— 1977 —

My first year at Chis and Sid (aged 11-12) passed without incident apart from an impressive number of detentions. Detentions at Chis and Sid were a serious business where you had your name read out in morning assembly and you went to the front of the assembly hall to get your little lecture from the headmaster. The list of names was always some permutation of Monroe, Harding, Winch and Lawrence.

Three detentions in a single term (there were three terms per year) and you got the cane. My record was six. In that first year, my detentions were never for properly naughty stuff though. They were mostly for not doing my homework or for talking in class. The naughty stuff came later.

At the end of every school year, we had a couple of weeks of exams — often 2 x 3-hour exams in each subject. They were a kind of warm-up for the O-level exams that would come at the end of the fifth year. The first-year exams put us into “streams” according to our results. My position in my class should’ve earned me a place in the top stream but I was put in the middle stream — perhaps it was all those detentions dragging me down.

— 1978-80 —

I was quite happy with the middle stream because my classmates were the best a teenage boy could wish for. I fell in love with a girl in my class in the very first week (more about that later!) and we were all best friends (almost everyone — sorry, David) and we hung out together all the time. Birthday parties on Saturday night with a bottle of cider and a Party Six of Watney’s. Ice Skating in Queensway on Sundays. We even took the train for a day trip to Margate (John’s mum didn’t trust him to take the train on his own and we caught her watching over us as far as Dartford). Most of us boys went to the Good News Christian summer camp at Winchester School where we spent a week singing Jesus songs and getting up to mischief. I’m still friends with several of my classmates 40 years later and we still meet up for a beer occasionally.

We were a lovely bunch on the whole but we often found a way to push our teachers to the edge and beyond. For the good teachers, we were well-behaved. On the first day with Mr Carlisle, we were our usual unruly selves when we entered the room but Mr Carlisle made us all go out and come back one by one in silence. We were never unruly again. At the other extreme was Mrs Timm. Mrs Timm would drone on about the English Reformation or the Industrial Revolution and no one paid even a smidgeon of attention to her. We took a cassette recorder to her class one time and recorded the lesson. The whole period was just mayhem with everyone talking and walking around the room while Mrs Timm droned on and on. I wonder if all her classes were like ours or if we were just especially unkind to her. I wonder what her memories of teaching are like.

During this period, I still did some of the assigned homework. I’ve always loved history but Mrs Timm managed to make everything so grey and tedious. We had a history essay for homework every week but I never scored more than 4 or 5 out of 20. Except once when we had an essay on Lord Nelson and I got 19½ out of 20. I got 19½ for an essay on Captain Cook the week after too. But I went back to getting 4 or 5 out of 20 for the rest of the year. Why did I do this? I don’t know. From the very beginning, I wanted to be myself and demonstrating that I could get any grade I wanted seemed important to me. Most days, I just didn’t want to.

Several teachers had a way of getting our attention. More than a few had perfect aim with a blackboard eraser thrown at the head of any student not paying attention. Mr Williams would slam his metre-long ruler down across your desk and if you didn’t move your fingers fast enough… too bad. “Basher” Lewis slammed Martin’s face down into the bench in biology and he beat me and Paul around the head over and over and over until half the class were in tears. The Terrible Mr Gooden deserves his own story

Poor Miss Furey was the only teacher that we broke entirely. Miss Furey was quite young, probably new to teaching and our class wasn’t the easiest class to learn the teacher’s trade in. I was often the culprit and spent much of her class writing “Le silence aide le travail.” two hundred times in the corridor outside her classroom. But that day it wasn’t me. It wasn’t even Paul.

I remember the usual mayhem — similar to the mayhem that Mrs Timm enjoyed — until Martin looked out of the window and shouted, “Look at that!”. The whole class ran over to look and there was nothing that poor Miss Furey could do to regain control. She just broke down. She burst into tears, ran out of the classroom and didn’t come back for several days. I like to think we were kinder to her after that; and after several of us got the cane though not, as I recall, the people responsible for Ms Furey’s breakdown.

Although I was innocent on this occasion, I usually wasn’t. I was certainly in the Top Two Naughtiest Boys in the Class and the other naughty boy, Paul, got sent to prison. But Paul did some really bad stuff while I was merely naughty. Most people from my school days still remember me as the naughty one — but I never hurt anyone and I never damaged anything or carved my name on the desk. I certainly never broke any laws. I just didn’t like being told what to do, especially by teachers.

I liked to make people laugh too. In the first few years of school, each class had to put on a play for the drama festival. My class chose a comedy about two football hooligans who were always in trouble with the law. Guess who played the hooligans!

It was about this time that my refusal to do homework became a problem. Julie and I were put on Homework Report which meant our teachers had to record every homework assignment on a card and sign it. Then our parents had to sign it. Then we had to come to school 30 minutes early to show our completed homework to Mr Durbin, the Head of the Second and Third Year. I found the homework easy so I didn’t stay on Homework Report for very long and I was soon back to my old ways.

At the end of every term, we were given a report card and Julie and I took turns to come last in our class of 30 students. But when the end-of-year exams came around, I came top or thereabouts in nearly every exam. I won a prize for my exam results and bought a book on computer programming with the book voucher. That was the book that changed my life.

My history exam became something of a legend because I answered every question as a joke. In the essay question about the Suffragettes, I wrote how the Suffragettes were a bunch of silly women who didn’t do as their husbands told them. The teacher marking my essay wrote STUPID BOY! in huge letters diagonally across the page in red ink and gave me a zero. In the question about religion in the Reformation, I said that Raquel Welch was a Buddhist. Why did I do this? Who knows? I probably thought it was funny at the time. I think Martin still has my essay.

Luckily for me, after the third year, we were allowed to drop all the subjects we didn’t want to continue. I dropped history, geography, music and art.

After the end-of-year exams every year, we had two or three weeks where we had no work to do. Instead, we brought games to school or went outside to play football. Except, at the end of the third year (age 14), I didn’t.

Our physics teacher, Ms McDonnell, was also new and inexperienced and she was a terrible teacher. She was also out sick a lot and we usually had a substitute teacher who didn’t know any physics. In the end-of-year exam, no one in the class scored more than 34% — except John who got 57%. I got an A. Ms McDonnell accused me of cheating and reported me to Mr Gooden who asked to see my workbooks. I had done maybe three pages of classwork and zero homework for the whole year. Mr Gooden knew I had not cheated because I also came first in chemistry, biology and maths but he was angry that I had done no work during the year. As a punishment, he made me spend those fun last three weeks doing physics instead of playing outside with my friends.

Mr Gooden made me sit at the back of his Sixth Form chemistry class to do the work that I had skipped. He was quizzing his class to prepare them for their A-levels (A-levels are the exams that determine which university you go to).

Gooden: “What’s the by-product of fermentation?

Silence. No one knows.

Gooden: Kevin?
Me: Carbon Dioxide, sir.
Gooden: Well done.

Gooden: What is the carbon dioxide used for?

Silence.

Gooden: Kevin?
Me: To pressurise the kegs, sir.
Gooden: Good.

This went on for several days. I knew all the answers and they didn’t seem to know any. My Dad had bought me an American college textbook on organic chemistry for Christmas that year. I could’ve easily done A-level chemistry when I was 14 but that wasn’t an option. The only option was four more years of boredom and getting the cane.

— 1980-82 —

For the next two years of school, I did practically zero work and I never took a book home — not even once. Still, when the final exams — O-levels — came around, I came first or thereabouts in most subjects and won another prize. I shared the top spots with three other students — Alison, Corrine and Roger — and they all went to Oxford and got their names in gold lettering on the wood panelling in the school lobby. I quit school and joined the Navy where I thought I’d get more of a challenge.

— 1982-86 —

Ha! What a joke that was. The academic work in the Navy was so easy that I felt like my brain was rotting (though we had plenty of other challenges).

— 2024 —

Epilogue
I am finally doing the degree that I should have done forty years ago but now my brain is rotting for real. I wonder if I’ll finish my degree in time.

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