Grammar School

When I turned eleven I transferred to the local Grammar School. This was where the brighter kids went, the ancient buildings and idiosyncratic teachers supposedly compensated by superior academic standards. I suppose it wasn't a bad school, although some of the older teachers exuded this air of dust and malevolence that seemed to come direct from the pre-war era. The German teacher, Beaky Edwards, was a case in point and the principal reason I took Latin instead.

For metalwork, woodwork and art, however, we had to travel by bus to a separate school building some miles away, called Grace Hill, where the facilities for these subjects existed. If the main school was a bit old fashioned this one was positively antediluvian. It was like the school that time forgot - they had teachers that had been overlooked for retirement (or committal to a secure institution) and who roamed the place like it was their lair. The art teacher, in particular, was a white-haired freak show, rather like the Quaker Oats guy would look after a smoking meth and feasting on a corpse. They used to make us line up in silence and walk up the stairs without stepping on the white bits at the side. When I transferred to a school in Bristol just after the riots I used to look back and wonder just what planet these fuckers lived on. Since I had no talent in any of these subjects whatsoever there was little to look forward to on Grace Hill day.

Nowadays, however, the whole thing seems so innocent. We all wore uniforms and behaved reasonably well (occasional fights excepted) and we learned stuff. No-one worried about our self-esteem. So here's a few things I'd like to bring back from my grammar school days:

Staff vs Boys Rugby
Nothing compares to the sight of fifteen thin teenage boys getting ground into the mud by two hundred and fifty pound geography teachers for sheer entertainment value. It's not as if we even played rugby the rest of the year; I think it was just a perk for the teachers to kick shit out of some kids for a laugh.

School Ties
Supposed to make us look smart, they just emphasised our scruffiness as we wore them with all different combinations of length, knot, dirt, etc. They also came in handy for strangling people during a fight.

The Cane
Bad behavior without consequences doesn't take much in the way of balls. Fucking about with the cane as a potential punishment takes some spine though. Reintroduce this for the added frisson of excitement when you're wondering if you're going to get caught.

Chalk
Real learning comes from a blackboard and chalk. If nothing else you can watch the dust swirl around on a summer's day. When you have those blackboards that roll over you can draw something obscene on the board during break and hide it so the teacher turns it over in class.

Prefects
Psychopaths with superiority complexes, these older kids would teach you that life isn't fair but that if you waited long enough you too could become a psychopath.

Still, this was a grammar school, not a private school, so at least we all went home at the end of the day unscathed. I hear the lessons learned at English private school were more "life-changing" in nature. It must be hard to remember how to decline a verb in Latin with someone putting vaseline in your back passage...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison