Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  ‘Well done indeed, everyone,’ said the MC wiping his brow. ‘You are entering into the spirit of things. Do keep it up. Now let’s give the ladies a chance to sort out the men, shall we? The next dance is a ladies’ excuse me.’

  I flopped on to a chair, already feeling physically as well as mentally exhausted even though the night was still in its infancy. I assumed I would now have an enforced rest because I couldn’t imagine Kim or Pat wanting to dance with me by choice.

  But I was wrong. Kim started off, and then, in what I soon realised was a neat bit of quick planning, Pat took over, followed by Wendy, and Melanie, then a couple of the other girls in our group, then Kim again. They all had a great time - not from their experiences with the Great Dancer, rather from the amusement they derived in putting me through the mill. Fortunately for me the musicians stopped the second round from getting very far by ending that particular dance.

  But, of course, my troubles continued throughout the entire evening. A group spirit certainly did develop, entirely at my expense: The other chaps occasionally took it in turns to dance with Kim and Pat, which meant I had to choose one of whichever two girls was left. When this happened they pulled my leg hard about taking one out of turn, and what they were going to do to me in revenge.

  When the end of the evening drew near I felt absolutely shattered - which was no more then I deserved - whilst the group, including Pat, had enjoyed a great deal of fun. But then the Last Waltz was announced and I realised suddenly that the evening might yet have a nasty sting left.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Kim. ‘She’s gone. She said she felt rather tired. It’s fortunate she doesn’t live far away, isn’t it?’

  I shuffled around to the music feeling the memory of the evening would be burned into my memory for many a long year. How right I was!

  I simply couldn’t face returning to the Fernley Dance Studios, so that was the last I ever saw of Pat. It was also the end of my ballroom dancing instruction, except for what a large number of female colleagues and students have taught me through the years at all kinds of school socials, dances and discos.

  One at a time, of course. Or thoroughly enmeshed in a group when partners were totally irrelevant.

  To have suggested that Dance should appear in secondary school curricula in the late forties would have attracted opprobrium from academics and ridicule from students. Occasionally infants and juniors were taught motley forms. I remember there being a brass plate in the middle of the hall floor at my Infants’ School, the top of which was removed once a year and into the revealed orifice a large pole was inserted from which hung alternate long red and white streamers. Each year on May Day we hopped and skipped in various rotations to gramophone music celebrating we knew not what. The object, as we soon spotted, was to tie ourselves in knots which we usually accomplished successfully, an attainment largely unappreciated by our teachers. But once in the rarified atmosphere of the Big School, i.e. the Junior Department, such frolics were regarded as stupid and cissy; which proves that our teachers had not adequately taught us the bucolic derivation of the Maypole and its revelry. Or perhaps, in those days of innocence, seven to eleven year olds were insufficiently mature.

  Yet Dance has a history as long as the human race. Cave paintings in France and Spain dating back 30,000 years show examples of this form of expression. It is interesting to conjecture what music accompanied such scenes. Surely it was never a silent activity? So Art and Music are essentially basic to human creative expression, as is Drama. Whether early humans indulged in dramatic representation also has to be conjectural, but it was certainly well established in ancient Greece. So Music, Art and Drama are rightly included in modern educational curricula.

  But societies have different cultures, so these have many forms. So does Dance. The question examined one way or another by education pundits in Britain during the immediate post war decades was what Dance, if any, should be taught or encouraged in schools. As with other forms of creative expression it has both formal and informal elements.

  My late teenage textural studies were concerned with the attempts to add weight to Ballroom Dancing. There was a dichotomy between modern and old time. The latter certainly had shape, but it was the shape of repetition. It also had a lengthy tradition of being the means of getting men and women together in controlled public display. It allowed couples to start off together and then, usually, provided schemes of exchange within a group, an eightsome reel for example, or even greater progression through a succession of partners. However, as my Mother pointed out, all you had to do was learn the basic steps of each dance. Once you had those off pat you could concentrate on other matters. The excellent costume dramas seen regularly on television usually show the main purpose very well indeed.

  Modern ballroom dancing, however, was deliberately intimate, hence its development with the rather decadent ennui of the twenty-one years between the two World Wars when so many people shut out the horrors of the first. Later its intimacy was wholeheartedly grasped by men and women in deliberately carefree moments which could be, and sometimes were, close to their last. In the Second World War that applied to civilians as well as those in the Armed Forces, depending on where you happened to live.

  So, generally throughout the forties and fifties, dancing of the ballroom kind in schools was reserved for after-school clubs and socials. Definitely ex-curricular. But ideas about dance in schools gradually changed. We didn’t know we were entering the swinging sixties as that decade began, though both wartime and austerity teenagers and the next generation who had no such memories felt it was time to loosen social shackles and have a bit of fun.

  The sixties came long before the prescriptive national curriculum so schools were responsible for what was taught. Of course, in the main, they all taught the same subjects, but reflecting changes in societal attitudes a degree of experimentation crept in. Drama began to appear on the timetable, rather than being the school play largely rehearsed at the end of the day. At the beginning of that decade I was involved with an English department and to find out what was what in Drama development, I enrolled on a university vacation course entitled ‘Drama in the Secondary School’. The prospectus assured me it was about teaching, so there was no double entendre. During an enlightening and revealing week I met the most dynamic lady I ever came across, before or since. One of the tutors, she was passionate about Dance. We learned she was battering universities to develop degree courses in it, head teachers to put it firmly in their Drama syllabi, Inspectors to demand that this was done, and anyone else who ever crossed her path - as we unsuspecting temporary students were doing.

  So I discovered there were other dimensions to Dance. Particularly, in this case, Creative Dance. Before I went on the course I might have assumed that referred to new figures devised by skilled practitioners for the Waltz, the Quickstep, et al. I knew differently by the end of the course.

  Had I known beforehand that I would, at one point, be dressed in very loose clothing, prancing about a room imagining it was the ocean, that we were all fish, that I was a shark and was stalking smoothly - because that’s how sharks stalk - a small and sinuous mackerel (well, I think she said she would be a mackerel; anyway, she wanted me finally to lunge and devour), I would have driven home at great speed despite the fact that I had come a long way. But such was the force of personality our teacher could muster that not only did I do just that, like the rest I did many other equally weird things as well. I contented myself with writing letters home detailing the larks we got up to in these sessions, overlaid with a heavy veneer of ridicule. But by the end of the course the dynamic lady had been successful with her most recalcitrant student. I have for years practised her highly successful relaxation techniques, to my advantage, I believe. I certainly added Dance to the curricula of schools for which I later had responsibility. I’ve even had the audacity to sit on judging panels for Creative Dance Competitions i
n schools. I never followed the lady’s subsequent career, but Dance has been available as a degree course for many years.

  She was brilliant. What a teacher! I have also since been astounded by the brilliance of students in their creative choreographing of expressive dance to all kinds of music. I’ve also marvelled at the difference between their experiences of the many creatively stimulating aspects of Music, Art and Drama and my own educational experience. In the matter of Dance they were poles apart - and I’m not referring to Maypoles or similar props.

  Chapter 16

  At College, as Kim said, my mind was very much on our second and final period of school practice. This was going to be crucial to all our final teaching marks as well as whether a lucky few would gain the rare and coveted ‘Distinction’ level in the ‘Principles and Practice of Teaching’ with an ‘A’ teaching mark. A good performance in one was expected to accompany a similar level in the other.

  Our second year was devoted to practice in senior schools, which under the recent Education Act had become secondary grammar, secondary technical and secondary modern. It was ushered in as the tripartite system, but in the next decade or so the technical schools largely disappeared and the system became bipartite. Most college students were sent to secondary modern schools because there were far more of them, and in this city as I explained earlier they educated seven eighths of the pupils over the age of eleven.

  Our final year coincided with the raising of the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen. So when we went into the senior schools, on both instructional and block practice, we found a rather reluctant group present comprised of those pupils who had expected to leave but who now had to stay on for part or all of their fourth year. As they reached their fifteenth birthdays they were allowed to leave at the end that term, so the year group diminished by one third at Christmas, Easter and Midsummer respectively. To-day that is Year 10. I wonder how keen employers would be to recruit from that age group now? Yet fourteen had been the traditional school leaving age since just after the First World War, when it had been raised from thirteen.

  Most of us were placed with classes below this age group, as I was at Marsden Road Secondary Modern Boys’ School. It was located in the middle of a large estate of houses built between the wars by the city Corporation. I was delighted to be sent there because it had a very good reputation amongst the students, largely because the Headmaster, Mr Appleton, organised matters to give them the maximum insight into the operation of the School, as well as the greatest possible number of opportunities for all kinds of relevant teaching experience. So I knew I was in for a busy month.

  I was assigned to Form 3A, whose teacher was Mr Painter. At that time secondary teaching was still largely a matter of one teacher teaching general subjects, with perhaps one or two specializing in Music, Woodwork with boys, and Cookery with girls. Sometimes Science also was taught by one person, if the school was fortunate enough to have a laboratory. All teachers were qualified to teach Physical Training, but in practice this was usually taken by the younger and more active ones. So when I taught on my practice many of my lessons were with 3A.

  I was absolutely blessed in being with Mr Painter. He helped me tremendously and certainly contributed considerably to my final success in this part of my training. I hope in the succeeding years I was able to do half as much for the students who were with me.

  Mr Appleton saw to it that students undertook other work with different forms wherever possible to give us experience of various age groups. I joined a fourth year class on weekly visits to various places of work, designed to make the pupils’ extra year more meaningful. The summer leavers actually saw about thirty five varied places, factories, businesses and offices, which no doubt helped them in their choice of a job. Part of the rest of each week was spent in follow-up lessons upon each visit.

  The Head’s policy also resulted in my learning another salutary lesson myself. This time the subject matter was football.

  For much of the time during training, teaching practice has an aspect of unreality. Either there is another teacher in the classroom with you, or there is one near at hand The youngsters know full well you are teaching them on behalf of someone else. There is a tremendous thrill to be experienced when you first face a class which is entirely dependent upon you and when both you and the pupils know this. How will they respond? Will you be able to control them? What will they do if you make a mistake? Questions such as these are in the forefront of every new teacher’s consciousness when he or she faces a class truly alone for the first time. The thrill, of course, may not be enthralling!

  Many do not experience this until they begin their first job. In the seventies I did some research into the probationary year. You may have passed your initial teacher training with flying colours, but you weren’t properly qualified until the end of your first year and a confirmatory visit from one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors, though when I did so it was His, not Her. I interviewed a hundred probationers in various schools. One question I asked was:

  How well do you feel your training practice prepared you for your first classroom experience here?

  I recorded most interviews and frequently at this point the mic was in danger of blowing. Respondents answered variously with outbursts of laughter, shrieks of ridicule and the occasional rude noise. It was very evident a chasm yawned between practice and the real thing. To be fair, however, many of my sample were in schools that had recently changed to comprehensive intakes under the hotch potch of schemes local education authorities were forced to invent due to the spending restrictions on the change imposed by central government. Those particular embryonic teachers were indeed born into the school world with a hefty slap to get them going.

  Sometimes, however, during training you do get unaided control of a class unexpectedly, as I did when Mr Appleton asked me to referee a second year football match during a games lesson. Fortunately the days of massive legal restrictions lay well in the future.

  The problem was that I had never refereed a match in my life and my knowledge of and skill at football was minimal. My own Junior School taught only a form of handball. We walked to one of the many sports fields provided by the city and played on a marked out football pitch, used properly by all other schools many of which travelled by provided transport. Then my Grammar School used another part of the same field, but by the time I returned from my year’s evacuation most of it was a barrage balloon site and the rest was ploughed for crops. We did actually get to kick a few balls each week, but that was all. The College field was still green and pleasant rolling minihills laid out by the Luftwaffe.

  Because Physical Training was a compulsory subject for all students it was legitimate for Mr Appleton to assume this included an elementary knowledge of games. He was not to know it did not extend to football in my case, and I wasn’t going to tell him. After all, he would be writing a report on me at the end of my practice, and people said that your final teaching mark stayed on your file forever....

  On the field twenty-two twelve year olds crowded round me. This was a half class fortuitously providing the exact number required, though it was quite usual to have matches with illegal numbers. The boys knew exactly what they expected from me. Decisions.

  ‘Who’ll be captains, Sir?’

  ‘I will,’ chorused fifteen volunteers.

  ‘Er....’ I said.

  ‘ME, ME!’ shrieked the remainder of the form.

  It was not a time for prevarication. I looked around, spotted two boys who were actually wearing football boots and promptly appointed them. With amazing speed and surprisingly little argument they each grabbed eight other boys, leaving four standing awkwardly in a sort of no man’s land between the two camps. One was fat, one was tall and very ungainly, whilst the other two wore washed out expressions which betokened no stamina whatsoever.

  ‘Ah,’ I said brightly, ‘you each nee
d two more. Who’s having these lads?’

  Immediately I realised what a slave market was like at the end of a day when business had been brisk. The clients were well satisfied with what they had and they were not going to give the dealer any help by taking the dregs off his hands.

  The captains owed me something, so I used the fact. I had to end the torture the dejected four were undergoing. It’s never so lonely as when you’re in a crowd, but unwanted. I divided them arbitrarily, glared at each captain in turn, and gave them a pair. They accepted without obvious demur but their henchmen were inclined to be rebellious.

  ‘Don’t pass to Fatso, he’s bound to lose it,’ breathed an unidentifiable voice. ‘That’ll do.’ I snapped, ‘I want to see a proper game with everyone joining in and doing his best. It’s the game that matters, not the result,’ I added piously. In those days that was still true....in isolated social pockets.

  The sports fields generally were well cared for but by contrast the boys were badly turned out. For the most part they played in their everyday clothes, taking off coats, pullovers and ties if they wore them. Sometimes they brought football boots. It depended upon whether parents could afford such items, or whether their sons were in the first team. If a lad reached those exalted heights, boots had to be supplied. The School provided shorts and shirts, having organised money-raising efforts to purchase them, but boots were a personal matter.

  The teams I had been given to supervise contained only two first team boys, identified as such by their footwear. I had unwittingly solved my first major problem by making them captains. A workable authority system was formed immediately; the team members accepted the captains because they were the best players, whilst the captains would respect me because I had chosen them correctly. All I needed to do was referee properly.