Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  ‘We must congratulate the Dayton Road teams on their truly excellent performances,’ Miss Brahms announced to the intimate gathering. ‘I don’t mind admitting they have given us quite a surprise with the standard of their play. So, if their captains will come forward, I will present them with their well-deserved trophies. They are not very large, I’m afraid, but as this was a single event, Dayton Road will be able to keep them permanently.’

  Pauline and Martin duly stepped forward and amid thoroughly overdone cheering from their own teams which made the four of us wince, they received two miniature shields. Rocky, who did not enjoy public speaking, murmured our thanks, turning crimson as she did so. Then, as leaves blown by the four winds, the audience disappeared leaving our children and ourselves alone - a victorious and vociferously happy bunch as we crossed the wide empty field towards the surrounding suburban houses and our bus stop.

  In the weeks that followed, despite various telephone calls and a couple of letters from Mr Brand, we heard nothing further of the projected Rounders League, This didn’t bother our teams much. The boys and girls were quite content to return to their playground .matches but it niggled us, especially Rocky, who not unnaturally felt her teaching had been wasted to an extent.

  Leslie summarized the day more than he knew when he announced in a loud voice for the benefit of various travellers eyeing us questioningly on the top of the homeward bound bus,

  ‘Cor, we showed ‘em, din ‘t we Sir?’

  We certainly had shown them but the fact was not appreciated by the organisers of the intended Rounders League. Too much talent emerged from a totally unexpected quarter and, moreover, one which was socially unacceptable to them. Instead of welcoming our high standard of play and using it to develop similar skills in other teams, it was rejected. The wrong school won and that was the end of the matter.

  I venture the opinion that class distinction still exists in recruiting youngsters for some of our national sports.

  Chapter 30

  We are all prone to generalise. It’s so easy to read an item about youths misbehaving in a city centre, then tell your neighbour how awful young people are to-day, or find an unhelpful assistant in a large store and complain that everyone in X & Y Stores is rude. It’s not unknown for teachers to do the same and I’m even doing it in saying so! Nevertheless it is easy to say that a particular class is brilliant, or cheeky, noisy, thick as two planks....because one or two individuals manifest the attribute. Many look the same outwardly, have similar physical characteristics at a glance, similar clothes - especially if they are in uniform. However, at the time I was at Dayton Road the notion of school uniform was ridiculous, as it was for virtually all junior and secondary modern schools during the post-war austerity period. The style of clothes most children wore was make do and mend, and some mothers were great stylists in the mode, to their great credit. So there was a degree of generalisation in the way the children were dressed.

  It took me a very few weeks to recognise that all, however, had distinct personalities. There was a mixture of happy traits and frustrations, of abilities and blind spots, likes and dislikes. Some were outstanding because certain aspects were accentuated - especially friendly, or particularly neat and tidy, or awkward and sullen, or, as in the case of Jimmy R, because he often seemed to be on his own.

  I soon noticed that no other child ever sat by him if it could be avoided. At the beginning I allowed the children to sit in their double desks with their particular friends and this produced twenty-four pairs, if attendance was 100%. But it rarely was because genuine illness was common. So whenever there were spaces Jimmy would be alone. But if I ever tried parting two who were chattering excessively when I expected them to be working quietly and put one in the seat next to Master R, the move was made under obvious protest. Within minutes there was a plaintive plea to be allowed to return accompanied by a fervent promise to be quiet. To my amazement the first time I gave in to this cajoling, the promise was kept faithfully.

  I realised why this was so the first time I sat beside Jimmy to mark his work. If body odour was visible he would have appeared perpetually enveloped in a clinging, foggy aura. It had an affinity for any other body, for when you got close to him some of it oozed away and wrapped itself firmly around you to take with you wherever you went for the next half hour or so.

  Of course there were other children in the school who would have been nicer to know had they had a bath more often. Perhaps they came from the few families that were known to put their baths to novel uses rather than for personal hygiene. They made useful fish tanks as long as you fixed the plug, or they kept the coal dry if there was nowhere to keep it outside so long as you didn’t turn on the taps.

  But many houses had no baths at all. In fact whilst I was at St. Andrew’s some chaps did a survey of homes in the area near to the College and estimated there were ten thousand people in houses with no internal water supply. The back to back rows shared outside taps from pipes laid between them. They also shared outside toilets which were certainly flush operated but you had to take your own bucket of water in with you to achieve this. I experienced the same when I was evacuated. The three storey house and its associated ironmongery shop shared an outside pump near the back door. Its toilet was across a yard to which you took a bucket filled from the pump. There was a bath on the first floor, devoid of taps, to which we took water warmed by a fire under the copper boiler in the kitchen, but it had no waste pipe and so had to be emptied by bucket again. Though the arrangements were a great surprise to my cousin and me we soon became used to them and in no way did they prevent us from being extremely happy with the lovely people who accommodated us.

  But there were only a few children at Dayton Road in Jimmy’s category. I doubt if he had ever had a bath in his life, and even washing his face and hands only occurred if he was made to do so in the thick brown earthenware sinks in the school cloakroom. When he did he used the standard school supply of Lifebuoy soap, but it couldn’t get into contact with enough of him to perform the feat proclaimed in its advertising slogan, Conquers ‘B0’. But bathing Jimmy would have been a monumental challenge for the product.

  I met another of Jimmy’s attributes all unsuspectingly one November morning. I cycled to. school through freezing fog, skidding dangerously in the tram lines set in the old cobble stones in the road which ran past the Rovers’ ground. In the playground hundreds of little steam engines were chugging around on disorganised tracks which crossed and recrossed each other as they avoided crashes by inches. Beneath the puffs of steam rising into the icy air were pairs of cheeky red fireboxes set above rapidly oscillating pistons.

  The engines were rescued from chaos by the sound of the stationmaster’s whistle which happened to be mine that day as I was on playground duty. Two reasonably orderly lines of engines chugged into the classroom pulling carriages full of girl passengers refusing to take an active part in such childish games.

  It was warm in the classroom and coats and scarves were supposed to be left in the cloakroom. But when I looked up to count the children as a check to my attendance register total, I spotted Jimmy wearing a faded piece of flannel around his neck. Years before it might have been described as yellow.

  ‘No scarves on in the classroom, Jimmy,’ I said briskly. ‘Go and hang it on your peg, please.’

  Jimmy’s normally pinched features became furtive. The slant of his eyebrows gave him a quizzical expression but it was always hard; his rare smiles never reached his eyes. He looked as though he expected the world to deal harshly with him which it usually did. In this instance his problem was me.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy, do what you’re told,’ I said with an edge to my tone. A few children turned in their seats. One or two looked at Jimmy and then turned back to me. A sixth sense told me the audience was not just reacting to someone trying a simple challenge to authority. They were not sitting back in safety watc
hing some daredevil going out on a limb. I knew there was something amiss but had no clue as to what it was. I moved down the row towards Jimmy’s desk near the back.

  There was complete silence except for some shuffling in the seats. Jimmy’s face dropped slowly towards the desk and he hunched his shoulders.

  ‘Jimmy, why don’t you do what I‘ve told you...?’ I stood still near to him. There was a long silence. In the end it was too much for Mavis C, rather a busybody but she had an underlying sympathy with people in distress.

  ‘Please Sir, his Mom’s sewn him in for the winter.’

  I was slow on the uptake. ‘She’s done what?’

  ‘She’s sewn him into his clothes.’

  Jimmy lifted his head and faced me with a pathetically defiant look to corroborate this statement. I stared back at him and put a disbelieving hand on the piece of material I had earlier referred to as a scarf. Jimmy swayed away from me, though the movement contained no fear that I might be about to divest him forcefully. But I was near enough to see the strands of thread which zigzagged broadly between the scarf and his ragged shirt. There was no doubt that his neck was effectively swathed until someone took action with a pair of scissors.

  My face obviously advertised my sense of shock for all members of the class were now sitting in absolute silence, gazing fixedly at me to gauge my reaction. For my part I was wrestling with a dilemma which I was to find is so common in teaching; how do you counter an individual variation to a rule for everyone when to do so invades personal privacy? Over half a century later high profile attempts have tested the question in courts, so it still hasn’t been entirely resolved. I was tempted to tear off the scarf and issue an admonition on the need to wash necks daily, but a wiser voice within me suggested that in view of the evidence before me, neck washing was not in Jimmy’s sphere of experience. It also said more firmly that if Jimmy’s Mother had taken this course of action I had no authority to tear up her handiwork, despite my revulsion. But what clinched matters was the fact, which was becoming more blatant as every embarrassed second passed, that to do anything at that moment would put Jimmy even more firmly into the wedge between the opposing forces of his home life and school. I had to retreat.

  ‘Well, my lad, I’ve never seen this kind of thing before, I can tell you. I shall have to speak to Mr Brand about it later. Now, take your reading books, we mustn’t waste any more time.’

  Some time later, when everyone was engrossed in silent reading, I secretly surveyed as many necks as I could from my desk. To my relief, I could see no more scarves and thus no further possibility of winter needlework. In the playground at break I saw Taff and took the chance to unburden my problem.

  ‘Oh, that’s started again, has it?’ He didn’t seem as surprised as I’d anticipated. ‘I expect there’ll be a few more. But you were right not to take it off. Miss Rees did that last year and there was-hell to pay. One mother came up and complained to the Boss that one of his teachers had assaulted her son.’

  Rocky and Wilf joined us.

  ‘Nigel’s just found someone sewn into his clothes. Sure sign its winter.’

  ‘I’ve got one too, Kitty W,’ said Rocky. ‘The buttons at the back of her dress are sewn up.’

  ‘Duw,’ Wilf said with feeling. Like me he was meeting this phenomenon for the first time. ‘I can’t believe it. This is the middle of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to live with it,’ replied Taff, ‘there’s only a few and the rest don’t like them because really they think it’s as dirty a habit as we do. And of course they can’t change for PT. which makes them stand out all the more. But don’t touch them - that’s my advice.’

  ‘What does the Boss think we should do?’ asked Wilf.

  It was cold in the playground and the other three walked on to seek their coffee in the warm which deprived me of a reply on the subject for the time being. But during the lunch hour I went to Mr Brand’s room and asked him directly.

  ‘Believe me, I appreciate your feelings, Mr Flaxton. I haven’t seen much of this kind of thing in my career and, as you know, I’m no chicken!’ He laughed as usual. ‘But I’ve always found that each school I’ve taught in has a small but hard core of children whose families retain some practices which were far more common decades ago. They’ve become even fewer in number since the War, I’m glad to say, but nevertheless they are still with us.’

  His comment jogged my memory of the use to which a few families put coal sacks on wet days at Spenser Street. Nevertheless now I had a responsibility to my class I disliked the incongruity.

  ‘But how can you try to have any standards of cleanliness in a class which contains a child from such a background? It’s quite unfair for me to emphasize this to everyone else if they know that there is one who simply will not co-operate.’

  ‘Ah, now that’s an idea which is frequently put forward by young teachers, if you don’t mind my saying so. If you followed that argument to its logical conclusion you would have to give up trying to improve any standards with anyone. Just because you can’t achieve one hundred percent success shouldn’t mean you ought not to try for ninety-five.’

  ‘Well, yes, I can see that,’ I replied realising my standpoint was defeatist, so wished to relinquish it quickly. ‘But don’t the children see that as being unfair?’

  ‘Yes, they probably do, and I know many of their complaints are about actions being unfair. But usually those concern comparatively childish matters. Outside they know perfectly well life isn’t fair, that families are not equal, nor are the homes they live in. They have their own way of coping with the Jimmy Rs of the world. You notice that he hasn’t many friends.’

  ‘But I should like to alter that. Surely if we could make him rather more like the rest, clean him up and get him better clothes, they would accept him more than they do.’

  ‘But how different can we make him from his parents before we alienate him? We might, you know, if we had him in a residential school away from them. But is it right for authority to take such steps?’

  ‘What about trying to alter his parent’s attitudes?’ I countered, searching for the positive action I longed to take.

  ‘Yes, that’s a better way. But would they listen if we went round and told them how to look after Jimmy? I expect they’d give us a short sharp answer: But people like them have been changing gradually, that’s why there aren’t many of them left. They respond to others around them in the end. But it’s a slow process and you’ll have to be patient.’

  I didn’t like what I’d been told but I could feel the force of the argument. I thanked Mr Brand and walked slowly and thoughtfully down his staircase.

  Jimmy remained on my mind for some days. Although I had known some men from very different home conditions to my own in the RAF, certainly so during my short stay in Pool Flight, nevertheless I was still mentally shuddering at the thought of what it must be like living in his household. Then an event occurred which provided me with a vivid demonstration.

  Because Jimmy was an isolate in the playground, every now and then a small group would form and enliven playtime activities by taunting him. Usually the children crept up behind him and yelled unfriendly comments such as Muck bag, Stinker, or Pongo. Depending upon his mood Jimmy would either suffer these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune till the teacher on duty rescued him, or he would give way to his fury and chase the miscreants.- Usually he was thwarted by numbers. A moment’s indecision on his part meant that the group could scatter with ease to the corners of the playground, so keeping plenty of distance between them and him no matter how hard he ran.

  On this occasion he took up his solitary stance near to the corner of one of the air raid shelters By an unhappy coincidence the taunters came up to him alongside one wall. With hands pressed against it in readiness they propelled themselves away into-
the wide open spaces to avoid his blind rush at them. Jimmy, having committed himself, couldn’t stop or turn to take avoiding action. With head down like a charging bull he hit the corner of the wall and reeled sideways, clutching his scalp.

  Leslie, who had seen it all, fled into our classroom where he knew I was.

  ‘Sir, it’s Jimmy. ‘E bashed ‘is ‘ead and it ain’t ‘alf bleedin’.’

  I dropped my pen and shot into the playground. Jimmy, claspring his head, was being pushed towards me by a group of anxious faced children. Blood was oozing through his fingers and had begun to trickle down his face.

  ‘Miss Rockliffe - first aid kit.’ I snapped at Leslie. ‘Mind how you go...!’ I yelled ineffectively at his retreating figure. Leslie was the sort of boy who would have run with alacrity into Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace if he had been entrusted with an urgent message for Shadrach and Co.

  I guided Jimmy inside and sat him down on the top of a desk amidst a chorus of explanations as to what had happened. But I cut it short and shooed everyone outside with no ceremony whatsoever. Then I turned to Jimmy who was silently rocking himself forwards and backwards on the desk, still hugging his head. I grabbed a large roll of cotton wool from the cupboard where it was kept for a multitude of purposes ranging from Christmas snow on models to first aid. I tore off a huge chunk and faced Jimmy.

  ‘Come on, old chap, let’s see if I can clean you up a bit before Miss Rockliffe gets here. Will you move your hands and let me see what you’ve done?’

  The hands faltered and edged away slightly from the middle of his head. What I could see appeared to be a river of blood between them. Absolutely no memory of queasiness surfaced. Quickly, but as gently as I could, I covered it with the cotton wool intending that it should soak up the blood so that I could see the extent of the damage.