Scribblings - Diary of a Mud Writer (Aged 10)

Just as I was about to enter high school, we lived in a small council house, the sort of house only a child could live in. As one of four brothers, it was a tight squeeze, but we just about made it.

In fact, I went back to visit the house when I turned 20 years old. That was when I discovered that houses shrink in the rain. It was the only excuse I could think of. The stairs were so small and the rooms so tiny that it could not have been the same place where I recreated the Battle of the Bulge, which as anyone knows requires a great deal of space.

Anyway, I still remember vivid details about how the house looked when I lived there. . . .

The front room was decorated in that tragic style of the 1970's, where three walls were one color and the last wall was covered in a bright, garish, horrid bit of wallpaper. I suppose it was an attempt to look stylish, but the wallpaper was to room decoration what 30 inch flares are to dress sense. Still, the front room was always a special place, while the hallway was useful for climbing up the walls.

We had a wash room outside in the back of our council house. Wash rooms are simple brick buildings that are cold, damp, and used for storage. The wash room served another purpose since it doubled as a den and a place to fill our water pistols. The fact that it also contained the freezer and the coal for the fire just made it a better place to hang out.

When I say the wash room was ideal for children, you have to understand that the house had to cope with four brothers, who charged around a lot. We used the all-important sofa as a fort, car, space base, truck and cliff to fall off. The carpet was a mine field generally used to blow up action men, and the fireplace was something you placed your cups of milk on.

In the front room, you would always find a stack of real cheap and nasty green paper. It was a bulk-load purchase for my mother's manual typewriter, a frightening bit of iron work that could ruin a young lad's fingers for all eternity. We never knew where the green paper came from, and I have never seen its like since. I bet we still have a box full of the stuff hanging around somewhere. It was rarely used in the typewriter, more as an endless source of scrap paper for my brothers and I to ruin.

I do know it was magical paper, though. You could take one sheet and be amazed that paper so thin could exist. On the infrequent occasions we did type on it, you could hold the paper up to the window and see where the metal letters and punched holes should go because those areas had no ink. We also had interesting typewriter ribbon. Ribbons were always at least two years out of date before they got used, a clever ruse by my mother to build up hand strength since you were forced to pound harder and harder on the keys before a vestige of sketchy ink appeared on the magic paper. She was cunning like that, my mother.

My elder brother (called Gary, though like all children we had altered his name in stages from "Gary" to "Gaz" and ultimately to "Goo") had joined high school, a dreaded place you went to at the age of 11 or 12. The only thing that you knew about high school was that it involved wearing a uniform, travelling on a bus, getting up very early, and being little once again.

The "being little again" was the thing that really bothered me. You see, I went to a village school, where you were small, you knew the name of every kid, and you knew your place. Everyone lived on the same street more or less, and so all the jostling for position and placement in the pecking order was pretty much secured by the age of 7. So in village school, there were no rules you didnít understand. You knew the best places to fish, where to play football, the fields you could walk through without the farmer getting snotty, and other essential rules of the countryside.

By the time I turned 10, I'd done my three big tests of manhood. I had ridden my bike (no hands) the full five miles to the next town. I had been grouse beating (a foul idea to wear out the kids in the village and allow ignorant farm owners the chance to blow the brains out of small birds). And I had done the 40-foot.

Of all of them, it was the 40-foot that had long filled me with a sense of dread, but the three tests will form a page of my diary for another day. For now, I'll stick to the matter at hand--what it was to worry about high school.

The problem with entering high school is that you're no longer the tallest or eldest, you don't know anyone's name, and you don't know the rules. You go from being confident in your own life to suddenly being a "tiny one" again. Kids you haven't seen since they left the "little school" are suddenly coming up to you and putting you in your place. Yes, going to high school was scary.

Before I was about to enter high school, a new television program had just appeared, a childrenís soap opera called "Grange Hill" based around a London high school. I suppose the producers thought it would be a winner since it dealt with kids' issues, giving them viewing rights to something that adults could not possibly understand. Sadly, the TV show also had another effect, for when you were 10 years old, all you had to go on for facts about high school was this program.

Like any soap it was full of action: we had bullying, stealing, fires, broken promises, teachers up to no good, kids with weapons, broken glass, drug abuse, heavy drinking, parties when parents were not home, and (of course) getting caught. In fact, the show had loads of things which convinced me that high school was to be a torture.

I had a long talk with my body clock. I tried to get it to freeze me at 10. I mean, I could stay at "little school," play football, and never have to worry. Sadly, I couldn't get my body clock to cooperate, and no matter how I tried to avoid it, I knew I would be forced to enter the dreaded high school.

I got my uniform. My mother was pleased, but then, she would be. Donning my uniform was like being forced to go to a christening or family wedding because my mother always got slushy when we wore shirts and ties. Try as I might, I was not allowed a tie that had a bit of elastic, so I would be forced to learn to tie the thing myself. It was that or face the shame of my mum doing up my tie each day before she packed us off to the bus stop.

My entire village got picked up by the bus at a single spot. This lead to the bus stop becoming more than just a place to catch the bus. Indeed, the placement you had around the bus stop marked what type of person you were.

The elder kids got the shelter, where they lounged about--some arm-in-arm with the opposite sex! The "dodgy" ones all stood around the back of the shelter doing terrible things like smoking cigarettes. Smoking was still seen as highly naughty, and beer drinking was off-limits till you hit 15. Looking back, I see it was a golden era compared to today's standards of delinquency. (By the time I left high school, standards of behaviour had gone to bits.)

Our school bus was the work of the devil. Imagine, if you will, a blue double-decker so old that it would not be used on any commercial route. The bus was given a new lease on life carrying just us for the last 10 years. Even sitting in the relative safety of the bus, however, did not exempt anyone from sifting through another person's worth.

The girls owned the back of the bottom deck. There, they talked about pop stars and how immature boys are. Of course, girls held to the line that any boy who was one year above them was somehow transformed from a childish lad to a hunk of man (which meant sometimes a boy might only be 1 month older than the girl but still one year ahead, something the girls sort of never thought about, I guess) . Oddly, the girls' estimation of male maturity increased for every year the boy was above the girl.

I never liked this "childish lads" rule that the girls invented. It appeared to be utterly unfair and totally one-sided. Boys who liked football and acting stupid were "children" and "immature," whereas girls who dressed in mini skirts when it was freezing and spent all their time trying to "go out" with a lad because he was a year older than them somehow managed to pass themselves off as clever.

Still, the girls ruled the bottom-deck in back of the bus. The top deck was mostly a lad's area, and the very back was for the "hard" lads and the smokers. The middle top deck was reserved for the lads who would be the "hard lads" the following year, while the front of the top deck was for the "runts." (Guess where I sat for my first year?)

You know, it's funny. I'm trying to remember some names of school mates, but perhaps recalling names from people at school is a task one should avoid. You see, when you're in school, you know everyone. At school, character traits are more exaggerated. The first person you meet who is a bully leaves an impression on you until . . . well . . . until you go into the real world and found out that the world's full of bullies.

So here I am racking my brains while I try to recall the names of the nice people at school. Sadly, the names causing me the most trouble spring more readily to mind. Why can't you recall the names of nice kids the same way you can recall your best and worst teachers?

You ask anyone to name their favourite or most hated teacher, and they will fire back a name, usually using the formal title "Mr. So and So," or sometimes it's a nickname like "Shoestring," but nine-times-out-of-ten a name will be mentioned. Try that with nice people at school and you get clicking fingers and lots or erms or hmms.

Well, in my case, I do remember the "adult girls" to be people like Cathline Brewer or Alison Crew, the sort of girls who pulled their jumper sleeves over their hands while holding a hanky. They wore short, white socks and ridiculous high heels. They spent their time pointing out how we were "children," then sniggered into their hankies if an older lad came by and said three words to them.

I, on the other hand, spent my time learning the one-hundred-and-one ways to tie my school tie. It appeared that the simple traditional method was not allowed. Instead, you had to do things like reverse-tie it, so that the thin part of the tie was all that could be seen and you tucked the chunky end under your shirt. Or you tried for BIG tie, where the entire thing was about 3-inches long and wider that your neck, anything to avoid a normal tie. The best person I ever found for this was Graham Holt, who invented all sorts of tie systems: he took a pin and unpicked the white threads from his tie; he turned it inside out and wore it as a statement; he even added tiny patches to it. Yes, back then, even brainless people managed to impress me.