers, I remember, supported three house bricks. Other projects were more aesthetically based – abstract cardboard sculptures constructed out of basic geometric forms.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing.  I did have one lesson a week in the woodwork room.  For one of these I collected a load of driftwood from the banks of the River Ribble, the idea being to use the vices and other woodworking equipment to transform these random pieces of water eroded tree into small sculptures.  

I was, I admit, a bit wary of some of the tools – the thought of what damage an enthusiastic eleven year old could do with a mallet and a razor sharp chisel didn’t bear thinking about.  But the dainty little saws I found tucked away under the benches seemed just the job.

It was at this point that Bill and his second in department, Rod, emerged from the stockroom – the latter’s door, like most doors in the school, had a small window in it.  Bill and Rod had, it seems been watching me through it. 

They drew me to one side, out of earshot of the kids.

“Er, that saw,” said Bill, with his usual lack of explanatory syntax.  Fortunately he had Rod with him.  Rod was a slightly built, mild individual who lived very much in Bill’s shadow. He did, though, speak in complete sentences.

“It’s a dovetail saw,” he explained.

“Precision instrument,” added Bill.

The message got through. I had, it appeared, been about to encourage my enthusiastic 1st years to attack their randomised lumps of slightly damp driftwood with an instrument designed to cut small, angular joints with millimetric accuracy into perfectly planed wood.

It was a difficult moment, rescued by Bill himself.  

He put the dovetail saw back where I’d found it in the cupboard beneath the work bench and replaced it with other equipment, tools like rasps and files for example which were much more suitable for the task in hand.

Basically he was a nice guy who recognised, as I did, that we had both been put in difficult positions by the ambitions of the Head of Art.

To the staff as a whole though he was a slightly absurd figure, if a slightly frightening one.  But everyone recognised his worth to the school in practical terms.  He built, mended and maintained much around the school. His greatest contribution was the extensive terracing at the front of the building which he had built using non academic 4th and 5th year boys as labour, a project which took several of years. 

But he did lapse into absurdity on occasion.  

As he did when he was adding some shelving to the wall inside the staffroom door.  He had made this small but fairly elaborate structure in the workshop and was, during morning break, on his knees putting some finishing touches to it before attaching it to the wall – when there was a knock on the door.  

Pupils, at the time, were under strict instructions not to knock on the staffroom door unless absolutely necessary and even then to just knock once and wait.  Bill ignored the knock – he was busy after all – as did the rest of the staff who were drinking coffee on the other side of the tall locker like cupboards which shielded the bulk of the room from the entrance.  

The knocker knocked again. And then a third time, this time more insistently. This was too much for the Boys’ Handicraft teacher.  He stood up and flung open the door.  For once he managed to complete a full sentence, demonstrating in the process, why he usually preferred not to.

“Do you mind!” he shouted at the unfortunate pupil without. “I’m doing a little job on the floor here!”

My memories of those early years in the Art Department are far from clear which I suppose isn’t so surprising given all that happened in those two rooms in the twenty-odd years that followed. 

The two teachers which occupied them (memories and rooms) were both called John – Head of Department McKay and John Bevan. I’ve written about Bevan elsewhere (see History Chapter 4) so won’t dwell too long. We discovered like minds in each other, with similar histories.  We’d both failed to take full advantage of Art College, both found ourselves with families to support afterwards and, after a dead end job or two, had both resorted to Teacher Training College as a way back into the artistic fold. And we both thought of ourselves as artists first and teachers second. But John was more economically ambitious than I was (or perhaps just more outgoing and energetic) and within a couple of years at Tulketh he went off to become Head of Art at Lostock Hall High School where he stayed until he and I had an unintentionally synchronised nervous breakdown twenty-odd years later.

McKay was a very different animal.  I got on with him well enough but it was a relationship of colleagues rather than friends. He was no artist, at least I never saw him draw or make anything that could be labelled as art. Nor did I ever see anything that he’d produced.  One seeming exception to that was a very accomplished and detailed watercolour he pulled out of a folder one Monday morning.  It was a preparatory sketch for a backdrop the department was committed to doing for the school production.  “I got this done over the weekend,” he announced.  This statement was classic McKay, leaving the impression that it was his own work whilst not actually lying about the fact that his wife had done it.  Rumour had it that his wife had actually done most of the work for his Art degree though he must have had some ability to have got onto the course in the first place.  I just never saw any evidence of it.  The only thing I ever saw him make was a fishing fly.

His was a morality I couldn’t fathom, best exemplified by a dilemma he had when he was sorting out his possessions before leaving Tulketh to take up a new job at Broughton High School.  I encountered him holding some sheets of white card, each with a picture of a different species of fish on it.  The images had obviously been cut from magazines and stuck to the card, presumably for the pupils to draw or paint.  

“I don’t know what to do with these,” he said to me. “The pictures are mine but the card’s the school’s.”

Talk about a nuanced ethical dilemma – from a man who would happily take the credit for the achievements of others. I saw him do this on more than one occasion.  “I like those shoe drawings,” I once heard someone saying to him, referring to a selection of large charcoal drawings on display in the school entrance hall.

“Thanks,” he said, completely failing to point out that the drawings had been produced by John B’s fourth years and had nothing to do with him at all.

He also happily used the photographs of the brick holding structures and abstract cardboard sculptures that my 1st year Creative Design groups had produced.  He was applying for the Head of Creative Design Faculty at Broughton High School and it was reasonable enough that he showed examples produced in his current department. It’s just that his letter of application gave the impression, in his usual not actually lying style, that he’d been teaching the kids that produced them.

I didn’t particularly object to him doing this – I claim no moral high ground – and the truth is I didn’t really care. In fact I helped him write much of his letter of application, though not overtly.  He kept wandering into my teaching room with the current paragraph he was writing to ask my opinion.  I’d make a suggestion as to how it might be improved and he’d say, “Could you just write that down?” following which he’d wander off with my revised version before returning with the next paragraph.  I’m convinced I wrote the whole thing, stylistically at least, the content was still his.

With or without my help he got the job and my life at Tulketh changed, for good and for bad. The good wasn’t really all that good and the bad was bloody awful.  The bad was called Terry Dickinson and I’m not prepared to go there yet.  It’s time to go back again.

s I’ve already said the increase in pupil numbers in the 1970s made for a lot of change in the staffroom as teachers left to take up promotions and new bodies arrived to replace them.  Many of these were straight from university or college and brought energy to the school and life to the staffroom.  

Robin Campbell (Biology), John Murray and Ian Wilson (both Geography) were three of these who I think arrived at the same time.  Campbell was the quietest, a nice guy whose ambition saw him move on relatively quickly (quickly meaning three or four years – a mere sliver in the 25 year context of this narrative).  Murray lasted longer and Wilson much more so.  

The two young Geographers in particular made an impact. Given that they were the same just-out-of-university age, joined the staff at the same time, taught the same subject in adjoining rooms and had a similar interest in sport and alcohol, it was inevitable that Murray and Wilson were seen as a pair.  But they were in fact quite different personalities. John was from a comfortable middle class background, the important word being comfortable. He exuded it – like a pink glow after a warm bath. Everything always seemed to go right for Murray.  My memory doesn’t record his marital status on arrival but what it does record, from later, is a bloke with a nice wife and a detached house in Clifton. He grew a range of vegetables in his extensive garden; so successfully that he persuaded his next door neighbour to lend him half his garden to grow more.  His sister played hockey for England and was married, engaged or otherwise romantically connected to an English rugby star (at least that’s what my memory records).

Wilson, in contrast lived in a bed sit in the middle of Preston whilst his adopted parents still occupied the council house south of Manchester that he had grown up in.

Ian could be a deceptive individual, characterised on the surface by cricket and beer.  He played the former for New Longton Cricket Club and drank the latter in any pub which sold a brand he approved of, run by a landlord who knew how to look after it.  Beer in those days was more art than science and ranged from reliable nectar to vinegary health hazard, with the emergent keg beers slowly replacing the latter.  Ian despised the keg beers with a passion and would walk a fair distance for a ’good pint’. And since he tended to have just one in each pub, a night out with him was less a pub crawl, more an extensive guided tour.    

I enjoyed many such tours with him, indeed once Bevan had left he became my best friend on the staff, to the extent that we did his ’best beer in Preston’ tour every Friday night.  As I said he was a deceptive guy – underneath the beer swilling, no nonsense, northern exterior was a man of culture, given to quoting Shakespeare – he seemed to have a quote for every situation – and an interest in anything and everything, including my subject, Art.  His enthusiasm for his own subject – Geography, particularly Social Geography – made him an interesting conversationalist on its own, especially since it went along with a reforming zeal and a mistrust of authority which he didn’t struggle overmuch to hide.

Despite their differences in background and personality Murray and Wilson got on well together although there was often an undercurrent of something.  Ian couldn’t help but find John’s permanent aura of cheerful, privileged contentment annoying, accompanied as it was with a complete lack of intellectual curiosity, but he managed to keep it under control, given that they taught the same subject in adjacent rooms, both ran school football teams and both had a tendency to get completely bladdered on a fairly regular basis (but not I should hasten to add, in school).

Their involvement with school football meant regular interaction with Head of PE Ray.  Given Ray’s ’one of the lads’ nature (despite being on the verge of middle age even at the start of John and Ian’s careers) his relationship with the two Geographers in particular was full of badinage, banter and boyish pranks.  The latter didn’t always go to plan. Like the occasion, some years into his time at Tulketh, when Wilson entered the gents staff cloakroom, a largish space with coat hangers along one wall where he discovered Ray, facing the corner opposite the door, in the act of changing his trousers.  He had just lowered them as far as his ankles when Wilson walked in to find himself staring at a a pair of bright blue underpants stretched across the Head of PE’s bent over buttocks.  The young Geographer didn’t hesitate; he strode forward, placed a hand at either side of the thinly covered form and simulated anal sex with it, to the accompaniment a large, exaggerated sigh of pleasure.

Unfortunately, the buttocks’ owner turned out not to be Ray at all but a complete stranger. It was, it later transpired, the new Head of RE on his first day in the school. The latter had travelled to his new place of employment by motorbike and was changing out of his leathers.

The conversation which followed has not been recorded though I suspect it was brief and lacking in complex syntax.

The victim of this piece of mistaken identity was an interesting character in his own right, though in a very different way from his pretend buggerer. His name alone – J.C.Savage – caused a wry smile as that of a Head of Religious Education; the first two initials being those of the messiah, the surname suggesting a personality running contrary to his teaching.  The latter at least was misleading.  J.C.Savage was the mildest of men with a chronic shyness which kept his eyes to the floor even when talking face to face.  That might have been explained in his first couple of days by his trauma in the staff cloakroom but it was his real nature and one which he carried into the classroom.  His RE lessons were consequently scenes of ill disciplined chaos.  Rumours of what happened in them abounded including the story that 2L had caused him to flee to his stockroom in tears.  He was moved to one of the temporary classrooms on the edge of the playing fields from which the chaos was less likely to spread.  I could see into this space from my first floor Art room.  ’Ill disciplined chaos’ was, I soon learned, an understatement. Chairs were being thrown around the room and tables tipped over.  Savage’s response was merely to return the chairs to their places and pick up the tables whilst the children dashed about the classroom with more energy than they exhibited outside at morning break.  He was eventually taken off the timetable altogether and sat in the staffroom for a few months before the local authority found him a job in a teacher resource centre.  In that environment he flourished. He was a nice man and an intelligent one.  He even had a good sense of humour though you rarely saw it.  I used to write humorous reports of staff cricket matches (see below) and on one occasion, following a match I hadn’t been able to attend, J.C. stepped in and wrote the report.  It was very funny.  Years later, remembering my reports, people would single out his (thinking I’d written it) as one of the funniest.  A lesser man than your correspondent might have found that slightly irritating, along with the fact that J.C. ended up, in his nice little stress free sinecure, being paid more than I was as Head of Art.  Such, as they say, is life.

Cricket between the teaching staff of Preston schools was a weekly event once the daylight began to last past teatime.  The teams (assuming Tulketh was typical) were a mixture of two or three actual club cricketers, four or five who’d played a little bit and were fairly well coordinated, and a smattering at the bottom whose sole attribute was bringing number up to eleven.  In my early days the driving force behind the Tulketh team (and possible the whole competition) was a Chemistry teacher called Stuart Dexter.  

Dexter was a cricketing fanatic.  Come spring Chemistry, for less able 2nd and 3rd years at least, took place out on the school playing fields; the sole task – to revive the cricket pitch at its centre.  It’s doubtful that Stuart managed to combine any Chemistry teaching with the cutting, rolling and watering which his little band of remedial helpers were engaged in but they presumably did learn something about cricketing horticulture (though it probably didn’t stick).  And I’m fairly sure they enjoyed being out there, rather than stuck in a laboratory failing to understand the chemical composition of methane.  They certainly seemed happy enough as I watched them from my Art room window.

And it was to this green manicured track that, on alternate weeks, the schools of Preston (and the occasional pub team) sent their own collection of the expert, the willing and the press ganged to do battle.

In those early days, before he went off to teach Chemistry and cricket pitch management in a different school, Stuart Dexter delegated the captaincy to Max Sawyer (see below) but he was still the the driving force .  Interestingly I can remember little of his cricketing prowess. What has stuck was his obsession with making sure everybody had a positive experience; his main worry being that if they didn’t they wouldn’t turn up the following week. He was keen that everybody regardless of talent be involved, notwithstanding the cricketing consequences.  Simple sporting reasoning suggested, for example, that a team member for whom a cricket ball was something best avoided should bat last and, when fielding, placed where the ball was unlikely to go, particularly if it was airborne.

Dexter have a go at bowling. Against the tail-enders admittedly but even so it was a dangerous tactic.  One such incompetent – a supply teacher called Frank – bowled so many no balls in his single over that extras became the opposing team’s second highest scorer.

But Dexter didn’t need the likes of Frank to put victory in danger.  His concern that the opposition had a positive experience too led him to quietly ask any batsman of ours who was scoring heavily to get themselves out in order to ’make a game of it’. On occasion we actually lost as a consequence.

But to be fair to Stuart, when he did leave to go to cricketing pastures new he left a well established competition that survived him for well over a decade.  

As mentioned above I used to write reports of these matches.  It speaks volumes about the nature of teaching in those days that I could often knock off these 500 word prose poems before lunchtime the day after the match, and occasionally in time for morning break.  They were written in pencil and stuck on the staffroom notice board.  Looking back at them (I still have a few) great literature they are not, but given the speed with, and the conditions in which, they were written they weren’t that bad – indeed they were consumed eagerly by the staff, non cricketers included. But you had to know the characters for a full appreciation.

So before I share a sample it might be best to describe one or two of them.  We’ve already met Wilson and Murray. Also featured is a member of the History Department with the exotic name (for a comprehensive school in Preston in the seventies at least) of Simon Millwood-Hopkins.  I used to take delight in getting this double barrelled name wrong in the match reports but, being a nice chap and confident with it he never complained.  Nor did Harry Devonport who features largely in the piece below.  The Chemistry teacher who had replaced Stuart Dexter, Harry was a fascinating character.  Sporting a head of black curly hair and thick lensed glasses he was good company, particularly when sharing a pint.  He was also extremely good at his job – his exam results were consistently the best in the Science Department.  But there was a troubled soul in there somewhere which, despite the details in the account below, he did not attempt to ameliorate with drink but by seeking status and success. I lost touch with him after he left Tulketh, and later the general area, but know he went onto greater things, including Headteacher and after that a Chief Education Officer.  By that time he was physically transformed – the spectacles had gone, the hair shortened and controlled – indeed it takes more than a second look to check it’s the same bloke. But for those brief years in the early eighties he was one of the lads.  No cricketer, admittedly, and when the chips were only part way down he consistently put Harry first, but he was good company when the wind was fair. 

One of Devonport’s colleagues in the Science Department was Dave Bowerman. 

Bowerman, a Biology teacher of a similar age to Wilson and Murray (and Devonport come to  that). He was a nice enough chap and a capable cricketer. Fielding at first slip one time he took a spectacular diving catch, one handed, less than two inches from the ground.  Off the cricket field he could be less impressive.  I don’t think he’d ever been to the dentist for one thing; his teeth were a multicoloured mess. As Ray once said, if he’d had a red one he’d have had the full snooker set.  I think he got them fixed before he moved on to better things.  The fact that he managed to get a promotion was something of a miracle given his reputation in the staffroom. It wasn’t that to he was a bad teacher – his knowledge of subject and classroom control seemed adequate, as far as one could tell – he just seemed to suffer from spasmodic bouts of mental vacuity.  Every so often his brain went awol.

He once responded to having an HMI watching him teach by setting the class working and then seating himself at the front and marking a set of exercise books. We might all be guilty of such behaviour – see ’writing cricket reports before break’, above – but we don’t do it when one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors is ticking boxes against bullet points like ’level of engagement with pupils’ or ’use of audiovisual aids’. 

And then there was the time we were sitting in the staffroom at break and headmaster Ralph Jones walked in and asked why young Bowerman was sitting drinking coffee when he was supposed to be attending a job interview. Jones had just received a phone call from the other school ten miles away, wondering where the prospective candidate was.

“Oh!” said the befuddled Biology teacher and dashed out to his car.  We  learned the following day that said car was running on fumes by the time he got to the school and, since he had, in his haste,  left his wallet in his overcoat pocket in our staff cloakroom, he had  to borrow a tenner from his prospective headteacher in order to return once the the interview was over. 

“Did you ask him for the tenner before the interview or afterwards?” we wondered.

“Before,” said Dave.

We didn’t really need to ask the follow up question because we already knew the answer: of course he didn’t get the job.

But Bowerman’s main claim to fame in Tulketh folklore was the incident with the bullet. 

In preparation for a 1st year Science lesson on the subject of combustion, Dave had asked the pupils to bring in different materials to find out how they reacted to being placed in a bunson flame, in the expectation that wood and other organic materials would burn whilst the inorganic, such as stone and metal would not. 

The attentive reader may well have worked out that one of the eleven year olds brought in a bullet.  Now to be fair it wasn’t a bullet from a Smith & Wesson or an Armalite rifle it was an industrial bullet used to drive nails into concrete.  But when we asked, later, what it had looked like the oblivious science teacher admitted that the answer was, “a bullet”.

He perhaps thought it was a from a child’s toy, or a dummy. Who knows what went on in the man’s chaotic mind?  It was, it turned out, no dummy; when he placed it in the Bunsen flame it exploded, sending out a projectile at something approaching the speed of sound.  Miraculously neither Bowerman himself nor any of the twenty or so first years gathered round to watch was hurt.

It was only a matter of a year or two after this incident that he got another job (Science teaching was, and still is, a seller’s market).  Whether he actually killed anybody at his new school is also unknown, though I suspect not – I think we’d have heard.

The only other staff member mentioned in the report (in addition to yours truly) is Max Sawer.  The single mention belies his importance in the team – he was both wicket keeper and captain – and in the staffroom generally.  

A decade older than me (and therefore nearly twice that with the youngest members of staff) Max was an avuncular figure – assuming the uncle referred to had a wickedly dry sense of humour and a subtly impish nature.  He had a face that’s best described as lived in – below a head of thinning, black, overlong hair was a slightly pockmarked face.  He had the nose of a heavy  drinker (though I don’t think he was); it was largish, red and hovered over a full moustache.  His name and appearance suggest Jewish though that never occurred to me at the time because I knew he was an active member and treasurer of his local Parrish church. I always thought he was an atheist who’s membership of the church was for social and  community reasons.  Maybe it was his wife who was the driving force in this respect.  He always referred to her as ‘Mrs. Sawer’, an affectation which had hints of Rumpole’s ‘she who must be obeyed’ about it.

In those early days Max was Head of Geography meaning he was line manager to Wilson and Murray whom he handled beautifully.  On the pretext that it would help their CVs he basically had them doing all the departmental admin, which in their youthful enthusiasm they were only too happy to do.  It worked particularly well with the staff allocation sheets – the document stating which members of the department taught which classes.  Unscrupulous heads of department would just assign all the best classes to themselves leaving the more difficult and less rewarding groups to their resentful underlings.  In Max’s system he got many of the best classes anyway since Murray and Wilson needed to keep on his good side.  And instead of resentment he got gratitude.   They liked him for it.   But then we all did; everybody like Max.

And so to the match.  It was played on the 18th May 1981 (and it’s perhaps worth reporting that Wilson was one of those cricketers who shouts a lot). Here’s my report, written the day after the match:

“Defeat for the Tulketh eight (or were they one over?)

Drink was the only victor at the Vernon Mill cricket ground last night when Tulketh staff lost to the Black Bull team in a nail biting finish.

Following the emerging pattern of the season Tulketh started well by only producing eight players (two of whom were guests). This ploy was effective on two counts.  First it lulled the opposition into a false sense of security whilst wearing out several members of their team who were forced to field for both sides.

Bowerman opened the Tulketh attack but made the mistake of bowling properly and thus caused the batsmen few problems. It was left to Milkin-Hopwood to show the way. Bowling in his now  familiar “guess where this one is going” style he quickly confused the batsman who started hitting the ball into the air. Sawyer took an easy catch directed by Wilson.

As the nun said at the enquiry, once into the habit there was no stopping them. The batsmen seemed unable to keep the ball down. A fielder’s feast followed. Both Tulketh guests took catches, Murray took three. Even the opposition fielders took one. However despite these and a magnificent run out from Wilson the batting side survived the 20 overs, reaching a modest total of 76.

As the Tulketh openers prepared, few noticed Devenport’s rush to the bar to continue the drinking bout which had started even before the match began. Fewer still realised how important it was to be.

The usual pair of Wilson and Mildew-Hopwell opened for Tulketh and made their usual solid contribution. Hopping-Madwell was out first and the old firm of Wilson and Murray were together again.

’Steady’ is the word which best describes the bulk of the Tulketh innings. Steadily did the runs accumulate and steadily did the wickets fall. And so it came to pass that with Mason at one end and Bowerman’s friend Wood (any friend Bowerman’s is a friend of Bowerman’s) at the other the last over was reached. Seven more runs were needed for victory.  Wood faced.

The bowler ambled up to the wicket and bowled with all the nonchalance of one bowling in the opening spell of a five day friendly. But with pinpoint accuracy. Wood was deceived. He played, missed and turned to see his wicket in ruins.

The main drama of the evening was about to unfold.

Devonport, last man in and thus all that stood between victory and defeat, was nowhere to be found. A quick search discovered him in the bar attempting to get on the outside of his ninth pint. Frantically his despairing colleagues attached pads, inserted box, forced on gloves and pointed him towards the centre of the field. Somehow Devonport found his way to the wicket and, waving his bat at the umpire, shouted “middle and leg”. The umpire nodded patiently; Devonport stood gazing drunkenly about, momentarily forgetting where he was. Somehow memory returned and the hero of so many Tulketh victories, now a painful caricature of his former self, faced the bowler. The latter seem to take pity on his adversary and bowled a gentle delivery.  But it was no use. Devonport prodded and miraculously made contact but only to drag the ball onto the wicket.

Tulketh had lost again.”

Of course the central message of that account, that Devonport consumed nine pints of bitter was a gross exaggeration. But then misrepresentation for comic purposes was what those weekly bulletins were about.  I’ve always found it difficult to choose tact over humour even in conversation, and in those cricket reports that tendency became even more pronounced. But nobody complained; they all took it in good part.

Well not quite all.  There was Keevie.

Keevie was the nickname of a member of the English Department whose real name was Keevil.  Keevie was his fairly affectionate staff soubriquet, the pupils, I was to discover, had another epithet.

He was a smallish, slightly built man whom I think had been in the army before entering the teaching profession.  Or at least if he wasn’t, he should have been.  By reputation he was a martinet in the classroom (a room with a connecting door to the school library which he believed to be part of his domain, though nobody else did).  In the the staffroom he was a pleasant enough, though without spark; I could never imagine him teaching creative writing for example. In fact we had doubts about his command of the  mechanics of his subject when he pronounced simile as ‘sea mile’ one day in the staffroom. He’d been teaching English for at least fifteen years by then. Interesting to say the least.

Back at the cricket, the day came when Max decided to relinquish the captaincy for a week or two – I can’t remember why but it did mean the position fell vacant.  An excerpt from the report following his decision, of a match delayed by rain, reads:

“Earlier in the day a more serious crisis has arisen when the captain announced that he would not be leading his lads in the coming match. Most were stunned by such treachery, others saw it as a chance to grab the captaincy itself. The author does not propose to go into the sordid details of the Machiavellian intrigues which ensued. Suffice it to say that as the rain abated it was Gruppenführer Keevil that led the Tulketh side out  into the swamp, clipboard in hand, jackboots conceal beneath his cricket whites, this formally mild-mannered chief librarian frogmarched his men about the field until they were arranged to his satisfaction”

I’m not sure what the Machiavellian intrigues were; I suspect nobody else wanted the job.  But Keevie did walk onto the field holding a clipboard and did attempt to set the field with Teutonic efficiency.  Not that anybody paid that much attention.

A few hours after publication (pinned to the staffroom notice board) the man himself cornered me in the gent’s cloakroom.  He wasn’t happy about being referred to as Gruppenfuhrer, he said.  “It’s bad enough having the kids call me Hitler.”   I can’t remember my reaction (it was forty years ago) but I’m fairly sure we parted amicably.

But it left me with a problem.  Keevie was to captain the next match, and I would obviously be reporting on it. My report began as follows:

Authors note: following the last report concern was expressed about the title given to a member of the team. It was suggested that this was disrespectful and represented a general lowering of the tone.  The author wishes to apologise for this lack of taste and will of course refrain from using said title in this or any other subsequent report.

“Gott im Himmel!” cried the captain as he frog marched the team onto the field of play.”Ve have have vays of beating zees dumbkoffs, Ya?”

The team were not so sure….

Thus it was that journalistic independence was maintained or, more accurately, this amateur writer’s freedom to wildly exaggerate and/or misrepresent the truth, and make fun of his colleagues for comic effect.

Keevie, this time, didn’t comment.

Cricket reports weren’t my only literary outlet – in the Autumn Term I used to knock off the staff pantomime.  I use the term ‘knock off’ advisedly; I’ll explain why in a moment.  

The staff pantomime was the last act of the Autumn Term.  In it the staff (or at least some of them) said “Look, we’re not the pompous uncaring authoritarian oppressors we pretend to be.  We’re real humans.” Achieving this feat involved making complete idiots of themselves before the whole school. I remember Max, he of the cricket captaincy and Head of Geography, and Head of History Chris Blackwell playing the Babes in the Wood, dressed only in giant nappies.  Not every participant reached that level of self abasement but most lowered the carapace of pedagogical reserve to some extent.   After all, it was Christmas. A two week holiday followed, allowing the children to go off and forget about school before returning in January to find the idiots once again at the chalkface and back in pompous oppressor mode.

Once I was bedded in as a member of the Tulketh team I started writing these extravaganzas. Interestingly and infuriatingly my memory of these scripts is woefully incomplete.  There is a possible reason for this: they were vandalised almost out of existence by Brenda, Senior Mistress (or Deputy Head depending on the developing social mores operating at the time). 

Brenda was one of those people who obviously believed that, had life’s dice rolled on for an extra few centimetres she’d have been a leading light at the RSC or Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC.  There was a definite luvvie in Brenda and, during the second half of the Autumn Term, it came out and did pantomime.  She never performed in these extravaganzas but she did produce.

I don’t know what being Senior Mistress involved but Brenda didn’t do much of it for most of November and December.  It was, admittedly, no easy task she took on.  Devising a rehearsal schedule at lunch times and after school for a load of working teachers, given their commitments to duties, clubs and after school detentions is demanding enough; getting them to follow it would tax the patience of a saint.  And Brenda was, I’m fairly sure, no saint.  But she hadn’t reached her Senior Mistress status by backing off from a challenge so she cajoled, pestered and facilitated, and made rehearsals happen, albeit, more often than not, with someone ‘reading in’ for a cast member who couldn’t make it.

But it was the content which obsessed her, taking my script and knocking it into shape – which from my point of view meant ripping out its soul and replacing it with the ghost sketch (“he’s behind you!” “Oh no he isn’t” etc) and sundry other pantomime musts. It also had to make space for those members of staff who wished to make more personal and individual fools of themselves.  The most memorable of these was Senior House Tutor, Gordon Little and his rendition of ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ by William McGonagall.  One reason why this is memorable is that ebullient, extrovert lay preacher Little did it every year whatever the pantomime (I think he did it occasionally without the excuse of a Christmas production).  He performed it dressed in a random ensemble of clothing which was only recognisable as Scottish because it included a tartan skirt.  I think it also included Wellington boots. 

Looking back now, I find myself wondering what on earth the audience of comprehensive school children made of this rendition of the world’s worst poem, delivered by a senior member of the school hierarchy, at maximum volume in an exuberant but far from perfect Scottish accent. And some of them, remember, would have seen it several times. I can’t resist including the first verse. 

“Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last sabbath day of 1879

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.”

Think of a large, extrovert, bespectacled man, dressed absurdly and shouting these lines in a faux Scottish accent and you might just have scratched the surface of the actual experience.

Of course I knew, before I even put pencil to paper, about Gordon and the other individualistic rogues who wanted to be in the pantomime without, as it were, being in it and solved the problem by always writing in a party scene in which the king, baron or whoever was entertained by these lone wolf performers.

They were thus included without the integrity of the ‘story’ being compromised.  It was Brenda who took it upon herself to do that.  She saw my script as a starting point; the skeleton on which she could hang the flesh of panto gold.  I got the impression that her office on the admin corridor was the scene of a one woman brain storming session as she sought to improve on the basic but stylish literary gem I’d supplied her with. It was, for example, impossible to walk down said corridor without Brenda emerging from her office with her latest brilliant transformational idea.

I learned fairly quickly that, since she saw my script as a skeletal starting point, to give her just that, the bare bones.  I certainly burned no midnight oil on it, limiting the damage to my writer’s ego to an acceptable level.  But damage there was.  I remember having a running gag in one script in which one character kept starting the joke “Why do they bury Scotsmen on top of hills?” only to be interrupted before he could deliver the punchline.  Said punchline “Because they’re dead,’  was supposed to come at the end of the show, except that Brenda replaced it – probably with the lines”Busy bee, busy bee, what have you got in the hive for me?” addressed to a water squirting flower in another character’s button hole.  Look, I know mine wasn’t the greatest joke in the history of humour, and it wasn’t anywhere near original, even when I wrote it, but the build up did take place over at least two acts so losing the punchline was a bit of a blow. I didn’t complain.  Brenda was a force of nature with a power base in the school.  As Ray used to say – best to just do your porridge.

They were good fun those pantomimes, a bonding exercise for a group that were already fairly well bonded.

As stated above, the individual details are now vague.  The only title I remember is “Jack and the Magic Bean Tin” in which Wilson and I played itinerant Irish labourers with accents as polished as Gordon Little’s Scots.  The only joke I remember writing (and getting past Brenda) came from these two characters and relied on the Irish tendency to pronouns the soft th as a hard t.  It went something like:  

The two Irish labourers enter stage right to be confronted by a sign saying ‘TREE FELLERS WANTED.’

SEAMUS:  Won’t ya look at dat, Paddy.  Dey want tree fellers.

PADDY:     To be sure, Seamus.  But dere’s only de two of us.

Yes. Ok.  Perhaps Brenda was right.

And when it was all over the kids went wherever they went to begin their Christmas holiday and we went to the pub, which brings me ever so neatly to the topic of alcohol.

There were, as far as I know, no alcoholics on the Tulketh staff – well, there was a science teacher working there in my first year who used to go out and have at least two pints every lunchtime so he might have qualified but I can remember nothing else about him so I assume we weren’t colleagues for long.  

‘Alcoholic’ is, of course, at the extreme end of the drinking continuum with ‘teetotaller’ at the other.  My father was a teetotaller but died when I was fifteen so was unable to pass the non drinking baton on to me. Consequently, from about sixteen onwards, I began to enjoy a pint or two (once I’d got used to the taste), and occasionally I’d drink more than one or two. My earliest memory of being properly drunk happened on a trip with Chorley Youth Hostel Association.  This healthy sounding organisation should actually have been called Chorley Drinking Association since all it ever did, every other weekend, was drive in a convoy of cars to within easy walking distance of some youth hostel or other, don hiking boots and rucksacks for the last half mile or so, then settle in, grab a bite to eat before heading off out to the nearest pub and getting legless. It was on one of these adventures, possibly my first, that I experienced the sensation of the ground rising up and hitting me in the face.  It took a moment or two to realise that I’d actually fallen over.  Fortunately we were on a moorland path, betwixt pub and hostel, so no damage was done.  That came the following morning with the hangover, the first of many, of varying severity, that blighted countless mornings-after for the next half a century or so. 

I had a good few of those following nights out with Tulketh colleagues. And they were particularly troublesome when they coincided with a work day.  

Like the one following the night out with Murray, Wilson and various others to celebrate Murray’s successful job interview – he went off at the end of the year to teach Geography in a school in St Austell.  But on the night following his successful interview he, Wilson and I ended up at his house pouring far too much of his whiskey on top of the pints we’d already consumed in the pub.  I slept in his spare room, retiring before the two young Geographers who kept going well into the early hours.  I know they stayed up because I kept waking from my drunken slumbers to find a set of step ladders on top of me.  How many times the two Geographers repeated this merry wheeze I’m not sure but it was at least twice.  I suppose, in retrospect, that I should be grateful they didn’t draw spectacles and a large moustache on my face with permanent marker.

At the time I was too drunk to care, in the morning I was too ill. 

Fortunately I was teaching first years all morning.  In those far off halcyon days teaching Art to first years was like having a free period. Which is just as well, given the state I was in. I set them off painting a jungle scene and sat down to concentrate on keeping the churning contents of my stomach in situ – I had a bucket in the stockroom behind me in case of failure.

At one point I also closed my eyes to ease the pain from the ice pick that was embedded in my head.

“Sir,” said a voice.  My raised eyelids revealed a small girl holding a paintbrush. “Sir what colour is a giraffe?” she asked.

In all honesty I can’t remember my reply though I did silently speculate that, if I lost the battle with my nausea, the colour wouldn’t have been far off.  

Back in those days it was easy to believe that it was only the younger members of staff who occasionally drank to excess whilst  their older colleagues were more moderate. From the Mount Olympus of my current age and experience it seems more likely that many of them did drink, but locally or at home (many lived some distance from the school; Brenda and Max in Lytham, for example, Ray in Blackpool).  It seems likely to me now that drink was a feature of their lives whatever image of themselves they allowed their younger colleagues to form.  Teaching is, after all, a stressful job. Even a good class outnumbers their teacher by around 25 – 1 and who knows? They could turn. Controlling them is, when all’s said and done, a game of bluff.  There is actually no physical reason why they can’t rise up and beat you to death with the classroom furniture.  It was one of the interesting effects of teaching for me: having experienced the understandable stress of a job I hated (in the rubber factory) discovering that there were stresses in a job I enjoyed, lying dormant until the fatigue hit at the beginning of the half term holiday, was a surprise.

So it seems likely that my older colleagues did partake of a glass or two of Cabernet Sauvignon after a hard day of educational crowd control, no doubt stretching to a bottle or more at the weekend.  

Of course it isn’t just an age thing.  Some people, even teachers, don’t drink to excess – or at all. 

The ones who turned out for Robin Campbell’s stag night, for example, were a definite mixture.  Robin was a nice guy and so it wasn’t just the young drink enthusiasts who turned out to celebrate his impending nuptials.  There were colleagues like Dave Joyner, Maths teacher and computer expert who wasn’t much of drinker, or Chris Blackwell, Head of History; Chris was a keen cricketer who’d certainly enjoy a drink after a match but was not the sort of person who would end up under a ladder in Murray’s spare room.  Nor would Tom Norris, an older member of the Maths Department.  Tom did like a drink, in fact he nipped out for a couple of pints most evenings, but like regular middle age drinkers tend to, he knew his limits.

My recollection of what followed is hazy, and not just because of the incident packed, memory erasing decades which separate then from now.  I’m fairly sure we started off in The Theatre, a hostelry whose landlord met Wilson’s exacting standards.  Because Wilson had taken it upon himself to ensure that Robin’s last day of marital freedom was a success. To this end he had not only chosen the pub but had also organised a kitty to pay for the drinks.  These of course were pints of his chosen landlord’s best bitter.

What followed is, as I said, hazy.  I did, after all end up rather worse for wear.  This in itself isn’t surprising: ‘Stag night’ and ‘drunk’ were like Laurel and Hardy for me: difficult to imagine one without the other. But this had been a particularly good do – if you define ‘good do’ as one you can hardly remember. I do recall ending up in a nightclub with Chris Blackwell.  This was surprising on two fronts: I don’t like particularly like nightclubs – they’re too loud and you can’t talk to anybody – and why Chris?  A nice enough chap to be sure but how come he got singled out from the crowd of more regular drinking partners?

I’m not sure what happened to them.  Details began to filter through the following Monday. It turned out everybody had had an unexpectedly ‘good night’, even the moderate drinkers. Not everyone, admittedly, had gone on to sample the town’s nightlife, though several had. Others had managed to find their way home and put themselves to bed.  Regular drinker Tom had, apparently, needed help with the latter, being too drunk when he got home to take his own trousers off.

Hangovers were the order of the following day.

I think the general consensus on the Monday was that these things happen and at least Robin had had a good send off. I suspect one or two made mental notes to be more careful in future, or maybe even give the next one a miss.

It was some time later that I discovered what really happened. Wilson confided in me over another pint which had passed his personal taste test.  The young Geographer, in his determination that Robin’s stag night went well, not only looked after the kitty but also went to the bar to get the drinks. And whilst there, he didn’t just order beer, he also stuck a vodka in each one. We weren’t just drinking pints we were drinking pints with vodka chasers included.

Robin, as far as I know, went on to have a happy marriage.

Alcohol consumption, of a gentler, socially relaxing kind, was the reason I actually looked forward to Parents’ Evenings in those far off days.  Basically, once the drudgery of telling  Mr. & Mrs Hesmondhalgh that young Damien should pull his socks up and do his homework on time was complete, a good portion of the staff used to head to the The Saddle, a country pub within easy driving distance but outside the school’s catchment area.  (The drink driving laws were rather less stringent in those days).

I enjoyed those evenings, not because of the alcohol consumption, which was moderate by Friday night standards, but because I got to talk to colleagues whom I wouldn’t normally socialise with. People like Dave Joyner (one of Wilson’s stag night victims), a mild mannered Maths teacher whose main fascination for me was his expertise in the then emerging world of computing.

Dave was an ex computer programmer and was something of a rare beast at the time.  Computers, when Dave was writing programmes for them, cost about a million quid and needed their own air conditioned room.  The nearest we normal folk got to one was a calculator, a still expensive device whose magic extended only as far as long division.

But times were changing and doing so partly because of people like Dave.  The days of the ubiquitous desktop were still in the future when the young thirty-something Maths teacher built his own.  He built it from a kit which cost him (if memory serves) around £2,000.  It took him a couple of months to build and had a 16 kilobyte memory – about an eight millionth of the iPad I’m typing this on. And when it was finished he brought it into the staffroom for us all to wonder at.  It was there for a week or more.

The only thing I remember about this modern marvel was the game Dave had designed for it; a simple affair consisting of two, horizontal white lines on the otherwise black screen. A long line straddled the screen about a quarter of the way up and a shorter one, not much bigger than a dash, floated above it, moving from left to right.  The dash represented an airplane and its speed and height were controlled by four keys on the keyboard.  The object was to land the plane – on the longer line, the ground.

And like so many of those early computer games it was utterly compulsive; landing that little dash was no easy matter. For example we left Wilson, still in those days a flat dwelling singleton, playing the game in the staffroom whilst we all went home to eat and rest before returning later for a Parents’ Evening.  In the three hours that lapsed he’d managed to land the plane just once.

Meeting the parents took place in the main hall.  The staff sat round the edges at tables, the parents waited on chairs in the middle. 

It being a comprehensive school the visitors should have been a random sample of the local parent population.  In fact, they were skewed towards the educationally committed, whose progeny tended to be able, pro school and industrious. These couples spent a happy evening being told that the apple of their eyes was ripening nicely on the Tulketh tree.  Their kids weren’t all perfect of course; Emma was a bit too chatty in class and Robin needed to get his exercise book neatened up a bit, but generally, these were minor flies in an otherwise encouraging ointment of progress. 

But for we teachers, pleasant as it was to pass on this yearly affirmation of the visitors’ successful nurturing, these weren’t the mothers, fathers and guardians that we really wanted to see. We wanted to talk to the parents of the classroom disrupters, the anti school villains who’d been making our pedagogical life a misery for the past two or three terms.  

“You’re Damien is an effing nightmare,” we would have liked to tell them. “Could you please go home and kick the living shit out the little scrote, and keep on doing it until he learns to behave.”  

Of course we wouldn’t have put it quite like that but, for the most, part we didn’t get the chance because they didn’t attend.  They might show up for the first year but after been reminded, multiple times on that occasion what a monster they’d inflicted on the world they tended to give the next four years a miss.

The exception was Mrs. Moss whose son was such a monster, a serial disruptor of his own and everybody else’s education. The young Moss entered the classroom with the same attitude that Lord Elgin’s troops entered the Chinese emperor’s summer place; with difference that the latter’s cultural vandalism was officially sanctioned.  Not that Mossy was necessarily the worst of his kind though he was up there. It was his mother who was unusual, the way she dutifully attended all five of the yearly Parents’ Evenings and, on each occasion, sat down before every one of his teachers to be told what a nightmare she’d given birth too.  I can still remember the look of abject resignation on the poor woman’s face as she lowered herself in to the seat on the other side of my Formica topped table.

I tried to go gentle on her, but it wasn’t easy – the lad was, after all, intent on giving all his teachers a collective nervous breakdown.

At least I could remember his name. This wasn’t always the case.

If I had one serious weakness as a teacher it was my inability to remember names.  I struggle enough with adults, in ones and twos, so remembering the names of the never ending stream of uniformed adolescents passing every hour, on the hour, through my art room was a mountain I failed to climb.  

I was ok with the 4th & 5th years whom I taught in smaller groups, individually and intensively, for two hours a week.  I knew not only their names but their their foibles, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their artistic potential.  It was the 1st, 2nd & 3rd years, the cohort later known as Key Stage 3, that I struggled with.  There was no way I could keep the same level of interaction with 25-30 kids an hour.  With them it was the activity that did the teaching, interspersed with the occasional general do’s, don’t’s and demos and with me wandering around monitoring their progress every now and again.  As a consequence, the only names which stuck belonged to the talented, the occasional charismatic extrovert and the not so occasional villainous disrupter.  I remember reprimanding one of the latter, only to hear him mutter to his neighbour “Why’s he always pick on me?” “‘Cause he knows your name,” the neighbour replied. He was right, I did, because he was an attention seeking little pain in the buttocks who was impossible to ignore.

Having said all that names weren’t a problem at Parents Evenings in those early days: the parents sat down, told me their son or daughter’s name allowing me to check my mark book and base my progress report on the grades recorded therein.  Which worked perfectly until two parents of Asian ethnicity sat down before me.  I found the name easily enough alongside a set of promising grades.  “He’s doing very well,” I told them.

“She’s a girl,” the father replied.

I learned fairly quickly after that that most Asian girl names ended in ‘a’ and managed to avoid a repetition.

Things changed when, under a new headteacher, it was decided to invite the pupils to accompany the parents to these annual confrontations.  Consequently the parents felt no need to name their child since the he or she was sitting next to them.

I spent a couple of difficult evenings, pretending a moment of forgetfulness, the temporary disappearance of a usually familiar name.  I don’t think anyone was fooled; I just hoped that they labelled me as an absent minded creative, a master of his subject whose foibles were worth putting up with in exchange for an exceptional education in Art.  All right I was clutching at straws but it stopped me waking up in a sweat of embarrassment in the early hours.

I actually solved the problem by having all the kids folders in a box at the side of my table.  “Just get your folder out of the box,” I’d say to the pupil as they and their parents sat down.  Problem solved.

I needed no ruses when it came to knowing the name or the progress of the girl called Annette.  

Annette was a large frumpy girl who appeared in the third year from I know not where.  I’ve never met a pupil as devoid of personality, intellect or skill as Annette.  In fact mentioning the word ‘intellect’ in the same sentence as the girl’s name feels like a form of flattery.  When it came to drawing she didn’t seem to understand the basic concept, never mind any details of how to go about it.

I remember having her class drawing a shoe (a popular subject in school art rooms).  After half an hour Annette had drawn two longish lines on the paper.  Not only did the lines not connect to each other (to form a shape) they didn’t connect visually to any part of the subject. They resembled nothing shoe-like at all.

Her mother came to Parents’ Evening though.  She was a Scottish woman, of similar build to her daughter, but smaller and with more spark. She sat down with something that looked like enthusiasm. 

Enthusiasm? For a report on Annette’s progress?  What was she expecting?  And what should I tell her? That her daughter was one of the saddest individuals I’d ever met; a girl devoid of any attributes at all and certainly non in Art.

Somebody should have pointed out that her daughter should be in a special school (and I think they did eventually) but that was a job for people higher up the food chain than yours truly, a humble Art teacher.  It was Parents’ Evening, all I could was tell her what I knew as sympathetically and as sensitively as possible.

“Well, she’s no Leonardo da Vinci,” I began; a measured, gentle negative I thought. “But she does her best.”  I really had no idea if this was really true; I had so little understanding of what went on in Annette’s head that it was impossible to know how much effort she made or could make. But it seemed a harmless enough suggestion. She had drawn those two lines, after all, which I couldn’t say wasn’t her best effort.  I prattled on about drawing, saying how it wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea – but Annette had a least had a go (those two lines again).

The mother became slightly animated. “Well,” she said, the Glasgow strong in her voice. “I dinna know where she gets it from. I canny draw at all.”

Meeting parents wasn’t the only activity which we professional educators engaged in after hours though there weren’t too many formal ones in those happier educational days.  I don’t think Tulketh was unique in this respect; schools were differently run back then. The county controlled the finances and took care of the major maintenance but although it did monitor progress (with an influential representative on the governing body for example and an advisor or two) the schools seemed to have had more autonomy over their internal workings. They made more use of the expertise within their pedagogical ranks, for one thing.

In those pre league table days, heads saw their practical subject teachers as a resource as much as an educational tool.  We in the Art department, for example, were expected to paint backdrops for the school production, decorate the entrance hall with artwork and produce programmes, tickets, certificates, posters, and anything else that required artistic skill and know how. This was all done by hand of course; cutting and pasting did actually involve scissors and glue in those pre computer days. I spent countless hours laboriously applying one letter at a time from plastic transfer sheets to whichever graphic the administration required.

Meanwhile Bill Yates (with his 4th and 5th year non exam boys) built the terracing at the front of the school, he himself put up shelving in the staffroom (see above) and generally took care of the maintenance jobs that the county didn’t get round to, or couldn’t afford.  

The music department produced the school band.  

Tulketh High School Band had a deserved reputation for excellence, to the extent that it toured the local area entertaining the old, the young and all ages in between, at various venues around the town.  It was run by Head of Music, David Reece for whom teaching was a definite second on his list of priorities.  (His external exam groups rarely numbered more than 2 or 3 on the grounds that only pupils who could play a musical instrument could be entered. This argument, widely accepted in high school music departments, was blown out of the water by Reece’s successor, a lady called Barbi Hankinson who regularly got as many as twenty through the exam by having them sing.) But Reece’s band was superb, mainly because he seeded it with expert musicians: a couple of members of staff and several talented ex pupils.  

It was the band who started the yearly celebration that was Prize night.

Prize Night was, without doubt the most important single event of the year, in Ralph Jone’s view that is, which, given his iron control over the institution he led, was the only opinion that mattered. 

It ran like a well oiled machine.  

As the band played its latest party piece the governors, head, deputies, head boy, head girl and guest speaker ascended the stage and took up the seats thereon.  The music over, the chair of governors welcomed, the guest speaker spoke, head boy and girl took turns to thank him or her, Ralf Jones gave his report on the school year and then all the prizes were given out.  

I can’t now remember a single thing anybody said during these extravaganzas.  I’m sure the guest speaker made some uplifting remarks but I can’t remember any detail. In fact the only memorable words spoken by anybody, that I can recall, were spoken by the then chair of governors who began the proceedings one year with the words “Welcome to this Governor’s Meeting”.  I bet she woke up sweating for years afterwards with those five words passing through her brain on repeat.

We staff did try to bring a modicum of interest to otherwise forgettable proceedings by holding a sweepstake on the length of Ralf’s speech.  This collective wager was the focus of much attention for us as we waited in the staffroom to be called to take our seats in the main hall.  Ray used to organise this distraction, partly because he had a stopwatch but mainly because he loved making lists.  Our childlike Head of PE was never happier than when he had a clipboard on his knee with a list of names, items or jobs on it which he could tick off, usually with a satisfying flourish.  Not that there was a lot of ticking to do on prize night – just the one against the name of the winner, following which the bag of coins was discretely passed along to whoever’s guess was nearest. One year, I’m happy to say, it was me.  

The event ended with pupils and parents exiting to celebrate their success elsewhere leaving the staff and governors to make their way to the school dining hall for the excellent buffet which the Home Economics department had spent the previous two days preparing.  How long this part of the evening went on for I have no idea.  I always stayed just long enough (approximately two sausage rolls and a triangle of egg mayo sandwich) before sneaking off and heading for – you’ve guessed it – the pub.

I was never sure how much Ralph enjoyed these public aspects of his job.  I got to know him quite well towards the end of his career and formed the impression that he saw them as a necessary evil.

He was definitely a man of contradictions. His slightly effeminate air was at odds with his macho leadership style and his ability to strike the fear of god into pupils and staff alike. And at times he could be a little absurd.  Like in his mispronunciation of the occasional word. Actually it was just two words predominantly – `God’ and ‘certificate’, which he pronounced ‘Gawd’ and ‘certificate’.  Someone suggested this was a consequence of his first language being Welsh. This seems doubtful because he had no trace of a Welsh accent and why did he mispronounce just those two words?

But he did and after McKay told us that Bevan’s forthcoming replacement needed, in Ralf’s view, to be someone who was properly qualified and not a ‘hippy type’ John B and I, neither of whom had a degree, were known to utter the lament: “Oh gawd, I’m a hippy without a certificate!”  Not in his hearing of course.  I was never sure that he was completely comfortable speaking publicly, as evidenced by his excessive use of fillers, those little words or phrases that most of us use to gain thinking time mid speech.  Ralf use three in particular abundance: ‘I mean’, ‘sort of’, and ‘at the end of the day’.  His speech, particularly when addressing his staff en masse was liberally peppered with these little devices, ‘sort of’ being his favourite by some distance (I once heard him say ‘sort of sort of’ before getting back to his thread). Few public utterances left his lips without at least one of them.  Staff meetings, for example were peppered with them.

If one thing characterised Ralph Jones’s management style it was the way he conducted staff meetings.  He restricted these to one a term since he didn’t, I suspect, really see the point in them.  He ran the school, why discuss it with the staff?  He only held them at all, I suspect, for reasons of either tradition or County Council diktat. 

The meetings took place in the main hall, where three rows of chairs were laid out in concentric semicircles. The focus of these was a table and chair on which Ralf himself sat, his only concession to informality was the chair being at the side of the table rather than behind it.  It was, as this layout suggests, the Ralf Jones Show with the staff playing the audience. And it consisted, in the main of an unscripted monologue, sprinkled liberally with a multitude of ‘I mean’s, ‘sort of’s, and ‘at the end of the day’s.

At one meeting Ray decided to count and record Ralf’s little thinking words, to which end he had his inevitable clipboard on which he had created three columns each headed with one of the words.  Every time headmaster Jones uttered one of his favourite fillers Ray would put a tick in the appropriate column.  He did this with an even more exaggerated flourish than usual, flicking out his wrist and placing a stylish tick under the word used.  Needless to say, Jones couldn’t see his Head of PE, lavishly ticking his clipboard every time he said ‘Sort of’, Ray being hidden behind two largish colleagues. Unfortunately I, who was sitting next to him, was in full view of the man and I – and maybe you had to be there – was finding it excruciatingly funny.  I spent the next twenty minutes doing an impression of the centurion in the ‘Welease Woger’ scene in ‘Life of Brian’.  It was excruciating.  I don’t know if the head noticed my discomfiture but then in those earlier days I suspect he thought I was a bit odd anyway – a hippy without a certificate still.

My relationship with Ralph did change over the years as he mellowed a little and I began to earn my pedagogical spurs.  But it didn’t, I’ll admit, begin well.

The simple fact was that I really was a hippy without a certificate when I started at Tulketh.  Well, I did have a certificate, the certificate that Chorley College of Education had given me – like they did to everybody else who’d walked through door and stayed for three years. They’d also infected me with some ultra progressive ideas, like A S  Neil’s notion that children learn best with freedom from coercion.  There was no way lessons would ever be optional at Ralph Jones’s Tulketh, as they were at Neil’s Summerhill, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t bring some of the great man’s ideas to my art room.

It was certainly in this spirit that I began one early 4th year Art lesson with 15 armatures (a length of wood nailed, perpendicular to a square of plywood – knocked up in my garage the night before), several plastic bowls, some strips of scrim (a loosely woven linen fabric) and a load of dental plaster.  

And with these materials it was my intention that we make sculpture.  We would mix the plaster, dip the scrim and transfer the result to the armature and see where the artistic gods took us.  This was no boring exercise, it was a creative adventure; no need for coercion here; the activity itself was motivation enough. 

Of course I speak of dental plaster as a fan, as an artist, someone who had used the medium extensively – at art college in particular, where I learned it’s creative potential. 

But even on first encounter it is magical stuff. Just mixing it is fun.  

Take a few handfuls of the gleaming white powder, velvety to the touch, and add it to a plastic bowl, creating a small shallow sided mountain. Add cold water until the mountain’s summit is just submerged and mix vigorously with a finger spread hand.  What results has the consistency of milk.  Left alone for a minute or less, this cold white liquid begins to heat a little and change, first becoming creamy and in time taking on the consistency of soft butter.  By this time it’s comfortably warm and continues its metamorphoses, via a crumbly Lancashire, to an unyielding wet solid.  At this stage it can be carved fairly easily. Then more plaster can be mixed and added.

Who could resist? The stuff virtually demands to be made into something.

It was using this magical material that I would bring a little bit of the Summerville ethos into my Tulketh Art room. 

Needless to say it didn’t quite work out that way.

As any teacher not over enthused with a dubious ideology and who’s been in the job for more than five minutes (in fact any sane person) will tell you, the notion of fun sits differently in the adolescent secondary school pupil psyche than it does in that of the committed adult artist. 

It actually began quite well.  They were, after all, nice, intelligent and generally well behaved kids who could, I felt, sense my enthusiasm for what we were about to do, and were infected by it.  They mixed, dipped and applied quite positively and forms began to appear on the armatures: the form of a head here, that of an embryonic figure there.  But it wasn’t long before the other qualities of plaster began to emerge, like the way a blob of it makes such a satisfying splat! when it hits the floor. Or, even more satisfyingly, how a small section of the splat detaches itself and travels towards a neighbour’s leg. Needless to say it doesn’t do so without consequence; a flick from a creamy covered finger and thumb easily returns the compliment. The adolescent notion of fun thus began to assert itself.

I played firefighter for a while, just about keeping the mischief from turning into mayhem. But it was an uphill task which I was definitely losing and I soon called a halt to the whole proceedings.  Apart from anything else there was cleaning up to do.

Lots of it. 

We managed the big stuff easily enough, aided by the fact that I had put some polythene sheeting down, but plaster in its various states gets everywhere and the white coating that covered floor, tables and cupboards was more difficult to shift.  No matter how many times you wipe such a tabletop with a wet cloth, when it dries the whiteness returns.  Eventually, half an hour after the end of the school day, l let the kids go. Gazing at the row of plaster and scrim covered armatures against the room’s back wall, it was difficult to declare the exercise anything but a failure.

The repercussions started the day after with a complaint to the head from the caretaker, whose cleaning staff had struggled with the room’s ingrained whiteness as I and my 4th years had. Then came phone calls from parents attempting to deal with their children’s white splattered uniforms.  How many parents there were I don’t know because the head didn’t approach me directly. He did so through head of department Mckay.  But the message was clear.  ‘ Hippy without a certificate‘ didn’t cover it; I was obviously a disaster.

It’s fair to say that I learned my lessons from the plaster disaster.  Even intelligent and normally well behaved adolescents were still adolescents and prone to the temporary madness that the flood of hormones brings on.  It had merely taken an idiot with a bag of dental plaster to confirm the fact.

For a small proportion of the school’s population you didn’t need plaster.  In fact for a fair few you didn’t need the onset of puberty though that certainly contributed to their disruptive tendencies.

To anyone asking, in those long ago days the kids weren’t streamed at Tulketh, they were banded; which meant they were streamed but in larger chunks.  For the five original classes in the lower school (yrs 1-3, Key stage 3 in later years) there were three bands – two in the top band, two in the middle and one at the bottom.  But they weren’t labelled numerically or alphabetically (less the ones at the bottom realise where they were in the academic hierarchy) but after the part of the town in which the school was situated, Ingol – I, N, G, O, and L were the designations.  By the time I got there the number of classes had risen to seven so N2 had been added to the top band and M tacked onto the bottom.  

My first year Art timetable contained a three period session with 3M.

3M ticked a lot of boxes, most of them ending in the word challenged.  They were very much at the bottom of the cliff face of educational achievement but unusually for the lowest set, they were lively with it. 

3M were a nightmare to teach.  

For a start most of them couldn’t read, which is why they’d been given an extra period of Art were this skill wasn’t needed.  In the eyes of those making these decisions, it was the secondary school equivalent of letting them play in the sand box.  Except that I, fresh out of my teacher training packaging, didn’t have a sand box and it wouldn’t have kept them busy and out of trouble anyway (see plaster, above), not for three periods – an hour and three quarters – on a Wednesday afternoon.  

It is a measure of the trauma of teaching this group that I can, close on half a century after the event, still remember such timetabling details.  I can also remember a girl who I think was called Samantha, a small, blonde child  with a voice so loud it would have been useful to shipping.  I can’t remember the exercise I set them, only that after about ten minutes Samantha told us – and presumably anybody passing along the corridors outside – that she’d finished.  A few others soon followed suit, though not quite as loudly. My suggestions as to how these ‘finished’ pieces might be improved – with a little extra effort – was met with the alternative view that such action would ‘ruin it’. I gave in and moved onto something else.  By the time we’d passed the hour mark I’d gone through three weeks of preparation and was reduced to the  ‘do something of your own’ option.

The last half hour was one of the longest in my teaching career – herding cats doesn’t cut it; trying to control just short of twenty Tasmanian Devils (Looney Tunes version) was nearer the mark.  

At one point I did sense that it had gone marginally quieter only to discover that Samantha had shut herself in a cupboard. 

And then I lost my temper. Not at the unlovely Samantha but at a boy who I caught vandalising someone else’s artwork.  This was, throughout my career, crime number one, regardless of the quality of the vandalised item. I grabbed the boy by his shirt front, the better to make my displeasure known, and two of the buttons flew off.

“I’ll get you done for that,” he announced, looking down at the damage.

Which is how I spent that Wednesday night contemplating the possibility that my teaching was about to end, less than a week after it had begun.

But nothing came of it of course and a good few years later I read in the local paper that the man that the boy had grown into had been sent to prison for sexually abusing his own children.

Hey ho.

One big lesson I learned from that early foray into the Secondary School Art room, particularly one occupied by the likes of 3M, was that the the work set needs to have a time element built in; be an exercise which, by its very nature, is impossible to complete quickly.  I remember John McKay talking of his perfect solution; creating a pattern on an A4 sheet of graph paper by colouring in each tiny square, one at a time – no more than three adjacent squares could be the same colour, including white. I don’t know if he actually used this idea – probably, knowing McKay – but one we all used was created by John B – almost by accident.

Art teaching is driven by ideas, and though some of them come from the work of other teachers – picked up at standardisation meetings and external marking sessions – many are generated in the teacher’s head.  They just come to you. We call it inspiration, or magic. On one particular day, relatively early in his career, John was heading up the stairs to his Art room and the magic hadn’t happened; he couldn’t think what to give 2G, or whoever it was, to do. He let them into the room. Still nothing. Sat them down. Inspiration still on ‘off’.  Even handing out sheets of A3 paper failed to bring on the magic.

“Fold your paper in half,” instructed the still idea free Art teacher, for want of something better. “And again,” he added.

You can’t fold a piece of cartridge paper more than four times so at that point he had them open it to reveal an A3 sheet divided into sixteen small rectangles.  “Now draw a shape, any shape, in the top left rectangle.” And he drew a couple of random possibles on the blackboard.

It was at this point that the ideas began to kick in.

There are, it turns out, a whole host of directions to go in from this starting point: draw the same shape again but rotated slightly, the same shape but smaller, a similar shape followed by others with small incremental changes – the possibilities, variations and creative opportunities are endless, particularly when you add colour. But importantly, even a small girl with big voice called Samantha couldn’t finish this exercise in seven minutes.

I was still using variations of this idea with the more challenged classes in Key stage 3 at the end of my career.

Of course there’s more to secondary school Art lessons than time consuming abstract designs.  Most work is representational which needs interesting subject matter.  In fact even if the end point is abstract it can often start with a real object (that’s why Art teachers love Mondrian’s tree sequence; it’s an easy to understand example of a transition from realism to abstraction). 

Art teachers are constantly on the lookout for stuff which will make a good drawing or starting point and preferably one of which the pupils can have one each. Your conscientious art teacher can’t go for a walk in the country and just take in the view; they’re constantly on the look out for stuff that can be turned into a good artwork.  Like pine cones for example which litter the floor beneath the right kind of trees; unfortunately they’re not that easy to draw.  Better is the inside of a green or red pepper, to be found in your local supermarket.  The trouble is such produce costs money of which there isn’t that much available to the average Art Department.  I once worked out that my departmental allowance worked out at about £1.20 per pupil per year.  And from this you have to provide paper, paint, brushes and all the other paraphernalia needed to make Art. It will be more now of course but I suspect less in real terms. A complicating factor was that stuff like peppers weren’t in the county’s education catalogue and buying stuff from other sources was complicated involving receipts.he  I used to get round this by selling pencils to the kids. I bought 6B drawing pencils by the gross and sold them on individually to the pupils at cost.  This didn’t make me popular with some of my colleagues who complained that the kids were using them in their subjects too.  Maths and Science diagrams are less than ideal when the lines are 3mm thick and prone to smudging.  Not that this put me off.  6B pencils were ideal for the kind of drawing we did in Art and the selling of them generated petty cash; useful for buying stuff which wasn’t in the catalogue.

Such as fruit.  Fruit which, on one occasion, I had my classes draw.  I had various exercises planned for the different groups, but they all started with each pupil drawing an individual apple, pear, plum or tomato.

Russell, from 2G, had a tomato.

Russell was one of those charismatic villains who caused constant trouble but was impossible to dislike.  He got away with stuff that others couldn’t.

“Why do I get done for shouting out?” some mouthy individual would demand.  “You didn’t do Russell for it.”

“Because what he said was funny,” I would reply.  “But she has a point Russell.  Shout out again and I will have to act.”  

“Yes sir. Sorry sir,” he replied with an utterly disarming smile.

But for now he was drawing a tomato.

It was on my second pass round the class that I discovered that Russel had taken a small bite from his tomato.

“Make sure you include the bite in your drawing,” I said, deciding not to react to this obvious act of vandalism and pointing, instead, at the simple outline of a complete tomato he had already committed to paper.”

“But…” He began, obviously believing that this would make the drawing more difficult.

“Draw what you see,” I reminded him.  “Draw what you see.”

It was only later, when I passed his way again that I realised his subject matter had disappeared altogether. He’d eaten it and rubbed out the drawing.  “Drawing what I see sir,” he beamed.

Funny but too far. I gave him a large pine cone to draw. “Try taking a bite out of that.  And since you’re now a bit behind, you better come back at break tomorrow to finish it.”

Russell struggled to draw that pine cone, as I knew he would.  He  did manage to produce a drawing that was recognisable as a pine cone but it lacked both structure and style. The seed-bearing organ of a gymnosperm plant (thank you Wikipedia) is composed of rather beautiful, criss-crossing spirals of scales which takes skill and understanding to identify and commit to paper.  The graphically accomplished can manage it but the graphically accomplished, otherwise known as people who can draw properly, are few and far between.  

I don’t know if Art is unusual in this respect but it is a subject where pupils come along who, when it comes to drawing skill, are off the chart – head and shoulders above the rest.  They are rare; you’re lucky to have one in a whole year group.  Indeed I think I can count the ones I taught, in a twenty-five year career, on the fingers of two hands. Many Art departments rely on these kids for their entrance hall displays – I remember McKay regularly exhibiting the work of one such pupil throughout the years I taught with him.  I never met this talented girl; she’d left before I joined the department.

The flip side of this is that most pupils can’t draw well; indeed stick figures, smiley faces and other symbolic representations apart, a good many can’t draw at all.  Consequently, for most Art teachers – and this included me back then – a good exercise is one that results in an impressive artwork whilst bypassing the need for skill.   Once again McKay found a ground breaking solution. It was years after leaving Tulketh when he was head of Creative Design at another school. As the title suggested his faculty taught Design as well as Art where he had, he told me proudly, found the perfect skill avoiding project: designing a holiday.  It may have involved a poster or some other graphics but from the way he was talking about it I rather suspect it didn’t.

I was myself to tackle this skill problem head on later in my own career but before we get to that we need to deal with some other stuff.  

There are times when my whole life seems like one big accident; or at least a series of small accidents, leading to larger outcomes.  Like becoming secretary to the Staff Committee.  I never really knew the history of this body but I alway assumed it had been set up by some brave souls to counteract Ralf J’s dictatorial tendencies, as a forum for staff to air their grievances which were then communicated to the head. If memory serves – and I’ve got to admit it doesn’t always serve me well from this distance – it consisted of a couple from each house and met once a term. And there came a point when it needed a secretary.  I, writer of pantomimes and cricket reports, ended up taking on the role. “Just take a few notes and write the minutes,” they said.  The trouble is, you take on these jobs and they start to take over you.  

The Staff Committee, by this time, was no hotbed of revolutionary fervour.  Their greatest concern seemed to centre on the recurring problem of the dinner queue.  I had no personal knowledge at all of this problem since I never took up the school’s offer of a free school dinner for doing a lunchtime duty; I preferred a tuna fish sandwich and an apple brought from home and consumed in the safety of the staffroom.  But apparently the children had yet to perfect the national skill for queuing, causing those charged with supervising it much trouble and aggravation.  And looking back over the minutes of previous meetings I discovered that this topic had been dominating the meetings as far back as I could be bothered to read.  Where was the meat? I wondered. Where the challenge to the hierarchy that the committee had been set up to facilitate? There wasn’t any.

One possible explanation was the way to agenda was arrived at – staff wishing to have things discussed had to submit their concerns to the Senior House Tutors first.  I can’t remember the rationale for this but the effect was fairly obvious.  The head got know, from his four lieutenants, what the committee was going to discuss before the actual committee did.  What’s more he knew who was proposing the topic, and they knew he knew.  The more I think about it these days the more I suspect that Ralf must have set the whole thing up in the first place, as an early warning system of trouble brewing in the ranks.  No brave souls had been needed at all. This didn’t occur to me at the time; I just thought it was wrong and should be changed.

Being secretary was, I discovered, a position of influence – if you knew what you’re doing.  My old boss back in the sales & marketing department of The Leyland and Birmingham Rubber company was my inspiration for this.  He used follow up important meetings with a memo confirming what had been agreed but biased slightly towards his own interests; not enough for his opponents to cry foul, without sounding picky or pedantic, but enough to nudge matters in his direction.

Suffice it say that when I wrote the minutes for the Committee, Ralf’s early warning agenda setting system, introduced by me under any other business, was rather more of a bone of contention than had really been the case.  I can’t remember the details but the subject found it’s way onto the agenda of a full staff meeting where the vote to bypass the Senior House Tutors was unanimous. 

It was a victory.  Maybe the committee could now develop some teeth.

Of course it didn’t. It carried on discussing the dinner queue.

So it wasn’t much of a victory and I can’t help wondering if Ralf had allowed it to happen because it knew it didn’t matter.  Or had he stopped caring as much? There were small signs that he had.

As the songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer once said, “Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”  Which is of course true.  But as many of us discover as the decades roll by, the equation eventually starts to break down – in the world of work at least. In the earlier stages of our careers the input of effort results in the output of progress (well it does for some of us, anyway).  But eventually the law of diminishing returns starts to kick in, progress falters and you end up feeling that you’re running just as fast and going nowhere.  That’s when burnout beckons. There are usually other factors – incompetent management in my case, in the form of the man who followed Jones.  

In Ralf’s case it was a matter of falling rolls nationally and local geography.

The new Tanterton estate just up the road skewed the local demographic feeding the school with increasing numbers of the socially and intellectually challenged, leading more discerning parents to look to the not too distant Broughton High School as an educational alternative.  Gradually, the goal of turning Tulketh into a jewel of academic and cultural excellence amongst a sea of comprehensive mediocrity, Preston’s answer to Manchester Grammar, became increasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible. 

These trends were only just beginning when Ralf decided to take a year off to recharge his batteries.  

In doing so he left Deputy Head, Dave Gibbons in charge.

I got to now Gibbons quite well as the years rolled on, in fact much better than I ever knew Jones.  In later years we played doubles tennis each week, though on opposite sides of the net, and before that I travelled with him for several months when my car broke down and I couldn’t afford to fix it.  I suspect I spent more time with him than most members of staff on those daily commutes. But I hesitate to suggest I ever knew him that well because I don’t think anybody did. 

Like so many of our generation he was educated working class but in Gibbons‘s case the grammar school/university combo had resulted in a classics teacher with a razor sharp brain. He was tall and moustached, and that, combined with his intellect, could be intimidating.  Ian Wilson, for example, as far from a shrinking violet as you’re likely to get and no mean intellect himself, became tongue tied in Gibbons’s presence. He had a lively, if dry, sense of humour though; the information sheet he put out each week was peppered with jokes and general wit, which was clever because it meant everybody always read it.

But he was not without his flaws.  He wasn’t good with people because he couldn’t open himself up to them.  But perhaps his biggest flaw was that he couldn’t handle criticism and saw it in places where it wasn’t intended.  Complain about some aspect of your timetable, for example, and he would take it as a personal attack since he had been involved in the timetable’s creation.

He was, however an efficient administrator and a good disciplinarian and most of the staff felt the school was in capable hands. I felt so too at the time though with the benefit of long distance hindsight I’m no longer so sure.

It was, let’s say, an interesting year. 

During it John McKay’s application to become Head of Creative Design at the above mentioned Broughton High School (the one I helped him write) was successful.  He wouldn’t be leaving until the following year but in the meantime his replacement both as a head of department and a teacher needed deciding and those decisions fell to Dave Gibbons.  The first of these left me with a problem, the second led to the worst thing by a mile that happened during my whole teaching career.

Replacing McKay wasn’t simple since his departure from the Tulketh Art Department did not leave a full-time-teacher sized hole.  Like all secondary schools Tulketh had been feeling the consequences of a shrinking pupil population.  The problem with falling rolls in a school is that they don’t fall in class sized chunks.  The Art Department had been over staffed for a while, with the consequence that Dave Middlehurst (Bevan’s replacement) and I had random bits of non Art on our timetables, like sitting listening to a small group of bottom stream second years doing reading practice or helping out with a large non exam Humanities group (all activities where we were kept occupied but could do no damage to the important parts of the curriculum).  

In consequence, when McKay left, the Head of Department role would be filled by either Dave or me.  

My problem was that I didn’t really want to be head of department.

As I said at the beginning of this extended essay, I discovered early on in my adult life that management wasn’t really my thing.  I didn’t want to be responsible for other people’s performance. People let you down. I was quite capable doing that myself, indeed I’d done so fairly consistently in my youth.  I’d now found something that I was, after a slightly rocky start, getting quite good at.  I still had a long way to go though and I didn’t really want the distraction of being in charge of a department.  I wasn’t ready for it.  

Then again, wondered my not inconsiderable ego, think of the status, not to mention the fact that the above mentioned Dave Middlehurst would get the job.  As nice a bloke as you could wish to meet Dave had been in post for several years by this time.  I liked and got on with him well enough but he had never been the artistic soulmate that John B had been.  His artistic hero was LS Lowry, and whilst I’ve nothing against Lowry he wasn’t on my artistic hero list.

But Dave idolised the guy, or at least he did as a student in London.  So much so that he decided, he told me, to go and see his hero who was still alive and living in Mottram, 10 miles from Manchester.  Dave travelled by train to Manchester and then by bus and on foot, to Lowry’s house.  Once there he knocked on his hero’s door and waited.  And, indeed, it was Lowry himself who opened the door.

“Hello Mr. Lowry,” said the young art student, “My name’s Dave Middlehurst and I’m a big fan of your work.”

“Thank you,” said Lowry, and closed the door.

He was, as I say, a nice guy, Dave.  But did I want to be his second in department?

I eventually decided, despite my reservations, that I didn’t so I wrote a letter of application and gave it to Dave Gibbons. 

A couple of days later acting head Gibbons called me into his office and after pointing out the spelling mistakes in said letter admitted that he quite liked what I’d written and since Dave hadn’t communicated anything at all, the job was mine.  Come the next academic year I would be Head of Art.

Which left finding someone to fill the gap in the timetable, I assumed by advertising for a part timer. 

I assumed wrong. 

Acting Head Gibbons was presented with another option. Because, in one of those absurdities that bedevils education (and, I suspect, the public sector in general) an application for a third deputy, submitted when the school was bursting at the seams, was finally given the green light.  Thus with the school shedding teacher indians the county’s slow moving machinery had granted the organisation another chief.

This was just the kind of situation that would have appealed to Gibbons and his super logical, problem solving brain.  Wanted for 1st September: a part time Art teacher.  Arriving on 1st Sept: a new deputy head with a part timetable to fill.  A perfect fit!

The only fly in the ointment of this cunning plan was that the deputy needed to be an Art specialist whilst also, of course, being the best candidate for the role of Deputy Head. 

What were the chances?  

It’s speculation on my part and it can’t be checked because the main protagonist, Dave Gibbons, is no longer amongst the living (nor is Ralph Jones, but then my speculation/suspicion is that he wasn’t consulted anyway).  My guess, knowing Dave Gibbons as well as I came to know him, is that he rifled through the applications and discovered to his amazed delight, an Art teacher.  I obviously wasn’t privy to what followed – there must have been an interview – but my conviction is that the beautiful symmetry that this candidate offered blinded Gibbons to the man’s failings as a potential deputy (and as a human being in general) and he appointed him.

The man was Terry Dickinson and he was a fucking nightmare.

But I didn’t know about that as McKay served out his notice. When I thought about it,, I decided being head of department was probably no big deal.  After all, John managed it without too much trouble. Given that I had, at this stage, no radical philosophy that I wished to impose on the department (that would come later) all that seemed to be involved was reordering paints and paper etc from the catalogue, and being there for my departmental colleagues when it came to matters of discipline.  The latter could have been a source of worry; there were certainly heads of department for whom this requirement was a living nightmare thanks to the incompetence of their underlings.  The head of Modern Languages, for example, once admitted to me that he hadn’t marked a book for two months, so busy had he been fighting the fires lit by his colleagues; one who struggled to contain her charges and referred an unending stream of miscreants to him, and another who took more days off than a lift operator with claustrophobia.

I didn’t expect discipline to be a problem in the Art Department given that Dave seemed to be on top of things and the new deputy would presumably have few control problems.  

And as it turned out the new deputy didn’t have problems with discipline.  But he did have problems pretty much everywhere else.  Terry was one of the most flawed individuals I’ve ever worked with, or even met, come to that. 

He was a small man with a small brain, which his subconscious knew about but he didn’t.   He coped with this dilemma by retreating into a fantasy land where his aunty was ice skating champion of Wales, his brother the best snooker player in North West England, he himself built engines for racing cars, made and sold his own clothes, could plait sawdust and juggle soot. I don’t know where he stood on the pseudologia fantastica spectrum (a condition also known as  pathological lying) but he was definitely (in my humble but confident opinion) on it.

In Terry’s case it took the form of a compulsive oneupmanship. Whatever anyone said he, or one of his family, could top it. This could be in world record breaking territory, like the time he claimed to have been out running in unimaginably high temperatures, as recorded (he said) by a friend with a state of the art atomic thermometer.  Ray took himself off to the school library on hearing this and consulted the Guinness Book of World Records.  Terry’s quoted figure turned out to be higher than the highest ever recorded.  That, said Guinness, was in the Lybian Desert – and not by the canal in Chorley where Terry had been.  

But his one-upmanship didn’t always involve the world beating, or even lies for that matter. 

A year or so into his time at Tulketh, at a point in which I was still trying to connect with him, he became a father for the first time.   

“I believe congratulations are in order,” I said when he came into my room that morning.  “Is it a  boy or a girl?”

“A girl,” he replied.

“Very nice,”  I offered.  “My first was a girl.”

“How old is she?” asked Terry.

“Twelve.”

“I’ve got a niece who’s fourteen,” said Terry triumphantly, thereby winning a competition for which only he knew the rules.

This was the man whom I met on my first day as Head of Art and his first day as a Deputy Headteacher.  How he felt about his new status was revealed in what he said to me on our first meeting.  “You must feel pretty good, having a Deputy Head in your department.”

“No not really,” I didn’t say. It was my first day in charge after all, I didn’t want to start upsetting people, particularly not Deputy Head type people.  But even when I got to know him better it was difficult to gainsay him.  The problem with fantasists is that they’re so obviously psychologically damaged that calling them out feels like kicking the crutch away from a one legged man.  Which is ok until the one legged man takes advantage of your common decency and uses his crutch to beat you over the head.  

And Terry did damage those around him.  His constant need to win meant those around him had to lose.  And yours truly, new, naive and not even sure I wanted to be head of department in the first place was easy meat and target number one.  It was mostly low level stuff almost all of which I’ve forgotten; all that remains is the memory of his constant interference, dressed up as being helpful but really designed to demonstrate his own superiority and by comparison my inadequacy.   Why, he might say, was I buying pottery clay from the catalogue? Why not drive down to Stoke and buy it from the source.  That’s what he used to do.  Of course they knew him down there, respected his exceptional ceramic knowledge and gave him special prices. 

It was death by a thousand cuts.  None of his suggestions were necessarily bad (though driving down to Stoke-on-Trent for the two bags of clay that we actually used didn’t make too much economic sense), they just came at a time when my primary objective was to take what McKay had left, make sure it didn’t get any worse and concentrate on teaching Art to the kids.

Terry’s constant interference was for the most part just irritating but it wore me down and turned what could have been a transformative, positive experience into a living nightmare. And of course it didn’t help that he was higher up the management food chain than I was.  For, to begin with at least, he had the Head’s backing.  Ralph Jones’s admirable tendency to support those beneath him worked against me here.  When I did refer an issue to him, in those early days, he chose to back his deputy against an as yet unproven Head of Art.

As he did when Terry suggested that the work which the pupils produced for the CSE examination should be displayed, for assessment, in the school hall rather than the individual art rooms.  This seems like a good idea at first glance but there were all sorts of reasons why it wasn’t, like the disruption it would cause other users – the external exams for example – meaning the exhibition would only be up for a couple of days. And for this I would have to beg, borrow, collect and return a couple of display screens from every secondary school in Preston.  Nevertheless Ralph backed his deputy.

And then, when the event got closer, Terry, for purely selfish reasons, changed his mind.  The previous year he’d pestered me into giving him the top set, which I had, with some reluctance, done.  Now it suddenly dawned on him that the big exhibition in the hall idea meant that the quality work which they had produced (despite him) would be lost amongst that of the less able.  Nobody would know which ones were his and he wouldn’t be able to claim the undeserved credit   So it was back to the individual Art rooms, and I had to phone round all the other secondary schools and cancel the screens.  I don’t know how he justified this change of heart to Ralf. I didn’t care; I just sighed with relief and put another tick in the ‘I hate Terry’ column . 

But to be fair to the man (which I do with some difficulty) not only was his classroom control good he was also industrious.  In his early days, for example, he gave up two or three of his lunch times each week to run a table tennis club in the main hall.  Still in my ‘trying to connect’ phase I went along to one of these sessions.  Terry challenged me to a game.  I knew the man well enough to suspect he was quite good and would probably beat me but it was a defeat I was, at the time, willing to accept in the cause of improved internal Art Department relations.  And lose I did but not quite in the way I expected.

“You serve,” said Terry, throwing me the ball. 

I served.  It was decent serve; low and fast with a small amount of top spin.  Terry watched it pass him and made  no attempt to return it.

“Love one,” he announced instead. 

“Rule ten,” he explained. “The referee must be able to see the ball at all times,” 

I looked around us.  The hall was virtually empty; just Terry, me, two young lads fully engaged in a game at another table and two or three more watching them.

“There is no referee,” I pointed out.

“I’m the referee,” Terry explained without irony, humour or any other ameliorating emphasis. It was, in his eyes, just a fact, a fact which meant I didn’t win a single point on my serve.

Later on in our relationship, when my status in the school had grown and his absurdity had become widely recognised, I may have reacted more intemperately; as it was I accepted the final 21-4 score line and went on my way. 

The table tennis club didn’t, in fact, last long; Terry soon moved on from pupil centred activities.  Ambitious deputy heads quickly realise that doing anything with the pupils, like running clubs and even teaching, is useless in helping them climb the next rung of ambition’s ladder. Better to devote yourself to setting up fund raising events, applying for grants or, in Terry’s case, organising a Tulketh Fun Run.  He’d started the latter having taken up running to lose a bit of weight, but given his nature it had become an obsession.

Industrious he might have been but his efforts were not always well, or even sensibly, directed.  This is best exemplified by the canoes, two canoes which Terry put in a bid for from somewhere or other.  He must have suggested that Tulketh was well into water sports, which it wasn’t – apart that is from occasional trips to Tower Wood on Lake Windermere where they had their own canoes.

Terry won the bids and the two canoes duly arrived.  They never saw actual water but each year, on Open Evening they were dug out of storage and displayed in the main hall, thus perpetuating the lie that I assume had won them in the first place.

By this time the man was out of my departmental hair.  The school had been shrinking and the Art department with it, to the point where a third Art teacher was no longer needed.  Terry became extra to our requirements and went on to make other departmental lives a misery. Bill Yates suffered him for a while as did the Maths Department. In the latter he managed to cover the wrong syllabus for two years – with a top GCSE group all but one of whom failed the final exam. But we were under a new headteacher by then and as far as I know, nothing bar a verbal warning resulted.  What would have happened had he done it under Ralph we’ll never know.

For most of the staff, apart from the occasional annoyance, he was just an absurd fantasist who was best ignored.  “He has a yellow belt in origami, you know,” declared Wilson at one point, marrying together Terry’s claims to have extensive, degree level knowledge of oriental art and a black belt in judo.

One member of staff whom he did cross swords with, though they had no curricular contact, was AJ.

AJ’s first name was Alan, his family name Child.  I don’t know what his middle name was but I know it began with a J because he always insisted on its use. It wasn’t difficult to work out why – it prevented him being referred to on registers, lists and public announcements as A Child, a source, no doubt, of much annoying banter in his formative years.  

AJ became Head of English a few years into my time and Tulketh.  He was an imposing figure – tall and athletic with shoulder length hair and an imposing moustache.  If he’d allowed the latter to grow a little longer he’d have been the spit of Vercingetorix, and whilst his ambitions didn’t quite extend as far as the conquest of Gaul they were large enough in the more limited world of education.  For AJ, head of department was merely a stepping stone; his sights were firmly set on headteacher.  Having said that his ambitions weren’t of the naked, by hook or by crook, trample over anybody who gets in his way, type.  He would get there through merit and application.  “Use time to make time,” he would announce to explain why he had arrived at the school at 7.00 am to get on top of his marking.  And he was the sociable type slotting easily into the drinking culture described above, not to mention the cricket team – he was a fairly fearsome fast bowler.  He also wrote poetry. 

He didn’t get on with Dickinson at all.

In Terry he saw a man who had reached the next rung of the educational ladder without any noticeable merit. There was simply no justice in this in Alan’s eyes; it made a mockery of his own drive for promotion through pedagogical and administrative excellence. Meanwhile Terry was jealous of AJ who had so many of the physical, intellectual and emotional qualities he himself lacked.  But he could (and I’m sure did) reassure himself that he was higher up the educational ladder than AJ.  What’s more he was happy to remind the Head of English of the fact, by pointing out, for example, that the move from Head of Department to Deputy Head, the one he had made and AJ hadn’t, was the difficult one since there were fewer deputy jobs than department heads.

It drove AJ nuts.  He had a similar problem with Terry that I did.  We knew the man was an intellectual and emotional pigmy but he had more power than we did and was happy to exercise it.  

It was around this time that a small ad appeared amongst the small ads in the local paper offering the services of a super handy man, who offered a range of services including building racing car engines, making high fashion garments and many other of the accomplishments which Terry claimed mastery (it was a long list).  I can’t remember if it mentioned Terry by name but it certainly contained the school telephone number.  Whether any inquiries were received in response to this small ad is not recorded. 

I make no claim as to who was responsible for this small act of print borne insurrection – it wasn’t me.  But, anyway, AJ went on to be a Deputy Head at a school in Blackburn.

The fact that Terry was no longer in my department didn’t mean he wasn’t irritating. Encountering him in the corridor early one morning after a day off with a stomach bug, I pointed out that I had obviously returned and apologised for the inconvenience.

“Could you come to my office to tell me that,” the man replied. “Telling me in the corridor doesn’t count as telling me.”

His office being only five paces away, and in the direction I was going anyway, I smiled sweetly and complied. It was no longer death by a thousand cuts, just a thorn in the side which caused occasional irritation. And although I didn’t resort to the small ads to massage my irritated ego, massage it I occasionally did.  On one occasion using the school’s photocopying machine.

The photocopying machine at the time was operated by a punch card system – each department had a small plastic card, the size and shape of a credit card with little rectangular holes in it,  in an arrangement unique to each user.  Light shining through these holes, I assumed,  identified the particular card and charged the appropriate account.

Sitting idly in my room one day, I found myself wondering if I could make a functioning copy using cardboard.  It would be handy to have a spare.  So I made one – a bit fiddly, but it worked.

The next nefarious step came easily.  I borrowed Terry’s card (his office was next to the room housing the photocopier) on the grounds that I’d left mine in the art department,  photocopied it, returned his card and, back in my room made a replica.  

For the next week or two, the Art department’s photocopying was done on Terry’s account. I was fairly confident he wouldn’t notice – I didn’t do that much photocopying, certainly not compared to  more academic subjects – and Terry wasn’t the kind who would check.

But in the end he didn’t need to because I left the damn thing in the photocopying machine and he found it.  He came into the staffroom brandishing it. 

It was obvious that I was the culprit.  Nobody hated him quite so publicly as I did, and whilst I’m not saying no one else could have produced the thing, it was plainly the kind of thing I would do.  So I ‘fessed up, there and then, in front of everybody. I can’t remember if, or possibly how, I explained my action – as a joke perhaps or an experiment.  I think Terry was confused; torn between the triumph of catching me and the embarrassment of having been duped in the first place.  The response of the headteacher, who was, by this time Ralf Jone’s successor, a certain Kenneth Curphy, was interesting.  We’ll get to Curphy below but suffice it to say for now that he was a man of limited understanding, particularly when it came to people. Oblivious to my actual motives he assumed I was struggling financially and gave the Art Department an extra £200.

My status in the school had moved up another notch or two by the time the above happened.  Not in the sense of having official status (as in earning more money status) but in the way I was viewed by colleagues. There was one main reason for this: the way I taught my subject.  Still in the days of Ralf Jones I had, in informal collaboration with ex colleague and now long term friend, John Bevan, completely changed the way I taught Art.  I’ve described this revolution in detail elsewhere (see appendix 1) but suffice it to say here that this had consequences both personally and professionally.  One of the great advantages of teaching Art is that you are not only allowed but expected to show off what your pupils have achieved in the school entrance hall, where it’s seen by pupils, colleagues and visitors to the school.  But in addition to that was the effect the new course had on my department’s exam results.  This was a time when league tables were introduced and and even Art GCSE results suddenly mattered.

But there was another factor, and for this I need to back up a little.  One of the reasons I was ready to tackle the drawing course was that I wasn’t by then making any artwork of my own.  And part of the reason for that was that I had taken up writing more seriously.  

It began one long summer holiday when I decided to write a novel.  Details of what happened can be found here (see History), the two teachers in that account being AJ and Wilson.

This novel and the one that followed it were set in a secondary school.  I’m not sure at what point in the writing of these two opuses the role of Staff Governor became vacant but the research opportunities provided by sitting in on governors’ meetings seemed too good to miss.  I put my name forward as did Harry Devonport (see Cricket above).  I actually think Harry would have made a better Staff Governor than me but I won the vote and took on the role.

In fact, as a source of inspiration for my supposedly humorous novel, governors meetings were a vast disappointment. They were boring. Well, they were boring for an Art teacher who was looking for material for the best selling comic novel he was writing.  There were absurdities, like the governor who suggested putting close circuit television in the pupil toilets (as an antidote to graffiti), but generally most of those present were content to ask the odd question before rubber stamping whatever Ralph proposed.  The real power in the meetings was actually the civil servant from County Hall, a highly intelligent, encyclopaedically well informed but diplomatic man whose occasional contributions where always pertinent and persuasive.  He was the one who was really keeping Jones in check.  Such expertise was sorely missed when the schools were increasingly taken out of local authority control.

Boring or not, being close to the decision making was, I discovered, quite seductive and slightly addictive.  Which is why, I imagine, most of these unpaid volunteers – local politicians, retired businessmen and others – were doing it.   They were a mixed bunch – there are, after all, no qualifications required for being a school governor, (or a local politician for that matter, which is the route by which most of them had ended up there).  The chairman for most of my tenure was an uncomplicated man, a man whose sense was of the common type who believed, for example, that you could tell almost everything you needed to now about a prospective teaching candidate, a Head of Science say, by the way he or she shook hands.  Perhaps he was right; I became increasingly conscious over my time sitting in on such events of the inadequacy of the interviewing process.  There was often little correlation between the ability to interview well and the ability to teach or run a department. The Head of Music , mentioned briefly above, who was the best by a mile that I’ve ever worked alongside, gave an absolutely dreadful interview.  Fortunately, one of the governors, who must have known something, argued for her appointment and managed to sway the rest.

Attending teacher interviews was one of the more interesting aspects of being teacher governor, as was attending the occasional appeal against a pupil expulsion.  One such was of a boy expelled for a vicious attack on another pupil (not his first offence).  The lad was a nasty piece of work though he was on his best behaviour at the appeal.  He was flanked by his parents who were working equally hard to appear reasonable and cooperative.

The chairman outlined the seriousness of the situation and pointed out that the school couldn’t tolerate the kind of violence that young Mark had inflicted on his victim.

“He’s very sorry for what happened,” said the mother.

The boy nodded.

“Other lad started it though,” the boy’s father now offered, eliciting another nod from the boy and a look of annoyance from mum.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Mark attacked first,” said the chairman.

The mother put her hand on her son’s arm.  “We’ve had a good talk with Mark and he agrees that he’s got to learn to bite his lip if anybody says anything.”

“Bite his lip,” agreed dad.`

“And can you do that?” 

“Yes,” said Mark.

“Of course this isn’t the first incident,” the vice chairman now said. “There was the one last month. You started that one too did you not?”

The boy shifted in his chair.  “I had to.” He said. “He asked me out.”

The idea that some romantic proposition had taken place passed through my mind at this point and I suspect it did others judging from the momentary silence.  But then we realised that the phrase was describing a challenge, as in “Come outside and say that!”

“So I had to,” the boy repeated.

“He asked him out,” confirmed the father, demonstrating that turning the other cheek was not, in fact, a family strong point.

“So much for biting his lip,” said the vice chair.

It was at this point that I noticed that the father had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles.

Needless to say young Mark didn’t win his appeal.  He was never going to if I had anything to do with it – I’d taught the monster and so had the people I represented.  

Meanwhile, the school continued to shrink, as did similar institutions across the country. There were too many schools with too many teachers and too few kids.  The councils, who were still running the educational show back then, were forced to act, beginning with the teachers and starting with the older, more expensive ones.

Who went first and in what order I’m no longer sure. As I pointed out at the beginning of this memoir, the chronology was never going to be straightforward, partly for stylistic reasons but also because of the flaws, gaps and inaccuracies of my memory.

The Senior House Tutors (old and expensive) all went in time to be replaced by other, younger staff from within the school.  And that became the norm; staff who left just simply weren’t replaced.  No new blood arrived, no Wilsons, Murrays, or Campbells.  I remember a moment when the two youngest members of staff were over thirty. (see appendix 2)*

The staffroom inevitably changed; it was quieter for one thing, particularly during free periods, there being plenty of other places to sit and do marking, admin and contemplate your own navel (or your impending nervous breakdown in later years).  The pupil body changed too.  New housing estates near Tulketh and the school in upmarket Broughton meant a change in the school’s demographic.

This had an effect on us all, or at least on those us who were still there.  But one individual it did affect and to an extent which few if any of us realised at the time was Ralf Jones.

It was Ralf’s school.  I don’t know what it was like when he took it over but it went through a stage where it was arguably the best school in Preston.  And now, thanks to circumstance beyond his control, it was in decline.  This must have been difficult.

He actually became a nicer guy in my experience (or the nicer guy that he had always been there began to shine through). Going to see him about some small administrative matter was to give up half or three quarters of an hour as he chatted and gossiped about all manner of things.  Our relationship had definitely changed.  He did, for example, back me against Terry when the latter tried to pull rank by ordering me to switch off the radio I used to play whilst the kids were working.

But the writing on the wall was getting bigger and I feel he increasingly saw himself as the captain of a sinking ship. What’s more I reckon (and it is just a personal view) he wanted to go down with it – or, more accurately he wanted the ship to go down with him.  He wanted to be Tulketh’s last headteacher; he wanted the school to close.

There were increasing signs of this, like when he confided in the staff, sitting in our concentric arcs in a termly staff meeting, that he had advised a couple of parents of prospective pupils that they send their child to the relatively newly built Broughton instead of Tulketh. 

Contrast this with what happened not long after at Ashton High School.  This nearby Tulketh rival discovered that their school had been declared unsafe and needed rebuilding.  If ever there was an opportunity for the  authorities to to solve the ‘too many schools’ problem in Preston and close one this was it.  But the Ashton head launched a ‘save our school’ campaign, galvanising pupils, parents and governors into action to get the school rebuilt.

It was widely believed that either Ashton or Tulketh must close so if Ashton’s campaign was successful it was curtains for Tulketh. We waited for Ralf to respond in some way but he didn’t.

As it turned out Ashton was rebuilt, Tulketh stayed open and Ralf Jones eventually took early retirement.  

I was looking forward to writing about Ralf Jones’s successor but now that I come to it I find myself pausing for a moment.  For one thing, unlike many of those occupying the narrative above – Ralf, Dave Gibbons, Bill Yates to mention but three – at the time of writing Ken Curphy is still alive. (So incidentally is Terry, though he did claim, when I met him a few years ago at a colleague’s funeral, that he had died but, with the help of the medical profession, had recovered from the experience).  

Looking back at Curphy, across the twenty odd years since I left the profession, I see a tragic figure, full of absurdities and contradictions, and find myself reacting with sadness.  Yet, at the time, a more common reaction amongst his staff was outrage, anger and despair – leading with increasing frequency to nervous breakdown.

He was almost the polar opposite to Ralph in many ways.  Where Ralph would back his staff without question Curphy would simply question; where Ralph would make his own decisions, his successor would look for someone else to make them.  It was (and still is) my belief – not shared by everyone, I should stress – that the man never made a single decision in the whole of his headteachership.  Such judgements, in my experience, where either referred upwards to advisors, inspectors and others in the educational establishment or downwards to the Senior House Tutors or Senior Staff at their regular meetings. I used to toy with this latter tendency when asked to design a certificate, for example, by always giving him two designs, both identical apart from some minor detail like the positioning of the date.  Any normal leader would have just chosen one and told me to make such decisions myself in future and not waste his time.  Curphy took both to the next Senior Staff meeting and asked them to choose.

But it was the words from above that carried the real weight, though I’m not sure that those offering advice, or merely passing comment, realised the extent to which their utterances were immediately written into the school rule book and acquired the force of law.   This was particularly alarming when the man didn’t fully understand what had been suggested or hinted at.

“The numbers of lates seems to be on the rise,” the school’s advisor is reputed to have said on perusing the books one day.

KC’s response, if there was one, is not recorded.

“Why don’t you start marking them late at the end of morning assembly instead of at the beginning.”

Ken seemingly didn’t appreciate that this bookkeeping wheeze was a simple way of massaging the figures on the quiet because the following day he announced it as a change of rule to the kids in assembly.  In the days that followed the school entrance hall filled up with late arrivals as increasing numbers of the kids took advantage of the new arrangement to have an extra fifteen minutes in bed.

I think it’s fair to say that our new leader didn’t inspire confidence in his staff whose sense of foreboding grew following such actions and even more so with his attitude to school discipline, as exemplified by his response the Head of PE being called a ‘knob head’ (described on page 4 above).  His use of language didn’t help either. Ralf Jones had had his idiosyncrasies and affectations in his pronunciation of words like Gawd and certificate, and his over reliance on fillers like ‘sort of’ but these were the tiniest of linguistic ticks compared with how his successor mangled the language.

I actually wrote about this during the pandemic.  This is the piece unchanged:

“During the Covid lockdown, many of us are discovering long forgotten items in cupboards, drawers and box rooms.  Unable to explore the world outside we’re rediscovering our own domestic inner spaces.  It was on one such expedition that I discovered a folder of bogus letters and genuine quotes.  They harked back to my teaching days and a headteacher whose woeful incompetence contributed considerably to my eventual nervous collapse.  He was a strange man, a Maths specialist who loved lists, couldn’t make decisions and who’s inability to speak his mother tongue was breathtaking.  He didn’t write it too well either.

In my attempt to survive the increasing chaos of his stewardship of the school, I started writing parody letters to parents which were passed surreptitiously around the staffroom. I even designed a fake letterhead, renaming the school ’Buckpasser High School’ and changing the school motto to ’See Your Senior House Tutor’, because that’s who he usually passed the buck to (though he’d pass it to anybody in a crisis).

The piece that follows, whilst mentioning his written missives, concentrates on his verbal communications. The quotes are completely genuine; I know this because I wrote them down at the time.  I’ve called it Kevinballs after Private Eye’s Colemanballs though the latter usually make more sense.

He was simple man, Kevin; simple as in limited. Kevin wasn’t his real name.  He acquired it in a pre-inspection staff meeting at the school of which he was headteacher.  The Chief Inspector in attendance mistakenly referred to his host as Kevin throughout the meeting.  And it was completely characteristic of our leader (a misnomer if ever there was one) that he didn’t once correct him.  

He was Kevin thereafter for me.  

I used it to write fake letters, parodies of the grammatical disasters that he sent out to the parents.  His letter writing was distinctive to say the least. Punctuation, for example, seemed at times completely arbitrary.  It was as though he just dropped full stops and commas onto the text from distance, like Jamie Oliver sprinkling salt. They fell where they fell.

But it was in his speech where language became really mangled.  Like many linguistically challenged men (and it is usually men in my experience) he felt that if he was to be taken seriously his utterances required complexity.  Unfortunately he didn’t have the vocabulary for complexity, or the grammar.  So more often than not, he ended up with gobbledygook.

“We need to keep things good in terms of things,” he once said to me.  There was no context to this statement to give it meaning; we were just passing in an otherwise empty staffroom.  I think he meant “keep up the good work” though it could equally, I suppose, have been “pull your socks up”.  I just smiled and said “Definitely.”

There was often a kind of circularity about many of his utterances, causing the sentence to eat itself and disappear. Like this of a departing colleague in a school assembly:

“Many of you knew her as knowing her.”  

Of course some might choose to interpret the phrase ’knowing her’ in a biblical sense, which would at least make it more memorable. But let’s not go there just yet – there’s more of that below.

As I said at the beginning, I took to writing these little spirals-into-nothingness down. How else could you remember an utterance such as:

“We are gathered this morning in terms of things,” which he announced to the pupil body one morning?  Without committing it to paper you can’t; they were without either meaning or content. They disappeared from the memory like last night’s dreams.

’Terms of things’ was undoubtedly his favourite phrase.  It didn’t actually mean anything but it helped fill out the sentence, give it some of the complexity he craved – in his eyes at least. But given that he had little else at his disposal those three little words were forced to do a lot of heavy lifting.

“If you think in terms of things you might think of some of the things you want to be aware of,” he told the kids in one morning assembly.

“She has been nice in terms of a member of things,” he said on another.  There was a slight clue as to what he meant in that last utterance but you needed specialist knowledge to really understand it.

There were occasions when we wondered if he had a restricted spatial sense as well as a literary one. As in when he told the assembled kids that, “The nearest one that way will be that way.”  No hand gestures accompanied this statement so although I assume we knew at the time what the ’one’ was; we still didn’t know the where.  Yet when he did manage to be more specific it didn’t necessarily lead where it was supposed to; like the time he attempted to expand on the news of flooding in the school’s north corridor.

“If anyone is wondering where the north corridor is,” he explained to the uniformed ranks before him, “it’s opposite the south where the sun comes up.”  I remember hearing the Head of Geography groan as I committed that one to paper.  

Kevin could have followed up with, “I think that’s right, but I wouldn’t like to be certain.” It would have fit.  But he didn’t, he said that on Prize Night.

It was fairly obvious that he began sentences without knowing how they ended.  We all do that to a degree of course but given Kevin’s limitations his could lead to some curious places.

“We have another sponsor which means that we have filled what was full,” he informed the staff one day during briefing.

And it wasn’t just spatial concepts that he struggled with.  Time caused him problems too. “I’ll put this [list] on the board earlier this morning.”

Time was a moveable feast for Kevin. “I know I’ve seen one pass across my desk very soon,” he claimed.  I can’t remember what it was that was passing but it was obviously travelling through time. To be fair, I don’t think he was really that confused about time’s arrow; he just had problems getting the words in the right order.

“So remember – school will ring on the bell,” being one of numerous examples I could quote.

But it was vocabulary, or rather his lack of it, that caused many of his problems, particularly when he felt the need to elaborate. In the days before an inspection he came out with:

“It’s going to be a strange week, a week to look forward to that week.” 

Too many weeks Kev, too many weeks.

When he did manage to use a larger vocabulary, the confusion simply got worse. He conjured up some interesting images.

“Today is one of the days when she‘s split sideways,” he said of a part time member of staff. Uncomfortable for the poor woman, obviously.

A pleasanter image emerged when he revealed that, “If you go in the changing rooms you realise how much money will go in there.” A PE Department full of illegally acquired banknotes inevitably came to mind. Of course he was really talking about decorators, who obviously caused him problems. “You know painters,” he confided. “They stick their brushes and cans wherever they can.”

He was something of a tour de force when it came to the unintentional double entendre. They could be simple as in his announcement about the temporary absence of a young member of the Maths Department; she had damaged her car in a minor shunt the previous evening.  In Kevinspeak this became: “Mrs. Smith was banged in her car last night.” 

Or slightly more complex as in, “I have an arrangement with Sally that if I haven’t got them off by the end of the week she should take them down”.  He may have been talking about the staffroom notices – but maybe not.

He was definitely referring to the year 10 exams, finished on the previous day when he stood on the stage and said:

“Today some of Y1O heads will be swelling up whilst for some, other things will swell up.” 

Which brings me to the penultimate quote, his most famous amongst the staff.  He said it on the morning of the annual tug-of-war between teachers and pupils. Once the obligatory prayer was completed he stood boldly forward.  I think he meant to say he hoped they’d been getting some training in.  What he actually said was: “I hope all the boys had a good tug last night.”

As he said himself, on another occasion, “It’s putting it along with everything else that comes with fun.”

Writing these nuggets down and sharing a bunch of them with colleagues was one of the ways I coped with what was becoming an increasingly stressful job. As mentioned above in relation to Ralf, there comes a point when the balance between effort and rewards starts to break down.  I never really stopped enjoying the actual teaching, particularly in Key Stage 4.  But with them I had an arrangement that worked.  They cooperated and accepted my rules and they reaped the rewards of artistic and GCSE success.  But it had taken time and effort to establish that relationship.  Lower down the school, with the new intake of eleven year olds the contract had yet to be drawn up.  And that took energy, in increasing quantity, at a time when my personal reserves were on the wane.  Yet the numbers of the overactive, attention seeking and disturbed children had grown, from the odd one in certain classes to three, four or more. 

But we had a leader whose concerns were focussed elsewhere.

“I haven’t had any minutes of your departmental meetings, Stuart,” our leader said to me one day.  

This came as a slight surprise since, thanks to the school’s continued fall in numbers, I was now a department of one.  I didn’t have departmental meetings unless you count doing a bit of admin or tidying my desk as having a meeting.

I pointed out that there wasn’t anybody else in the department to meet with. This obviously discomfited him, faced as he was with the unfilled gap in his filing cabinet in the section labelled ‘Departmental Meeting Minutes – Art’, but couldn’t defeat the logic and went off to annoy somebody else.  But the gap in his files was still there and he sought me out the following day. He’d obviously slept on the problem or more likely asked his wife what he should do. 

“About the minutes,” he said. “Could you just write down what you were thinking.”

So I wrote something for him, which wasn’t in itself stressful but it added to the ever growing pile of meaningless tasks which the man generated.

But the real writing was on the wall for me.  I’d seen others crack up.  They all went differently.  Rod Lewis was the first.  The signs that Rod was struggling became known as the Lewis Stare. He sat in the staffroom communicating with nobody, his eyes focussed on some personal agony a thousand yards distant.  Keevie, he of the clipboard carrying cricket captaincy, became slightly manic in the days before he went. 

Colleagues expressed surprise when it happened to me.  One person did know I was on the edge and that was Curphey himself.  He came to my room one day to ask why I hadn’t completed his latest file filling piece of paperwork. Somewhere in side a small damn broke and my eyes temporarily filled with tears. He backed off and left, allowing me to pull myself together and reconstruct the facade that I showed to my other colleagues and the world in general.

“You’re sounding chipper,” someone said to me as I sang along whilst making myself a coffee in the staffroom kitchen. “Just trying to keep my spirits up,” I’d reply jokily but with truth.

But it wasn’t working; I could feel myself going.  It became a race to mount up the Y11’s GCSE work in readiness for their end course exhibition.  I didn’t make it.  There were no tears this time; I suddenly just couldn’t function.  Barely able to move and completely unable to talk, I sought out Judith and she took me home. 

I never went back.