My
mother taught me to read before I started school, so I could manage little
Ladybird books and form crude letters on paper by the time term started in
September 1972. In
the days before modern curricula, primary schools in the early 1970s were a
beautiful, psychadelic mash of art, song, and nature walks. We wrote sums in
chalk on slate squares. We labelled the parts of a flower in our drawing books,
and wrote about Saint George in slim, feint ruled books.
I loved our little Victorian
red-bricked rural school with sixty children from outlying villages. I pleaded
to go when I had measles and a fever of 102 degrees, and commando-crawled to
the back door in my nightdress to catch the school bus. My Dad had to restrain
me. On the infrequent occasions I pass that little
school now, I’m gullet-struck with sorrow. Whether this is nostalgia, or
because the building has stood empty for a decade, I am uncertain. Most likely,
it is because of what happened next.
The
summer of 1977 was full of colour: the merciless festooning of halls, lamp-posts,
pets, anything, with patriotic bunting, and exotic teenagers on TV with fluorescent
hair and safety pins. Our bright chatter at school, between recounting episodes
of Six Million Dollar Man and lyrics from Abba songs, was punctuated with talk
about the test we had to take to determine which ‘big’ school we would attend
the following year. I was a good kid, a bright kid, and paid no attention
another test- we were always having tests, and at ten I, as any child should,
knew no fear. None of us truly understood the import of one afternoon spent
answering questions in a booklet. I
didn’t realise the result of that test had the capability to drain the colour
out of my world for many years to come.
Some
time during 1978, life as I knew it came to a halt. I
failed the Eleven Plus.
The significance of certain words began to
press on my mind. I recalled how the Secondary Modern was referred to as ‘a bit
rough’, but this didn’t concern me as
much as the use of ‘pass’ and ‘fail’. Pass and fail were as prominent and
insistent as Jubilee bunting. It was clear that for me, and the other children
who didn’t achieve a high enough mark, that we were off -cuts. Chump chops.
During
the summer holidays I became introspective, anxious, ashamed. I decelerated
from happy, breezy, funny Bev to moody, angry Bev and stayed that way for the
next five years. My husband and family would probably say it’s been more like
forty. There
was no induction, or Welcome Day, or pastoral care; no friendly, shepherding
seniors. We stepped down from the ‘cattle wagon’ – a bus with wooden-slatted
benches running lengthways down what was effectively an oblong metal box on
wheels- to jeers and cat-calls from the older children.
We
funnelled through the main doors into the dilapidated building, a stew of
horror with an undernote of simmering violence, and stood in the main hall
while the headmaster hollered at us from a lectern and teachers at the side of
the hall physically assaulted pupils for seemingly no reason- although they
must have been talking, or fidgeting, or some other unacceptable misdemeanor. I
looked around at us, assembled in our black uniforms, funereally cast against
the maroon-blazered successes of the Grammar School, wondered what terrible
thing it was we’d done wrong.
Is
it possible for an eleven year old to be depressed? By the second year, I was
showing signs of giving up. I no longer felt motivated to do any work. I felt
anxious much of the time. I only wanted to eat crisps and chocolate. I swore
like a navvy. I couldn’t be bothered to wash. I spent evenings in bed thinking
about death and if we were all to die anyway, what was the point in anything? Rather
than crawling across the floor with a fever to get to school, I shrank beneath
the blankets with undefined malaise and my mother wrote notes to school to
explain that I was ‘run down’. I stayed at home and taught myself to play the
guitar, and thrashed along to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. ‘There
is no future / And England’s dreaming,’ I sang along with John Lydon.
The
consistent message at school was discouragement. The tenor – anger. Nearly
every teacher (apart from ‘Happy Harry’ who taught religious education and was
what we’d call these days ‘pleasantly confused’) had overtly said we were
failures, a bunch of miscreants, unemployable,
stupid, good-for-nothng, hopeless, not worth educating. Physical and
verbal violence was a daily occurrence- teachers to kids, kids to teachers, kids to kids. I walked past
the Woodwork block one day to find the whole class and their teacher, Mr Taylor,
pressed to the windows, watching me. I had bright orange hair, crimped and
backcombed like Siouxsie Sioux. Mr Taylor opened the window and addressed me,
in front of his class of boys : ‘Oi! Look at yourself. You fucking freak’. Can
you imagine what would happen to that man now, for saying that to a pupil? If
you couldn’t look after yourself, you were doomed, so the school had a
reputation for brutality. It took no account of size, age, or gender. You could
expect to be ‘twatted’ with alarming frequency. Some teachers even encouraged
inter-pupil scrapping.
By
the age of 15 we had careers guidance with an austere Northumbrian called ‘Naggy’
Norman.. I asked if I could go to Art College. Naggy’s advice was ‘you need O levels to get into
college, and you’re not going to get them here, so you’ll have to think about
something else. Maybe Gymphlex?’ Gymphlex was the sportswear factory down the
road. Word had it that Naggy had a secret tunnel from beneath the school to the
factory floor, and was paid recruiting commission. My friend Ange confided
ambitions to be a radiographer. Naggy despoiled this with laughter and more
pressing suggestions of Gymphlex. For every girl, the advice was Gymphlex, and tacitly, marry
and have kids. For the boys, army or land work. Computers came in during my
last year at school. Only the boys were allowed to use them, but what did it
matter? We were none of us good for higher ambitions; we were herded like
cattle to the abbatoir- choiceless Patsies being taught to lower our
expectations. By the age of 14, Secondary Modern had broken my spirit, and
those of my peers, clean in two. I began primary school as a happy, bright, bookish
little girl, and left Secondary Modern a depressed, dispirited failure. I
couldn’t be bothered taking CSEs. They
meant nothing, and I elected to leave before the exams. I couldn’t take another
day.
One
night in 2008 I watched a Channel Four programme called ‘Law of the
Playground’, where celebrities fondly recounted their memories of school. Robert
Webb (comedian, half of Mitchell & Webb, alumni of Robinson College,
Cambridge, Footlights, Labour Party supporter)
talking about his experiences at Grammar
School. The Grammar School in the same town as my Secondary Modern. ‘There was
no competition between the two schools,’ he says, ‘but you KEPT THE FUCK AWAY
from those kids – until they became lorry drivers, or something’. And that
dismissal, in the name of comedy, laid bare the prevailing attitude, by someone
who purports to be a socialist : superiority,
public condemnation of our violence, stupidity, and lack of ambition. And my
reaction? Well, I just defaulted to my training and took to Twitter to offer
him a twatting at the Grammar School gates.
I
put a lot of effort into rebuilding myself over the years following school. I
spent two years on the dole, then got myself into Technical College for O and A
levels in a revelatory atmosphere of encouragement and respect. The old, old
feelings of adoring learning came back.
‘Have
you ever thought of University?’ said my English tutor.
‘Me?
University?’ I replied. ‘It’s not for people like me. Is it?’
‘It’s
very much for people like you’, she said.
She
managed to unpick the tight knots of uncertainty and broken confidence, and
killed the demons raised by Secondary Modern education. Three years later I
sent her a card thanking her for her kindness and no small part in the honours
degree I’d gained (2:1) in English from the University of Liverpool. She sent
me back a William Morris card declaring that she had unstinting faith in me,
and that I, like many others, had survived an educational ordeal.
Beverley Butcher
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