My old headmaster – whitehaired in a black suit for the school photograph. A bluff plainspeaking Northerner who despised The South, where he worked, and Southerners, whom he taught. He was near retirement – sour, irascible and merciless.
He had strong opinions about everything and shared them freely. He once took the time in assembly to rail against the newfangled Rock’n’Roll craze that was sweeping the country’s teenage population like an epidemic. Baby baby baby, he said, that’s not a song lyric, that’s gibberish.
I still remember how he hauled one small wretched kid – from one of the poorest families in the neighbourhood – up in front of the whole school and shouted at him for not having washed his face. Big grown man, tiny small grubby faced boy. I’ll not have any boy come to my school unwashed, he bellowed.
Bully.
Once he asked me a question in class. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He asked again, more angrily. My brain froze and the words refused to make sense in my mind. I said I still couldn’t understand, and he erupted with fury.
Took me out into the lobby where he regularly caned offenders and shouted in my face that he wouldn’t stand for boys trying to take the mickey out of him. I literally wet myself with terror that he was going to beat me – piss trickling down my bare leg inside my shorts.
In the end he took me into the small children’s classroom and told the teacher, I’ve got a boy here who’s got too big for his boots. He left me there, where I had to stand in shame in front of the grinning, nudging juniors for the rest of the lesson.
Cunt.
Remember that recruitment campaign a few years ago with people reminisicing and the same tagline every time, ‘Nobody forgets a good teacher’?
It made me want to do Nobody Forgets A Bad Teacher one. It’s one of the short list of topics (along with adventures on acid, bad landlords and hitch hiking) that can make a conversation go on forever.
My 1970s primary school pre-dated the moden cafe style of school meals, everyone had to eat the same thing. I wouldn’t eat the stew as it had meat in and my family was vegetarian. They piled a plateful and insisted. When I still refused they marched me and the plate past all my schoolmates, into a classroom where I was sat in front of a teacher and made to pick out the meat-infused vegetables and eat them.
Aged 9, we had a teacher who had peeled the rubber off a table tennis bat and laboriously deeply chalked the word JOEY in reversed letters on to it.
Any minor misdemeanour was punished with a spank on the backside from the bat, leaving the word – a common insult in the days of cerebral palsy sufferer Joey Deacon being on Blue Peter – imprinted on your clothes until they were washed.
But remember kids, today we’re too soft, it never did me any harm and anyone saying you can’t physically and psychologically abuse childen is just giving into political correctness gone mad.
[…] Click here for the full-size chart. Five & a half yards = a rod, pole or perch. 36 bushels in a chaldron, 100 fathoms in a nautical mile – who knew? Back in 1959 every schoolchild was expected to know a fair bit of this table off by heart according to the Headmaster. […]