The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  Jean-Claude also took me to a party in a nearby house, local families, with quite a few teenagers, girls and boys. They danced a funny way, none of the quicksteps and valetas we did at our church youth club dances. They were mad on ‘le bebop’, which seemed to be their version of jazz. They also loved sloppy romantic ballads such as ‘La Mer’, which I quite liked as well. I even got Jean-Claude to teach me all the words – managing to pronounce most of them without too much of a Carlisle accent.

  None of the girls would speak to me, dance with me, or even look at me. I was left to my own devices, a little roast-beefy wallflower, while he bebopped. I couldn’t really understand this. When I had taken Jean-Claude around Carlisle and up to Glasgow, my friends and relations had all made a big fuss of him, making him the centre of attention. But in France, as a foreign visitor, I did not exist. His parents were kind enough, though neither spoke English. I was mainly ignored. In a big farmhouse, on a big estate, they probably hardly registered I was staying with them.

  Thinking back, we were rather in awe of French culture throughout the 1950s. They had arty films made by directors like Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. I remember queuing at the City Picture House to see La Ronde. We thought all French films were intellectual and sophisticated, compared with the silly, corny English films, with Will Hay or George Formby, and even the Ealing comedies which were thought to be good at the time. French films had sexy stars, such as Bardot and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

  They also had all those philosophers and intellectuals like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who wore fashionable black and looked ever so, well, philosophical. And writers like Albert Camus. We had no English authors who were remotely contemporary. Nobody later than Dickens seemed to exist. Not to mention all that wine and food, South of France sun and romance. I think we Brits felt rather inferior by comparison, while they seemed to us arrogant and superior. And they were.

  You didn’t hear then the French being worried about the influence of the English language, replacing so many of their words, or English fashions and pop music dominating French culture. If anything, they thought our culture was pretty pathetic. No wonder the girls wouldn’t dance with me. That was my considered wisdom, after two brief visits, unable to speak the language.

  In the autumn term of 1952, aged sixteen, I presented myself at the main entrance of Carlisle Grammar School. This in itself was an enormous privilege. Only the sixth-formers were allowed to use the front entrance. Even those in the fifth remove, who had been at the school just as long, were relegated to a rear entrance.

  That main entrance was not as ivy-covered as I had imagined from afar, passing on the other side of the street for the last five years. Nor was the actual building all that ancient, more mock-Gothic Victorian, built in 1885.

  But the school itself was tremendously old, much older than Eton. It dated back to AD 685 when St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, visited Carlisle and founded both a school and a church. For the next 900 years, the school continued in the grounds of the cathedral, occupying buildings on West Walls, some of which are part of the diocesan offices to this day. It was in 1883 that Carlisle Grammar School moved to its new handsome building on Strand Road.

  It modelled itself on the public school system, as did all our ancient grammar schools in towns all over the country. Some did charge fees, if they had a preparatory department – which CGS did until just before I arrived. One of the friends I had made through Reg was Mike Thornhill, the son of a dentist. He had been at the prep department before he entered the grammar school itself. I was most impressed. I had never met anyone who had been educated privately.

  Most towns in England, even of a modest size, had an ancient grammar school, used by the local quality, such as solicitors and tradespeople, charging small fees, but there were also scholarships and free places for less well-off children, as most of these old grammar schools had charitable funds. William Wordsworth went to Hawkshead, a small, remote grammar school in Lakeland, yet every year it sent pupils to Cambridge. One of them, Wordsworth’s big brother Richard, ended up as master of Trinity College.

  I don’t think any Old Carliols – as our ex-pupils were known – became as famous as the Wordsworths, but over the centuries, according to the noticeboard in the hall, many pupils had won open scholarships to both Oxford and Cambridge and some gone on to be bishops and MPs.

  In the 1950s, the school still considered itself on the level of a public school. The headmaster, V.J. Dunstan, a classics scholar, was a member of the Headmasters’ Conference, which was the association for public school heads. He floated around the entrance hall in his gown, a rather eccentric, abstracted figure, often followed by his wife who would be shouting things at him. They seemed to have accommodation somewhere in the school.

  Not long ago, I noticed a 1913 poster for sale at Sotheby’s in an auction of football memorabilia. It was entitled ‘Football Colours of Our Public Schools’. It showed ninety-six football caps from ninety-six different public schools, including Eton, Harrow, St Paul’s, Winchester. And, blow me, there on the top line was a football cap marked ‘CGS 1912–13’ and below it the name Carlisle. The colours were black and yellow, the same school colours that were there when I arrived. So it was true, we had been considered a public school at one time.

  The staff all wore gowns, most were Oxbridge graduates, the forms had Latin names. There was even a tuck shop, as in Billy Bunter. There had been a cadet corps, but that had recently gone.

  I went straight into the sixth form, not lingering and loitering in the fifth remove for a year, which had been threatened. It was called Lower VI Alpha Modern. This meant you were doing arts subjects. There was a science sixth and also a classics sixth, though that was quite small. Lower VI Alpha Modern contained twenty-three pupils.

  I was to do A-levels in English, history and geography. We also all did a general science course, encouraged by the education authorities, as the government did not want too much specialisation by sixth-formers, divorcing arts students from the sciences, and scientists from the arts. Was this due to C.P. Snow going on about the ‘two cultures’? I have just looked it up and he gave his famous lecture in Cambridge in 1959, warning that if science became too separated from the humanities we would never solve the world’s problems. Or something like that. This worry was doubtless in the air some years before Snow started wittering on. Most theories are, before someone pins it down and becomes associated with it.

  Apart from my three A-levels, and general science, I was doing French O-level again, resitting it, hence the exchange. But then I found there was another exam hurdle to be overcome, which I had not expected. In the 1950s, to get into a half-decent university, so I was informed, and study for an arts degree, you had to have O-level Latin. None of us from the Creighton had ever studied Latin. I don’t think we were asked our opinion. Latin just appeared on our timetable. I presume they decided we could all cope, which is why we had been allowed to go straight into the sixth form. But I was not so sure. How could we fit it all in?

  I had always considered Brian and Alistair swots, neat bastards, not like me. They would knuckle down to all their studies, do what they were told, follow the rules and guidelines. I never considered myself academic in any way, it was all a drag; my object was to get away with as little as possible, without being stroppy or bolshie or drawing attention to myself.

  We found ourselves down for Latin with Mr Hodges, who took the three of us from the Creighton in his own time, when he had a free period, starting us from scratch. We did not sit in a proper classroom, as they were all being used, but crouched in a little cubbyhole storeroom miles up at the top of the old building. Mr Hodges, who had a little walrus moustache like Captain Mainwaring, realised we would never be as good at Latin as others in the sixth form who had been studying it for five years. So he worked out that we had to learn the basics, quickly, then memorise all the set texts, which was mainly Tacitus. The set texts provided half your marks, so if you could memorise as m
uch as possible, even without understanding a lot of it, you had a chance of scraping through the exam. The theory was good, but as you were only aiming to attempt little more than half the syllabus, it was easy to come a cropper.

  Mr Hodges was incredibly kind and helpful and patient, as was Mr Watson, the French teacher, and also Gerry Lightfoot, one of the English teachers. But I felt most of the other teachers had no interest in me. They didn’t know who the three new boys in their classes were, our personalities and skills, such as they were, and nothing of course of our school career so far, whereas they had known everyone else in our class from the age of eleven. One or two clearly felt we were a lesser breed, coming from a lesser school, so how could we be much good?

  The main English teacher, Adrian Barnes, always seemed to me so superior, disdainful, giving a sort of sarcastic, sideways sneer, when I attempted any answers or gave him my pathetic essays. Perhaps I imagined it all. Reg and all my other friends who had been at the school from the first year loved Barnes, admired his brain and his cleverness and attitude, said how nice he was, once you got to know him. He did strike me as clever, too clever, as if he thought he should be an Oxbridge tutor, not a grammar school teacher, especially of boys who had not even had the benefit of a grammar school education.

  Socially and culturally, I never felt at all out of it. I was accepted straight away by all the boys in the sixth form, was on their wavelength, but I sensed Brian and Alistair might perhaps have felt a bit on the fringes. It was mainly due to my long-term friendship with Reg. That gave me an entrée, which had made me part of his group while I was still at the Creighton. Many of them had been at Stanwix with me, which was considered the best, most middle-class primary school.

  Reg was the star, the one everyone admired, not because he was the cleverest academically but because he was clearly the most original, most talented, who was witty and could write amusingly. He edited the Sixth Form Debating Society Magazine which sounded official, but it was a homemade, duplicated and stapled few sheets, with drawings and stories and jokes, like an early Private Eye. There was an official school magazine, The Carliol, edited by one of the teachers, but this was incredibly boring and banal, even though it was professionally printed and glossily produced. Reg had even got the school secretary to duplicate the sheets in the office, at the school’s expense, on the office Cyclostyle, one of those monster machines with stencils, a handle and ink flying all over the place. Your hands got black just looking at it. I don’t think the staff twigged many of the references or hidden obscenities. We all thought it was marvellous, so subversive and funny – for a school in 1952. I never contributed any articles. I just admired it. I didn’t think I could ever write as well or as amusingly as Reg.

  The cleverest boy was Dicky Wilson, who knew everything, understood everything, from politics to science and economics, all things I knew nothing about, and could speak several foreign languages, when I couldn’t even pass one. Some of them he had taught himself. During that first year in the sixth, while still only seventeen, Dicky won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford. Despite being a superstar for his cleverness, he was popular, well liked, didn’t think he was anything special, not a show-off, aloof or arrogant – unlike a couple of boys in the classics sixth, who considered themselves the chosen ones, clearly heading for Oxbridge.

  Lower down the school, the all-star legends, as in all boys’ schools, were of course the sports stars – the captain of the first XV rugby team, or the cricket XI, natural athletes who had been heroes all through their school years. Everyone wanted to be them and, naturally, they seemed to get the girls. This had been evident at Creighton as well.

  But in the grammar sixth form I began to sense a change. The arty set, led by Reg, who were interested in artistic things, music and drama, writing poetry and satire, they had their own following and were if anything more admired than the heavies, the jocks, the rugger buggers.

  I find it hard to believe now, but during my two years in the sixth form I did become really keen on classical music. Reg and I went on our bikes twice to the Edinburgh Festival, attended classical concerts, watching famous violinists, like Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. We even queued up for Hamlet. There was another boy in our group, Brian Donaldson, who had family in Edinburgh, so we all stayed with them. Reg and I shared a bed.

  We planned to go down to London together for the Proms, but at the last minute Reg couldn’t make it, nor could anyone else. I went off on my own, all the way to London, hitchhiking down. I booked into a youth hostel and every morning went off to the Albert Hall and queued all day for tickets for the concerts. Was that really me? Did I really enjoy it? I don’t recognise me at all. At least I could read music, so all my years of learning, or failing to learn, the violin had not been wasted. And I did love watching and hearing all the great violinists doing it properly, playing the famous violin concertos by Beethoven, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, all of which I knew, the best bits anyway. Sibelius was my fave.

  I also learned to play chess and took part in plays. Both of these were relatively short phases. Led by Reg and some of the Stanwix-based sixth-formers, we started our own drama group, rehearsing in the Miles MacInnes Hall in Stanwix. I was useless. Couldn’t act for toffee. But when you are in a group, you all take part in whatever is the new craze, until it becomes the old craze.

  Perhaps the most surprising thing that happened during the sixth form was that I started to play rugby. At the Creighton, I had been excused games from the first year, standing around with the drips and the useless. When I first began at the grammar school I decided it was a chance to change. I could be a new me. There would be new people, new masters, who didn’t know me. They didn’t know I was a weakling who didn’t play games. I could be anything I wanted.

  So I decided to play rugby. Although I was in with the arty set, we were not anti-sport. Games were compulsory, so we all had to do them, but deciding to do them properly became a new game, a new obsession, like classical music. Giving it a go, I suppose. It was easy for Reg to throw himself into rugby, being very tall and fearless, if without much skill. And for the others in our group, like Mike, all of them huge. Harder for me, being a weed.

  I worked out that if a small, weedy player tackled a big player, when the big player fell to the ground he would do more damage to himself than the small player, having further to fall and being heavier. And it worked. I became a demon tackler. By the end of my first year in the sixth I had made the school’s second XV.

  On my report at the end of the year, it didn’t give places or percentages, just grades. I see I got an A in history, B in geography, B in English. ‘Steady improvement’ is what they mainly wrote. In Latin, I got an AB. ‘Has made sound progress’, so Mr Hodges wrote, giving his initials as R.G.H.

  The report stated, under out-of-school activities, that I was a member of the debating society, the gramophone club and the school orchestra. The summing-up comments at the bottom of the report were not as pleasing; in fact, they were rather worrying. ‘He is working steadily but he must give serious attention to certain shortcomings,’ wrote the form master, whose name I can’t read. The headmaster, Mr Dunstan, wrote: ‘B+ He will need to make a big effort next term.’

  I don’t remember ever talking to the headmaster, so what did he know? I put it down to prejudice.

  French was not listed on that report – for the simple reason that at the end of my first year in the lower sixth, at Christmas time, I had retaken the exam – and passed it. Oh rapture. The second year would be more testing. As well as three A-level exams in the summer, hanging over me and coming up at Christmas time was my Latin O-level. Would there be any time for personal pleasures and amusements?

  14

  WOMEN AND WORK

  I think I must have lied about some of those activities, such as the debating society, or greatly exaggerated them, and been affected and pretentious when I was going to plays and classical concerts and playing chess. I�
�m sure my main concerns were more on the lines of wine, women and song. Okay, not the last one, as I can’t sing. Nor wine, now I think about it, as I never drank wine during my school years. As for women, we didn’t have them either in the 1950s, only in our dreams. But you can be concerned about certain things without ever participating in them.

  Drinking was a concern, or at least a challenge, for any teenagers at the time, as supermarkets and shops did not sell booze and pubs would chuck you out if they suspected you were not eighteen. I turned seventeen in 1953, but I still looked about thirteen. At least I had moved into long trousers, which I thought I would never manage. All my friends, like Reg and Mike, had been in long ’uns for ages, but I don’t think I went into them till I was fourteen. In photos of me in France with the school, aged fifteen, I am wearing long trousers, but I can’t have been in them for long.

  The agony of getting a drink in Carlisle as a teenager was made worse than most places because of the State Management Scheme. This was a unique situation begun in 1916 to control and limit mass drunkenness during the First World War among the Gretna munitions workers, most of whom used to come into Carlisle and wreck the place. According to Lloyd George, more harm was done to the war effort by the drinking than all of the German submarines. So what the government did was nationalise all the pubs and breweries in the local area, bringing them under state control. It was supposed to be just for the duration of war, but it carried on, for decades, right throughout my lifetime in Carlisle, and did not end till 1973. Lots of new pubs were built, in a distinctive style, now praised by architects, and they hired an excellent chief architect, Harry Redfern. The local pub where my father drank, the Redfern, was named after him. The pubs were mostly cheerless but the big attraction was that the drink was relatively cheap. It was all their own State Management brand, from the beers to the whisky.