What
little confidence I had in Gillingham manager Basil Hayward disappeared
completely when he sold Carl Gilbert to Bristol Rovers. I was sorry to see Carl
go, but in good cheer I set off for the match against
Gillingham
6
Six! Yes, six! And Bailey got a hat trick. Yes, the much derided Ray Bailey! And the day’s programme notes showed Upbury old boys Geoff Bray and Graham Knight were making their mark in the reserves.
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At school...
I was pleased with the collapsible bookshelf I’d completed in woodwork. That’s how I described it to Paul, who was tickled by the description. It fell short of collapsing, but it was wonky enough to wobble thirty degrees either side. Handy for putting against an uneven wall, I thought.
It was 4A1’s turn to do assembly. The theme was loneliness. The whole class had to stand on the steps at the front of the stage and sing Eleanor Rigby. And Richard Pascall, who’d parted his hair in the middle for his role as Father McKenzie, had to sing a solo – a miserable dirge of a song called In Sympathy. Though I was there, I didn’t feel part of it. I didn’t know all the words to Eleanor Rigby and I knew nothing of Richard’s solo spot until it happened, but then I wouldn’t, because while Mister Fisk had been putting the class through rehearsals during RE lessons, I’d been alone in the canteen.
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‘Look after them, they’re yours to keep,’ Miss Rotherham had said in our early days at Upbury. I hadn’t just looked after my hymn book; I’d treasured it as the keepsake it was meant to be.
Missing assembly twice a week to attend Catholic prayers meant my hymn book hadn’t suffered the wear and tear others had. Some Hymn Books, particularly those belonging to the boys, were shabby and falling apart, even before certain elements thought it’d be fun to rip people’s hymn books up, just for a laugh.
Another day, another assembly missed… after Catholic prayers with Mister Carroll, I returned to the 4A1 classroom to collect my books before going off to the first lesson… and was sickened when I opened my desk and saw what was left of my hymn book.
~
Our classroom was no longer a happy place. The joy and innocence of previous years had gone and a dark cloud descended when one of the lads made a big mistake. Some money went missing from a shop where he worked a paper round; when the police turned up to question him at school, other lads were implicated. It wasn’t the best of times.
Whatever the future held, my time at Upbury was coming to an end with Easter looking likely. With no sense of belonging, purpose or direction, I drifted into the exams, making little effort to revise.
There was no need to revise for Art. Art was something I just sat down and did in a peaceful, contented hour. The exam was no different.
Ron
Chadwick spent a lot of time in Mister Brown’s Art room that year. Fifth years had
that privilege, it seemed, if they were focused on a particular subject. Sometimes
we’d see him having a word with Mister Brown; otherwise he just melted into the
background. Ron was an intriguing character. A year older than us, I’d been
aware of him since the early days when I was a wide eyed new kid and he was in
the second year. A leader on and off the sports pitches, he was someone I
looked up to from a respectable distance, as a king of the lower school
playground.
Three years on, Chadwick the sportsman had become something completely different. He was now Chadwick the long haired art student and an immensely talented one, I realised, on the morning he came down from the top deck of our bus when it pulled into the depot. As I’d never seen him on our bus before, seeing him standing there with a well wrapped drawing board under his arm was a big surprise. In anticipation of the bus doors opening, he stepped forward and for a moment, the covering on his drawing board flapped open, revealing the top half of a pencil portrait of John Lennon. I was stunned. It wasn’t just good, it was absolutely brilliant.
A pencil drawing of a monstrous head on legs was my choice for the art exam. Such was the product of my fourteen year old imagination. When the legs didn’t look right I gave it tentacles, giving it the appearance of a mutant hairy octopus. With gnashing teeth and crazy paved eyes, it was coming on well when I heard Mister Brown whispering to someone behind me.
‘Yeah, that’s good,’ Ron Chadwick replied. I didn’t acknowledge them or even turn around. I just stared at my drawing and waited for them to move on, afraid to touch it in case I made a mistake in front of them. Outwardly, I might have appeared calm but inside, I was bursting with pride.
My exam results were so bad that the average mark credited to me in RE was one of my better results. From a position of comfort in the A1 steam – a position that had never been under threat – I’d dropped like a stone, finishing second to bottom of the class.
Bloody hell, I didn’t expect that.
I well knew the consequences of finishing so low. The bottom two regularly got demoted, sometimes three. It didn’t help that Brian Lack, who’d mucked about all term and looked an absolute cert to finish bottom, had ducked out of the exams.
Blast!
I only had myself to blame. As Christmas neared I waited for the axe to fall and put me out of my misery. I dearly wanted to see out my time at Upbury in the A1 stream, but as disastrous as my school report had been, there’d been no mention of demotion and while Mister Fisk remained silent, I had a straw to clutch. I was still clutching it when we broke up for the holiday.
Dad didn’t
kick up over my bad report. Since he’d decreed I was leaving school anyway,
perhaps he wasn’t bothered. If he read it, he never said, and I wasn’t going to
ask.
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