Tom Purdew Pt.4 - Teachers

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We have to wear caps when we're in uniform.

And if we are in uniform but outside the school, we are required to doff said caps to teachers, parents and governors.
For a kid just starting grammar school, who wouldn't know a governor from a hole in the ground, this is a bit daunting.
We do, however, miss having to wear gowns by one year. Which is a bit of a swizz, because they're great for playing Batman.

The Big School is huge, like a scary city, with places we're forbidden to enter and others we're just plain terrified of. Our little gang gets lost for the first few weeks. We get bullied. We get yelled at and hit by the teachers and præfects (yes, Latin is mandatory to O level) for just standing there looking confused.

The teachers' corporal punishment armoury is formidable. There's the cane, of course. And Mister White has his slipper; Messrs. Montacute and Fosdyke are all too ready with a heavy wooden blackboard eraser to the head. There are rulers to the hands, chalk thrown at the head, all manner of slaps and punches to head and body … and Mrs. Gardner, the deputy head, rules by sheer pants-wetting terror.

Oddly, nobody is afraid of Old Slump, the half-dead headmaster who sleeps, toad-like in his study all day. He is a master of delegation.

For a kid who has been teacher's pet in primary school and shoved forward a year for being a girly swot, the Big School is a real smack in the face with reality. Suddenly there are other kids smarter than me. There is a pecking order and I'm not at the top.
Arse!

The teachers come in two basic flavours:
Flavour one is the old guard. Hardened and embittered old disciplinarians; they will all retire when we leave after our seven year sentences as the school is due to become a "comprehensive" under education reforms and will be filled with filthy little oiks.
The old guard are determined to take it out on the last year of grammar school kids … us.
Flavour two is the young, wide-eyed and innocent wave of liberal, anti-corporal punishment, caring educators. We love their classes for the first few years; it is only after we realise they haven't the balls to beat good grades into us that we start to turn against them.

I find as the years pass that the most terrifying and the harshest teachers are the ones I come to like and respect far more than the wishy-washy drips who let us run riot.
In fact, in my final year as a præfect I am best friends with the child-eating gorgon Mrs. Gardner who, as I've said before, shares a passion for avant-garde music, lets me wear my hair long and wear my dope-stinking old afghan coat, and lets my rock band play school concerts (unheard of back then, when guitar was not allowed in music class).
And I get through all seven years without being caned once …

Special mention in the teaching awards goes to:

Miss Mc.Carthy (English Grammar) and Miss Jackson (French). A couple of elderly spinsters of uncertain sexual proclivities, who share a small bungalow in the town and who make an excellent cup of tea for a student who has been out gigging all week and so needs to be watched over (at their bungalow) while he catches up on his homework.
Miss Jackson is ex. French Resistance and goes understandably apeshit at any mention of Germany; which must be uncomfortable in the modern languages staffroom …
Miss Mc.Carthy is without a doubt the best teacher I have ever had. Bless her wrinkly old stockings. She instils in me a love of books, a love of learning and a pedantry beyond all reason.

"Fifi" Harcourt; another elderly French mistress and apparently a bit of a goer in the nineteen-twenties. Imagine Margaret Rutherford after being dead twenty years, yet behaving in an unnervingly frisky and flirty manner, and you will get Fifi.

Bernie Culpin; the only one of the new breed to garner any respect from me, probably for introducing me to the Communist Party; though marks deducted for not accepting an essay on John Lennon and the peace movement (JL is very much alive at the time, and so not of "historical significance").

Mr. Phillips; for seducing Andy P. and getting kicked out (not for the seduction, but for the brazen flaunting of their relationship).

Mr. Stuart, a Scotsman madder than Old Knudsen, who makes a damned good athlete out of me by shouting a lot and hitting my shins with a hockey stick (his constant companion).

Mr. Grove (Religious Education); for producing more kids than he actually teaches. We all feel sorry for his poor, permanently pregnant wife.

And finally, Miss Moore, Head of Art (Hi, Priscilla), the micro-skirted and admittedly hot school tart; for leaving her knickers hanging on the mirror of her sports car, and for leaving me in sole charge of the art department all through my final two years while she fucks her way assiduously through the sixth form register; which results in
(a) me winning the school art prize and
(b) copious sex with Judith F in the art office …

Happy days? I honestly can't remember …