R

‘We will now sing hymn number thirty.’

Bloody hell not that one again.

Morning Has rotten Broken. I was sick of it.

At the end of assembly Diane Oakenful was given a round of applause and presented with a certificate for gaining her latest belt in judo. Diane, a short chunky girl from Twydall, had been in my class in junior school and though we rarely exchanged a word, I liked her and always looked upon her as one of ours. It pleased me to see her doing well, but this was her fifth, sixth or even seventh visit to the stage for a judo certificate and it wasn’t half getting monotonous.

Another regular on stage was Mervyn Brameld. A fifth year boy and a cousin of Helene Martin, Mervyn was the golden boy of the track and cross country, winning races all over the place. Mervyn had a style of his own; wearing his tie longer than anyone else and walking with a lazy, loping stride that made his head bob up and down. In winning his races, he must have moved a bloody sight faster than he ever walked to the stage.

Others rarely appeared in the limelight but when they did they made a lasting impression. One such kid was Brian Mirza. He impressed everyone when he played guitar on stage and sang The Gypsy Rover. How that came about I don’t know, but I admired his nerve and his talent.

Sometimes it was the subject that stuck in the mind and not the performer, as happened when someone – possibly Jeremy Brougham, who was no stranger to the stage himself – recited a poem about a cavy.

What’s one of them?

 A cavy is another name for a guinea pig, I learned. ‘Sleep well little cavy, sleep well,’ went the poem – very touching.

Matthew Hewison was impressed enough to copy the poem and pass it off as his English homework. He’d have got away with it and earned himself a good mark too, if Mister Porter hadn’t been in the habit of reading the best stuff to the class.

‘Here’s a good one… a poem by Matthew.’

The opening lines sounded very familiar. Confused faces around the classroom suggested others thought so too. ‘Sleep well little cavy, sleep well,’ nailed it. The whole class was in uproar. Jane Taylor, sitting in front of Matthew, was quick to spin round on her chair and lead the condemnation, giving Matthew the full sneer.

Realising he’d been had, Mister Porter stopped reading. Though he did his best to put on a brave face and lock the stable door after the horse had bolted, his challenge to the squirming Matthew was comical. ‘Thought you could pull a fast one on me, eh Hewison?’

Music

Miss Rotherham introduced us to opera. Bizet’s Carmen made a welcome change from listening to the Planet’s Suite and wasn’t half as bad as I expected. She was flogging a dead horse with some of us though, when she had the class sing the sharply rising ‘I will go to my friend Lillas Pastia!’ at a speed my lips couldn’t keep up with.

History

I liked Mister Askew and I liked History, but I was sick of Kings and rotten Queens. I did not want to hear about the monarchy, Oliver Cromwell or the treachery of that nasty Catholic Guy Fawkes. I wanted to hear about World War I, World War II and great battles of the empire.

Maths

Mister Rye had us doing sines, cosines and tangents. As usual, Davinder shone. As difficult as maths could be, nothing perplexed me more than the R Mister Rye used when marking a correct answer. He marked a wrong answer with a conventional cross, so why the mysterious R? And what did it stand for, did it mean right, or Rye, or something else?

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘Sod off, you ask him.’