The school reunion

I went through a spell of using the Friends Reunited website a few years ago and through this, I received an invitation  from Tony Malone to a school reunion he was organising for the year’s cohort of which  I was a member. I vaguely remembered him, it was a long time ago. It struck me as strange that I now knew his first name as, at school we were referred to by the teachers by surname only and we continued this amongst ourselves. I don’t know most of the first names of my peers even now.

                This invitation got me thinking about the teachers and fellow pupils from so long ago that I had not thought of for many years - life before memories. I attended Worthing Technical High School until I left on 4^th August 1962 and joined the Royal Navy on 7^th August, just three days later the same year. This was after a major row as my teachers and parents wanted me to stay on for the usual route of ‘A’ levels and university. I disagreed as I couldn’t wait to leave home and school and get out into the wide world. I had planned on joining the Royal Navy since I was about six. I was obsessed by the sea and read everything I could about it. I could soon name the different styles of bows and sterns and knew the name of every sail on a square rigged ship. I left school with one GCE, Maths, that I had taken a year early. I later got the results of passes in six more, after I had joined up.

                The irony was that, as soon as I joined, instead of going to sea as I had intended, I ended up spending six years doing an Artificer Apprenticeship with only the fifth year at sea in the Persian Gulf – from one classroom to another, the frying pan into the fire.

                This was the new style of vocational technical schools so we did the first three years together and then chose the Artisanship, Arts or Sciences for the last two years up to GCSE. I enjoyed wood and metalwork so wanted to be in the Artisan group but was persuaded to take the Sciences instead. This being 1960, the group consisted only of boys, ‘You can’t have girls doing science’! There were fifteen of us in our group and, while I got to know them very well, it also meant that I lost touch with my friends who had been through primary and secondary education with me. I was very sorry to slowly lose touch with my best friend, Jack, who I lost to the Arts stream as he wanted to be an architect.  He became a very successful architect and started and built up his own practice but, he sadly died in 2009. We kept in touch over the years with Christmas cards and the odd letter but I got to see him in 2006 when he and his wife had a holiday in Bath. They came to see us for a day and it was good to see him after so many years

                There were some real characters in our group, I suppose these days they would have been characterised as mad scientists and geeks – I was the only one who was normal, of course.

                Brooks was undoubtedly teacher’s pet as he soaked up the knowledge without any problem and could effortlessly regurgitate it in exams so inevitably coming top in all exams and tests etc. His favourite subject was maths and he left us all standing. What made it worse was that his parents were rich and so bought him one of those three wheeler bubble cars while he was still at school, it was one of those strange ones with the one passenger sitting behind the driver. It was called a Messerschmidt. The rest of us could only run to second-hand bikes so we were very envious even though we didn’t show it, much.

                The teachers were very strict and all wore their academic gowns every day. Mr Bush took us for chemistry. He was fearsome and insisted on everything being ‘just so’. ‘There is only one way of doing things,’ he used to say. ‘That is my way, which is also the correct way.’  He had pet hates, one was the use of the word ‘amount’. ‘Do you mean mass or volume, boy?’ he thundered. ‘Amount means nothing, it has no units. If you want to describe a quantity to me, it must have units, preferably SI units of grammes or cc. Now, try again.’ By this time the poor student would be a red –faced, stuttering wreck, but the message got home. If you want to do science, you have to be precise. His other bête noir was describing something as a ’chemical’. ‘Everything is a chemical. Everything is made of atoms that are on the Periodic Table, they are all chemicals’.  I still think of this all these years later when people say there are too many chemicals in food. I am very tempted to agree and then say that, à la Bush, ’if you took all the chemicals out, you would have nothing left.’

 In spite of the rigor, I liked Mr Bush and enjoyed chemistry because, even at that age, I could see that he was driven by the enthusiasm for his subject, he just wanted to share the wonder of it all with us. I do laugh when today’s schoolchildren talk about health and safety as none of us had goggles, there was no fume cupboard, even when handling bromine, we used to play with mercury and float coins on it, on wooden trays. At the end of each term, Mr Bush used to play tricks with reagents. This might be pouring sulphuric acid onto sugar and seeing the resulting, writhing black snake or mixing two clear liquids and making a rich dark blue solution and then making the colour disappear with the addition of another clear liquid.  After enjoying all this magic, we of course, had to write the equation of the reaction and then get told off if we got it wrong.

                Hubble was the quiet one who always appeared to be rather stupid and gave wacky, way out answers to the teacher’s questions. On one famous occasion, when asked a fairly simple question and getting it hopelessly wrong, albeit in a funny way, the exasperated teacher asked, ‘How on earth did you get to this school Hubble?’ Hubble answered artlessly, ‘By bicycle, Sir.’ This question and the response was all around the school by lunchtime. Hubble was not stupid at all, he always got good marks in exams.            

                Miss Davis took us for Maths. We did Ordinary, Applied and Additional Maths as three subjects and some days we spent all day on maths. I really struggled with this until we started differential calculus and I could see the beauty of it and it all seemed to make sense. Then we did ballistics and Newton’s equations of motion and I really enjoyed all that as I could see some future applications of that in my secret dream to go to sea with the Navy. She was really the favourite teacher of our group as she seemed to be easy going, but in reality she knew how everyone was doing and managed to get us through the exams with little trouble.

                Monnery was the typical nerd. He just worked and worked and understood everything. He was in great demand to explain the parts that no one else understood. He was friendly, not standoffish, like Brooks, so he was very popular in spite of being the class swot.

                Mr Baxter took us for Physics. He was a geography teacher but as there was a shortage of physics teachers in the school, he would have to do. He was honest with us in saying that he was only a day ahead of us with the learning before teaching us and sometimes we would have to learn together. It all worked though as there was an overlap with some of the maths we were already learning. Sometimes he got stuck and we would have to help him out.

                                Cooper was probably in our group by mistake. He was a big lad and an athlete. He could just about cope with the science and maths but his real joy was to get out on the field during PE and join in some game or other.

Of course we couldn’t just do science and maths, we also had to learn a language. We thought anything that wasn’t science was a bit of a waste of time – we were all rapidly becoming embryo lab rats. I chose French as I thought it would be the easiest. Mr Martens got the unenviable task of trying to teach us French. He was Flemish. He spoke English very well but his teaching method didn’t suit us. We were scientists, we inquired, checked and challenged! In French, we had to listen to Mr Martens, accept what he said and learn regular verbs by repeating the conjugations in time with the tapping of his wedding ring against a desk top. We didn’t like him, or his subject, or his country, very much.

*

‘Wake up. Richard,’ said the nurse,’ it’s time for your medication, I’ll help you sit up.’

                The ghosts from more than fifty years in the past slowly faded as they walked off into their futures and out of my life. I didn’t want to see them as old men or hear about the ones that had died so I never did go to that school reunion. I think of Jack most days – a conflict between all the happy adventures we had growing up together and remembering him before he died as a sick man with a wife and four children he would soon be leaving.

 I still think of them all as enthusiastic teachers and bright young boys, looking forward to their lives. I think it is better that way.