Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  Young as I was, I knew there was a certain social cachet attached to the grammar school uniform. The caps and blazers showed the difference between success and failure. It was visible to all. People regarded these young women off to the convent high school on the bus to Sheffield, or boys on their way to the boys’ grammar school, or the Rotherham high school girls walking through the town centre, rather differently from other students. Their uniforms, visible to all, showed which school they attended. They looked a cut above and sometimes acted so.

  I imagined that I too would go to such a school as Notre Dame, so strikingly different from the Juniors, where everything was exact and ordered, so my disappointment was great when I discovered I would be attending the ugly red brick building near the town centre which I had passed many times. It was like a featureless factory, high and square, with its row of uniform windows.

  In Rotherham, with its large population of ‘baby-boomers’, the number of children going on to the one boys’ grammar and one girls’ high school was relatively low. Those who are great champions of the selection of children at the age of eleven perhaps do not really appreciate that the secondary modern school never came close to achieving the parity of esteem with the grammar in any way. In many secondary modern schools the expectation of the students was low. I have met so many ‘Eleven Plus failures’ who believed themselves, on the strength of a test taken when they were eleven, to be on the educational scrapheap destined for the menial jobs in society, or at best going into apprenticeships. Certainly higher education was not considered an option for them.

  The curriculum at the secondary modern was significantly different from that in the grammar schools. It was unashamedly non-academic. Of course there were exceptions, but in general there would be no academic rigour, the emphasis being on practical subjects like cookery, housecraft, metalwork, woodwork, rural studies and technical drawing. No modern language was on offer, and the students would not sit the school certificate at the end of their school careers and would leave for work at the age of fifteen.

  Secondary moderns had few of the facilities of the grammar schools. I used to walk up Moorgate to Boston Park, past Rotherham Grammar School, and marvel at the great ornate gothic-style building set in well-tended lawns, with its great curving drive leading to the impressive entrance. The cricket square was as smooth and green as a billiard table, the rugby and football pitches were free of mud patches and skid marks, the touchlines freshly marked, clean and straight. It looked to me like a stately home. How different it was from the school I would attend.

  Looking back, I don’t harbour any bitterness or indignation over failing the Eleven Plus. I don’t wear my lack of success at eleven on my sleeve like some people I have met, who feel angry to have been labelled less able at such a young age. The fact is that at that time, under those circumstances, there were children who were cleverer and who performed better in the test than I. That is a fact of life. I was a perfectly average boy in possession of a perfectly average intelligence. Having brooded for a week after the results, moping about the house and looking miserable, I was taken aside by my father, who told me to put it behind me and get on with my life. He knew I was bright enough and had the potential to do well at the secondary modern and I should show everyone I could succeed. And so I learnt early on that failure is a part of growing up, and if, as I was encouraged to by my parents, a person has a healthy attitude towards failure and uncertainty, he or she can create, innovate and strive to achieve.

  33

  Thinking over what gave me the most pleasure in my childhood, I should place first and foremost reading. My mother, a natural storyteller, taught me the nursery rhymes and read to me from picture books. I knew all the old favourites – Chicken Licken, The Gingerbread Man, The Giant Turnip, Rumplestiltskin, The Magic Porridge Pot – and many more before I started school. Most evenings, before I went to bed, she would read aloud with me snuggled up next to her. I loved listening to the story, following the words on the page as she read and feeling that special physical closeness. Sometimes she would change a word, take a bit out or add something, and I could tell and told her so. I might not be able to read those black marks on the page but I knew the stories so well. Later, when the story was told and the light turned off, I would close my eyes and dream of a world peopled with the magical characters I had encountered in the book.

  One of my very first memories was hearing one of Enid Blyton’s Bedtime Stories from the Bible. I can still picture this large red book with shiny pages and garish illustrations, and clearly recall the images of a gentle-faced Jesus with his carefully trimmed beard, snow white cloak and sandals, telling his stories to a group of avid listeners crowded around him. Then came the Noddy books. Even now, sixty or so years later, I still have my collection of Enid Blyton’s stories on my bookshelf. I recall the very first Noddy book I read myself – Hurrah for Little Noddy, the second volume in the twenty-four-book canon. It was a crime story for little ones, in which innocent little Noddy discovers a car heist at Mr Golly’s garage and sets off in hot pursuit of the thieves, only to end up in a head-on collision with a tree. Poor Noddy is blamed for the theft and P.C. Plod takes him to gaol. Predictably it all ends happily, with Noddy vindicated and the villains locked up. There has been much criticism of Enid Blyton, and many educationalists believe children deserve better reading material, but for me, as for many children, her stories had the power to keep me captivated throughout. Everything was there – characters, suspense, pace and action.

  The Noddy books led inexorably on to my reading of Enid Blyton’s other adventures, and I rattled through them at great speed and was quite happy to suspend my disbelief. Of course, the children in the Secret Seven and the Famous Five series were a world away from my own life. For a start they talked differently. You would never catch George and her friends dropping their aitches or speaking in anything other than sentences. They lived in the middle of the country in rambling old houses and thatched cottages, with babbling streams at the bottom of the garden and long lawns and perfectly tended flowerbeds. Their parents were happy, smiling, easy-going folk who never shouted or told them to finish their homework or do any chores. The children had spiffing adventures, discovered treasure, foiled villains and saved lives and then ran home for their lunch. They always seemed to be tucking in.

  They were all very hungry at lunchtime. They went back up the cliff path hoping there would be lots to eat – and there was! Cold meat and salad, plum pie and custard, and cheese afterwards. How the children tucked in!

  ‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ asked George’s mother.

  ‘George is taking us out in a boat to see the wreck on the other side of the island,’ said Anne.

  – Enid Blyton, Five on a Treasure Island (1942)

  Thankfully George’s mother did not live in this day and age or she would be prosecuted for child neglect, allowing the children (minus life-jackets) to take a leaky rowing boat out to a wreck. They can say what they like about Enid Blyton – that her stories are inane, simplistic and unrealistic – but she managed to get me hooked on books.

  My father captured my imagination with his stories. He would bring back books from Rotherham Library or buy a couple of old tattered versions of the classics from the market, taking out his finds from the brown paper carrier bag where they had been hiding between the vegetables and fruit. Once he arrived from the market with a large hard-backed tome called King of the Fighting Scouts, which depicted on the front cover a garish illustration of a soldier on a rearing horse hacking his way through a horde of savages. For several nights my father read a couple of chapters, only to arrive at the denouement to discover that the last few pages of the book were missing. Undeterred, he made the end up.

  My father took over from my mother this nightly ritual of reading to me when I was eight or nine. He would read a chapter or two at a time, ending on a high note and thus whetting my imagination for more. I would be keen for the next instalment th
e following night and be up those stairs in my pyjamas, face washed, teeth brushed, ready and waiting. It was a really clever way of making me go to bed at night. Boys who have had this sort of upbringing, where fathers tell them stories, read to them and associate reading with great pleasure and affection, learn to love books. A magical world is opened up to them.

  Books and reading ‘habituated me to the Vast’, for as a youngster I would disappear up the garden and sit on the old bench behind the greenhouse or in the garden shed, or lie on my stomach on the lawn in the sunshine or hide in the branches of the cherry tree to read. I read even when I was supposed to be working, and in those childhood days I had my heroes and dreamed of how I could imitate their courage and prowess. At night, under the sheets with my torch, I would continue reading despite nudges and grunts from my brother Alec, with whom I shared the old double bed. I would disappear under the covers and enter a world of pirates and smugglers, adventurers and explorers, knights and war heroes. I would go to sleep dreaming of those wonderful adventures. I used to consume authors; when there was one book I really enjoyed, I would go all through his or her works (it was usually a ‘he’) one after the other. At first it would be Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Edith Nesbitt, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame, and then, as I grew older, it would be The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of the New Forest, Robinson Crusoe, Moonfleet, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Rob Roy, Black Beauty, Lorna Doone, Biggles, Kidnapped, The Red Badge of Courage, The Secret Garden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Man in the Iron Mask, Around the World in Eighty Days. I devoured Richmal Crompton, John Buchan, Stephen Crane, Conan Doyle, Georgette Heyer, Rider Haggard, J. Meade Faulkner and Alexandre Dumas.

  The adventures of The Three Musketeers fired my imagination. What daring exploits and what colourful characters: the wicked Milady (with the tell-tale brand on her shoulder), poor Louise de Vallière, the beautiful and romantic Queen Anne, the Machiavellian goatee-bearded Cardinal Richelieu and, of course, the gallant band of musketeers.

  Years later I still read the books of a vastly underrated novelist: H. G. Wells. Few authors can match his brilliance for narrative pacing and suspense, his command of gripping dialogue and his skill at creating that eerie, captivating atmosphere which keeps the reader glued to the page. I read The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr Moreau, in quick succession. These great classics should be on every English curriculum. It was The War of the Worlds that for me towered above the rest. In 1938 Orson Welles turned the novel into a radio show broadcast in the style of a real news report, and so convincing was he that thousands of panic-stricken Americans on the Eastern seaboard deserted their homes in the belief that the Martians had actually landed.

  But my very favourite author is the great R. L. Stevenson. I read Treasure Island over and over again, until the spine fell apart and the pages fell out. It was in my capacity as a school inspector that I was asked to accompany a politician around an infant school. He was a pompous, self-opinionated man who bemoaned the decline in standards of reading. In the lower junior classroom he asked the eight-year-olds if they had read Treasure Island and was greeted with shakes of the head from the children and incredulous stares from the teacher.

  ‘It seems to me that it is a great pity,’ he observed later, when he bored us in the staffroom, ‘that the children are not aware of one of the greatest works of children’s literature.’

  I agreed that Treasure Island was indeed a classic but I did point out that a story about treacherous cut-throat mutineers, murderous pirates and a character who kills with a crutch is not the most edifying diet for children aged eight. I guess he was thinking of a simplified version. I well remember the fear I felt inside when, at the age of eleven, I first heard my father read those episodes in the novel and I came across Long John Silver and felt something of Jim Hawkins’s terror of ‘the seafaring man with one leg’:

  How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now the hip: now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over the hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.

  – R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)

  As I listened to my father I was there with Jim, hiding from Long John Silver in the barrel of apples and overhearing his murderous plans. I was with Jim in the sweet-smelling darkness, trembling with fear in case I was discovered. I was there in the stockade, shoulder-to-shoulder with Squire Trelawney fighting off the mutineers. Stevenson as a storyteller is unsurpassed. It isn’t only his powerful command of narrative, description, character and dialogue, it is the way he creates suspense, which is so vital to keep the reader entranced.

  The children of my childhood were exclusively white and working-class. All my friends, Terry, Jimmy, Michael, Peter, Greg, Martin, Billy, were from homes similar to my own. Some were a bit better off, others a bit worse off, but we all lived in the same kind of house, ate the same sort of food, dressed the same, had the same interests and went to the same school. Only one boy on our street went to Rudston, the small private preparatory school on Broom Lane, and he had his own friends and never came out to play with us. I would sometimes see him getting off the bus with his bright blazer and cap, loaded down with heavy satchel and P.E. bag, but I never spoke to him.

  As a child I had no experience of people from other cultures or races and, as far as I can recall, there were no black people around in the Rotherham of the 1950s. My cherished book as a small child, which my grandmother Mullarkey read to me, was Little Black Sambo. It never occurred to anyone at home or at school that this could be considered offensive. I loved the eponymous hero who outwitted the tiger. My treasured books when I became a ‘free reader’ were the Biggles series and the Bulldog Drummond stories, and it would have been considered absurd at the time to call such British institutions racist. I loved the rip-roaring action in Biggles Defies the Swastika, and the exploits of his chums Algy, Ginger and Bertie. I still have those Biggles books lined up on a shelf in my study, all with little inscriptions from my parents. I cannot bear to part with them. How I loved my Biggles books, though when I re-read them now, I do feel some unease about parts of the writing.

  So, as a child, books were as common in my life as knives and forks and I swam in an ocean of language.

  34

  There is a picture of me that my mother kept on the sideboard (which we called the ‘buffet’ for some odd reason), taken at the age of eleven, posing awkwardly in the back garden in my new black blazer (a good size too big) with a large shield-shaped badge on the breast pocket, long grey shorts (obligatory for first and second year pupils), held in place with a striped elastic belt with a snake clasp, knee-length grey socks pulled up tight to the bottom of the knees and anchored there with elastic garters, grey jumper, white shirt, striped tie and polished black shoes. My ears stick out like jug handles because I have had a particu larly vicious ‘short back and sides’ haircut the Saturday before at ‘Slasher’ Simcox, the demon barber of Rotherham. A new satchel is over my shoulder. I don’t look all that excited on my first day at secondary school. I was terrified, to be honest. I had heard all the rumours at my junior school about what happens to new boys and had spent a fitful night thinking about them. The older boys would wait at the gates shouting and jeering and getting ready to pull your hair, punch you in the stomach, clip you round the ear, steal your dinner money and flush your head down the toilet bowl – lambs to the slaughter. It was a tradition to get the ‘first years’. My mother told me such stories were nonsense, and that if anyone did start to pick on me I should tell her
and she would be up to school like lightning. I am afraid I was not altogether reassured.

  On that first dread-filled morning I arrived nervously with my friends at the tall wrought-iron gates of a huge redbrick building with greasy grey slate roof and high square windows. To a small eleven-year-old it was a massive, towering, frightening edifice resembling a prison, or the workhouse I had seen in the film Oliver Twist. Of course, there were no gangs of vicious-looking youths lying in wait to pounce on us, just groups of boys dressed identically in black blazers with the red badge, some clearly new like myself and looking lost and anxious. The older pupils talked in groups and ignored the younger ones. In the midst of the crowd stood a teacher – a small, barrel-bodied, balding man with little fluffy outcrops around his ears. With hands on hips he stood in the middle of the playground, watching as we trooped through the gates. He was wearing plimsolls, and instead of a belt he had a piece of string fastened around the top of his trousers. He looked like a character from Dickens. I learnt later that this was the much-feared Mr Theodore Firth.

  So here I was at South Grove Secondary Modern School for Boys, where 500 pupils and twenty-five staff occupied the top floor of the building. Below was the girls’ secondary modern, which was, of course, out of bounds.

  The headmaster was Mr Williams (T.W.), a silver-haired Welshman with a pronounced accent and that deep sonorous tone of voice deeper than a Welsh coalmine. Several of the other masters were from Wales: Mr Reece (Dai), Mr Davies (Cliff), Mr Griffith (Griff), Mr Price (Van) and Mr Jones (Bobbin’ John). They were known as ‘the Taffia’, and, in common with the headmaster, they all had a genuine and bubbly enthusiasm for their subjects and for teaching. The Welsh call this passion ‘hwyl’, and it was not in short supply at South Grove. To this day I have a real affection for the Welsh people who sent their missionary teachers to educate the likes of me in Rotherham. I owe a great deal of any success I have had to those Welshmen. The other masters were equally good-humoured and supportive: Norman Hill, Les Wales, Eddie Dyeball, Alan Schofield, Ted Duffield, Wilf Badger, Ken Pike, Bert Gravill, Chipper Payne, Gerry Blowfield, Harry Cooper, Nobby Clark and the one woman teacher I recall, the sylph-like Sybil Cartwright, who taught biology. I still remember them with affection.