Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

It occurs to me that we are only about a couple or three weeks away from conker season. I used to like conker season when I was a kid, though I never managed to create a killer conker like some of my friends claimed to have done. That didn’t stop me from lovingly marinating them in vinegar for a few days, or trying to persuade Mum to let me bake one to concrete-like hardness (preferably a pre-soaked jobbie). To the best of my recollection she never did let me bake a conker and I never did develop a super conker which would conquer all-comers for years to come before retiring to the honoured spot in the bottom of a satchel, covered in fluff, shell-less and dry shrivelled in all its glory¹.

We had a conker tree on the school grounds, just behind the science block, as I recall. We were allowed to pick up fallen conkers but not to ‘encourage’ them to fall. That didn’t stop us. Generations of schoolboys had developed a stooge system worthy of Colditz to warn of advancing school masters. I do not recall it failing in my time at least. Prefects were more of a problem, but were generally spottable in their black blazers (the hoi-polloi all wore maroon blazers) ². This meant that we could hoof half end bricks up the tree with relative impunity, though the occasional fallen branch caused some concern.

I think the highlight must have been when a chap in my form, one David ”Arfa” Beynon, discovered a rusty gate hinge and threw that up the tree. It never came back down and for weeks we pondered nervously in the anticipation of it falling on and braining some passer by.

I don’t think it ever did; it may still be up there for all I know.

Do kids still play conkers, or is it all illegal drug taking and vandalism these days?

¹You know, that looks far ruder in writing than it did while I was just thinking it. binidj will have an embolism.

²Except for Jan Mateki (sp) in the Autumn term of 1973, whose blazer sported a bright green sleeve for about four months until it disintegrated, but that’s another story.

Over on his LJ, my old friend telemeister and I have been reminiscing about school days at Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire back in the 70s. The days when the world was garish, the music glittery, shoes platformed and clothes flared.

The mullet was the hair style of choice for many a spotty oik, and those of us who didn’t have one generally had long hair with centre partings. I recall that we were not allowed to grow a beard at school (one or two of us thought we could, but they were distinctly nu-metal Belgian beards, and hideous). I myself, in one of those rebellious streaks that you spend the rest of your life regretting¹, had sideburns that stopped exactly one razor’s width apart. You couldn’t call them mutton-chop sideburns unless you were taking your sheep from Belsen, but they would have been had my face follicles been more accommodating between the ages of 16 and 20.

My mother told me that I looked like an idiot, and Dad (unwittingly quoting Rod Stewart) said we looked ridiculous.

You have to remember that I was only half the man then that I am now, almost literally. (I believe the weight gain over the past 25 years puts me officially one steak dinner away from being two people – neither of them anorexic).

This has sent me into something of a reverie, as I am choosing to remember the bits I liked, or rather of which I have fond memories. My good friend telemeister has rather darker memories of being bullied on occasion, but advancing senility has largely edited that sort of unpleasantness from my bonce. Thus it is that I can recall standing in the sun on the lawn behind Beaumaris House in the late summer of 1973 with a bunch of friends listening to Suzi Quatro singing Can the Can on the tranny,².

The masters (for they were masters: no mere teachers for the likes of us) were an odd and unlikely bunch. Most of them (but not quite all) now retired, and many sadly deceased.

There was old Motty Mottershaw, the senior historian: a man with breath that could drop an elephant at twenty paces. His successor in waiting, one Rodney Rodders Jones, the cheery young history master who liked to pretend he was one of the chaps. A man who looked rather aghast when a friend of ours, John Cotterill (who later joined the army and who I believe is currently a major serving in Basra), hauled him over the coals in class for disparaging the achievements of the army in the First World War³.

And what of old Bernie Deakin, the world-weary giant of a chemistry teacher who would look balefully at miscreants and announce that he would “come down on them like a sack of bricks from a very, very great height” if they didn’t mend their ways?
There was, for a while, Tony Cave, the English Master who was also an Old Boy. This gave him an unfair advantage, because he always knew exactly where people went to skive off, carve their names in the masonry, or just have a smoke. He’s done it all himself ten years earlier. He like modern jazz, and drove around town in a half-timbered estate car with a double-bass sticking out of the back.

I think he may have been a Time Lord.

My favourite teacher was the eminently laidback Jerry Chambers, denizen of the art room and Beatle fan. He was permanently sad that the school no longer had a skiffle band, and bemoaned in a gentle way the fact that it (skiffle) had died out after a brief flowering, some 15 years earlier.

It transpired that my cousin was going out with, or was at least a friend of my old geography teacher, Tom “Master” Bate. In those days he was fresh from teacher training college and a dead shot at ten paces with a wooden board cleaner or piece of chalk. Of course, I had a certain licence in his class on account of my cousin. This was rather wasted by the fact that I quite liked geography, so paid attention instead of up.

Lastly, the man who closed the world of mathematics to me forever, with his cheerily boring lessons: Mr Edgoose, or Spock as he was known. He meant well, and wasn’t a particularly nasty man or anything like that. But Lord, could he bore for England. I do recall, though, his exasperated catch-phrase, “Watch the board while I go through it again.”

There were many, many more notably Flash Newton, the communist biology teacher who had the good grace not to mention to anyone outside the staff room that in one of my essays on bird reproduction, I had consistently used the word ‘clitoris’ instead of ‘cloacae’ much to my later mortification and his amusement. These are the incidents that scar us, and the fact that he didn’t take the piss out of me in front of my class mates gives me just about the only fond memory I have of that man.

Still, that’s all for another day.

¹Largely because you are never entirely sure that you have destroyed all the photographs

²I have covered this ground in previous entries: in the far more naïve 1970s a tranny was a radio, not a bloke in a dress saving up for the operation.

³I believe Johnny came very close to accusing him of treason and calling him out.