Episode 1 Cannock Grammar School September 1967

"Interpreting the past....not as a refuge from the present, but as a means of understanding and enjoying it."
Graham Robb: The Discovery of France (Picador 2007)


"Remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.
(Aphorisms 'R' Us)

Click on any picture to enlarge

INTRODUCTION by Alan BROWN

1. The butterfly effect?

Cannock Grammar School 1Z 1967 is the first in the series “Grammar Mémoire Collective”.

These stories started out as the author’s attempt in 2004 at capturing memories with a butterfly net. The net widened during the next four years, and some of its gaping holes were patched as former classmates got in touch.

Paul, Nigel, Lynette, Kevin, Judy and Karen added their own anecdotes. They brought light, shade and colour. They brought new specimens to the collection.

There are several episodes in preparation, covering the years 1967-1974 at Cannock Grammar School, as seen through the eyes of 11-18 year-old kids from the miners’ terraces and post -WW2 houses on the edge of the Cannock Chase Coalfields.

Read on if you’d like to recall the Summer of Love, Cannockian retro-gastronomy, The Beatles at their zenith, Time and Space Oddities, teenage explorations, wet-look bikinis, power cuts, Hillman Imps, David Bowie, French Clockwork Oranges, Life on a Mars Bar, cross-cultural trainee sperm donors and bus journeys upstairs with the smokers on the Number 17...

Or if you just fancy a bit of a giggle.

2. Disclaimer, rose-tinted spectacle warning, and admission of historical incompetence.

The author achieved a grade 7 for History “O” level. (That's a fail)

Any glaring errors or gaffes are entirely the responsibility of the author.

If any person is offended by any content, remark or implication, please contact me
albrown@wanadoo.fr and appropriate action will be taken to remove offending material immediately.

(Keep reading; it gets worse as we get older. )

3. Thank-you. Without the input, exchanges and conviviality of fellow 1ZAACs (1Z Alumni & Affiliated Contemporaries), these stories would have remained a flutter of butterflies…

Thank-you to cgsfpa for the images we have borrowed from their website! http://www.cgsfpa.co.uk/

We hope you enjoy the trip.

Alan Brown, Ste Cécile, France November 2008.

Carpe Diem

For our parents. In appreciation:

In 2008, Lynette wrote;

…we know that our parents were so proud "our Lyn passed her eleven plus you know" was how mine started most conversations in the summer of 1967… We realise now that they (probably even more than us) felt out of their depth if they had to have any contact with the school…

For our kids: Remember Blue Peter. Don't try this at home. Not all of it, anyway.


IZAAC EPISODE ONE : 1Z 1967

Absolute Beginners?


Diary Extracts; Monday 4th September 1967;

PRESS RELEASE

BBC announces “17 ex-pirate DJ’s will join the soon-to-be launched Radio One.

They will include John Peel and…

Tony Blackburn.”





















Spend afternoon stifling excitement, shining Tuf black lace-ups with Cherry Blossom polish, removing blazer from tissue wrap in box, smelling the new cloth.





And calming nerves by removing fluff from stylus, looking in vain for the gaps between tracks, listening to Sergeant Pepper on cousin's Dansette record player, last track, side one, Day in the Life...


"I read the news today, oh boy...."

...Hoping Tony B wouldn't get his hands on that one.


Tuesday 5th September, 1967;
First day, Class 1Z at Cannock Grammar School.

"IngLAND clap clap clap, IngLAND clap clap clap",
...we had chant-applauded in June the previous year at the end of our lives' first decade, watching victory in the soccer World Cup final.

Our grandparents at the same age had packed up their troubles, witnessed jingoism and heard hushed accounts of slaughter in Flanders.

Our parents had scurried into Anderson shelters, or journeyed to these islands, and sought impossible bluebirds over white cliffs.

And us. The Middlers.


The mid-boom, born in '55 or '56 Suez-crisis Baby Boomers, now in 1967.

We were in the middle of England. And, as it would turn out, we were also in the middle of Cannock Grammar School's twenty-five year existence.

Now we had Sandie Shaw with Puppet on a String as our victrix in the Eurovision Song Contest.

As a marker in the history of Britain in Europe, the orchestrated oboe closing strains of Puppet may not have been the most memorable.

But, looking back, they might have been a move in the right direction, and a sign of Hope after a first-half twentieth century that will not be remembered as Europe's most glorious epoch.

So by September 1967, we were the next generation.

It was with Hope, curiosity, and cautious enthusiasm keeping those butterflies at bay that we, the eleven-plus examination's "chosen few", started Living almost Worthily in billiard table cloth blazers.

The braid & badge shining green & silver grey on the first day.

That's how you knew the first year pupils.





The braid faded with our own freshness as the terms went by.




Mrs Waterhouse
was our form teacher.





She had lop-sided long hair with a mauve headband, and spoke like a genteel Billy Connolly.

We liked her, even when she smiled with the north-of-border aplomb of Gorrrdon Brrrown.

She explained with a deft combination of prudence, seduction and dourness, and in a contralto Scots brogue, the intricacies of “Geenerral Fund, one guinea…”.

We wondered what she made of our not-quite-Miss-Jean-Brodie's "crème de la crème" nasal Midland/Mid Staffs tones, an octave higher than her own.

A minority of our fellow pupils spoke using genuine or affected Mid Staffs variety of (“posh”) Received Pronunciation:RP.

This was, after all, a state school in the middle of Staffordshire, where the Black Country dialect drifted northwards with the factory smoke…

One of our compositions was "The day I shrank". Miss W told us not to spell “shrank” with a U. When she said it, it sounded to our ears like "shrenk".

Being Mid-Staffordians, however, our language centres were attuned to diasporan varieties of British English. De-coding Scots, Irish, Geordie, Welsh, Pye Green-ese, Wyrley Bonkish and the like was second nature to most of us. We could switch with ease from dialect conjugations (I am/yoe am/he is/we am/yoe am/they am) to more Cannock Grammartically correct versions...

Even our RP-er mates could do this.

The "shrenk" piece was written in a crisp exercise book which had the school crest and a different colour for each subject. French dark blue, Science green, orange or pale blue, Scripture pink, Latin mustard...

The covers felt smooth and shiny, then became matt with use.

One of our number expressed forthright views about Tarka the blinkin’ Otter;










"Rough books" were orange with blotting paper pages which drained your Quink but made good paper planes or, in later years, fuses for home-made fireworks.

We Zedders spent nearly all of our time together as a closely-knit class in the first two years, unlike subsequent years when we were set by results for core subjects.

There were five forms in the First Year; 1A, 1B, (trendy sixties appellations oblige) 1X, 1Y, and our own 1Z.

If your form's letter tag was from the tail end of the alphabet, you studied Latin.

1Z’s form room was up the dusty, tiled stairs in D block. Room D6.

The rumour had gone around that D6 had been the Staff Room when the school had opened in 1956. Perhaps this explained the faint, lingering aroma of Camp coffee, St Bruno's pipe tobacco and Rothman's King Size.

Ten years later, when we Zedders took up D6 domicile in 1967, the staff had long moved out to new, upper floor premises in the quieter outer suburbs of the campus, overlooking the dining room.

From a surveillance perspective, the new Staff Room's location was of questionable merit; the town-planning equivalent of putting a police station in the smartest residential street, then blindfolding the policemen.

But it did allow for reverse observation.

From the hush of the library's custom-made oak tables, bookcases and herringbone parquet, we could watch the Staff Room from fifteen yards away, through two thicknesses of glass, like a colourful silent movie. Onto which we would dub our own soundtracks and screenplays in imagined French, Latin or RP.

On that first day I was last to arrive, with fellow Cheslyn Hay-ite Kev Gunn.

We had been delayed on the 8.15 Number 17 blue double decker from Colliers Arms terminus to Cannock bus station. There was a newly-qualified Sikh driver at the wheel, and a conductor called Dennis issuing navigational instructions in broad Walsall and with a hare lip.

Extract: "Noooo! you'm s'mosed ter tairn LEFT, LEFT! There's a mloody RAILWAY bridge down the end of this road! Yo' cor get under it in a nubble necker..."

It was the first time we had taken the bus unaccompanied.

So we had prepared with paramilitary precision.

Identical contents in our blazer inside pocket;
Ø Platinum pump-action fountain pen.
Ø EJ Arnold HB pencil, pin-point sharp, maroon.
Ø Passport to Adventure (Staffs Education Authority lime green free bus pass).
Ø Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan club card (expired).

Kev had to walk half a mile in the wrong direction to qualify for the 3-mile pass.

We walked past the “Dole offices” (1963 Tax & Social Security buildings), taxonomizing and comparing identification notes for Austin & Morris 1100's/1300's.

Then through the School’s back gate, past the “front lawn” soccer and rugby pitches (there were acres of playing fields to the rear, which we hadn’t seen yet).

Through the bike sheds.

We got briefly lost in the dining hall, consulted Kev’s U.N.C.L.E. compass and a smiling Miss Andrews, and found our form room.

The room looked something like this;
















We tried to do our Dynamic Duo “Batman and Robin”, but must have looked like a nervous, blushing Laurel & Hardy with new leather brief-cases.

Kev, one foot two and a half inches taller than me, was already shaving three times a week.

Gentle giant, Enid Blyton Famous Five guru, backwoodsman and general Good Bloke Kev had been my best mate since we were 5 years old in Mrs Jeavons' class at infants’ school.

Together we had;
Ø Set fire to Cheslyn Hay County Primary playground with lilac methylated spirits from a stolen/recovered model MECCANO/MAMOD steam engine. (One zillion per cent kudos rating from onlookers.)
Ø Collected “tat”, a war surplus parachute, a thunder box portable toilet & pop bottles for pocket money.
Ø Embezzled kali and acid drops from the alcoholic off-licensee by scaling a back wall and returning the same pop bottles 8 times.
Ø Done a project on mammals with stolen Sellotape. (Kev stuffed up the taxonomy when he started adding pictures of birds to use up excess tape.)
Ø Pilfered balsa-wood from Mr Blount’s classroom to make models of Thunderbird 4.
Ø Got busted, (narrowly avoiding “the cane”) for attacking our 36 other classmates with peashooter/outstretched arms Spitfire & Hurricane impressions.
Ø Been photographed (by a teacher) sharing a double bed on a Junior school holiday to Devon. (Cash paid if anyone -besides Gary Glitter- has the negative).
Ø Become The Hooded Avenger (Kev in black trunks, hood made from second recycling of parachute silk. Had previously been shepherd’s hood in 1965 nativity play.) and Lightning Lad (Me in borrowed, old blue balaclava, Lone Ranger mask from lucky bag, & new black trunks +cape made from little brother Ant's Silver Cross pram blanket.)

No wonder we looked nervous.

Fortunately it would be 40 years before our classmates would find out about our primary school Curricula Vitae.

Kev was also unfailing in his ability to laugh at my jokes.

Despite our previous superhero experience and deductive powers, we were at risk of being overawed on our first day at The Grammar.

Sharing his potato puffs during that first morning break, he remarked;

“There’s a lot of kids from Walhouse, ay they Al?”

Walhouse was the town’s C of E primary school.

In 1967, we hadn’t heard of the English Class System, Establishment pecking orders or Postcode Lotteries, but it didn’t take many days, or an ‘O’ level in sociology to work out that ex-Walhouse alumni had a better than 60% chance of quasi-natural progression to “The Grammar”.

Fewer than 10% of us kids from the outlying mining villages, or from the less leafy parts of town got to jump the 11-plus exam hurdle to don the green baize.

Judy and Lynette pointed out in 2008 that it was even harder for the girls: The 11-plus exam marks were scaled up for boys, in order to ensure a balanced boy:girl ratio in mixed Grammar Schools.

(It nearly worked, but there were more girls than boys in every class of our year. No complaints from the lads on that score.)

That first morning, after our first French lesson, Kev & I sat on the grassy knoll between B-block book repository and the tennis courts, potato puffed-out, leaning on a low brick wall. Our new-found "Mairte"Graham Price sat next to us, licking salt from his fingers, and told us, Full Metal Jacket-style, that he was having a "Paratrooper" air rifle for his birthday.

Grassy knolls, book repositories, rifles...

"Kev, we need to ask Miss Simpson what the French is for "déjà vu"

"Yoe ay trying to be a smart-arse again am yer, Boy Wonder?" mumbled Kev.

We sat, observing the green fibres which the elbows of our blazers had deposited on the masonry.

"Them'll want some leather patches on 'em before th'end o' this term, Al"

said Kev, as we ruminated on our situation, and talked of thoroughbreds and pit ponies.

We drew up a quick sample list of non-mining paternal occupations we'd evesdropped, on the back of Kev's Man From U.N.C.L.E. card: Headmaster; Turf Accountant; Dentist; Night Club Proprietor; Solicitor; Gents' outfitter...

"Mairte, this is Cannock aristocracy", deduced Kev, scratching his stubble. Graham agreed.

"One of them posh wenches has even got a Blue Peter badge"...

A kid from the soon-to-be notorious non-Latin class 1B interrupted our musings, asked if I was Al, and introduced himself as Denis Bould.

He told me he knew my uncle in Pye Green road because it was the last house on his ‘paper round.

DB1

DB2

He then informed us he had the same initials as his preferred oddball pop idol, and performed a pitch-perfect rendition of David Bowie’s “Laughing Gnome”, without the helium or voice synthesizers.

The four of us agreed that Bowie had no future as a performer if he continued to produce such puerile stuff, but Kev, Graham & I thought Denis had something…a bit, er, "Pye Green roadish" about him.

Which we liked.

Paul Nicholls 2008 “Denis was one of the few genuine eccentrics I have ever met”…

(I can vouch for this; according to my uncle, Denis would wear a WW2 German army helmet to deliver the Express and Star Mid Staffs edition on rainy days).

After “break”, we went back to room D6, which, along with the residual staffroom essences, smelled of Dettol, soap, chalk and recently-purchased, two-sizes too big, overpriced cloth.

We’d already deduced that the price had something to do with the word “exclusive” next to the word “outfitters” on the cardboard box containing my short trousers. A first, free lesson in Market Economics/cabals, and the Grammar School year had not yet even started properly.

Uniform prices were set to drop as the Co-op got in on the act, with "Dividend too!":

Do you remember the boys blazers had rounded front edges, the girls had pointed ones. Our uniform brief also stated that for those girls who wished to wear tights 'American Tan' would be the accepted colour. (LR)

(Yards more American Tan in 2E)

On the side of our form room nearest to the door there was a dazzling array of fresh-faced, smiling girls.

“Our” 16 girls sat, smiling or serious, on their planet in their half of the classroom. They wore green-striped summer dresses on that first day.

Lynn Bellinger, Angela Binks, Debbie Clark, Nicolette Dzuba, Judy Edge, Karen Floyd, Carole Freeman, Gillian Lucas, Carolyn Mayou, Faith McCarthy, Janet Robinson, Lynette Royster, Annette Stimpson, Lesley Thompson, Janet Thorneycroft, Christine Tongue.

The boys looked not so serious, more like a good football team, and mostly seemed much bigger than I was.

Dave Bowes, me, Nige Dean, Peter Gethin, Kev Gunn, Will Haughey, Nick Hill, Paul Nicholls, Graham Price, Steve Rotherham, Bernie Silverstone, Robert Walker, Ian Walton, Steve Wilson.






I soon worked out that I was the youngest boy in the class, and that white-socked Karen was the youngest (and tallest) girl.

We sat in alphabetical order. For me, this meant looking up at the back of good all-rounder Dave Bowes' head for a year, sharing jokes with Nige “Marcel” Dean, passing French test notes to Nick Hill, and being dazzled by Bernie Silverstone's Aston Villa badge.

We all had French names.

Dave Bowes protested across the front row to fellow Walhouser Peter Gethin that he should be "Davide"[sic] and not "Didier".

Presumably because of the Ken Dodd overtones. He was not prepared to be a Didier-man.

The alphabetical order stuff, as well as teachers' wearing of gowns, was quietly dropped by the younger “hip” staff members as the year progressed.

Our lift-top desks were covered in graffiti, some of it witty.

The school buildings and furnishings were the same age as we were, although not as fresh. They were already showing the inevitable wear and tear inflicted by the passing of 150 new Grammarians each year.

Judy in 2008: “I used to leave my purse in the desk, and never worried about it”…

Karen, ominously, in 2008 “Judy used to get £1 a week pocket money by the time we were in the 3rd year. We used to buy Player's Number 6 cigs.”

In 2008 Kev Gunn wrote about forgetting books and lift top desks. Kev add comment here.

The desktop jottings bore tangible witness to an undercurrent of anarchy which never seemed far below the surface at Cannock Grammar, and which in later years, despite the sporadic presence of prefects and duty staff, regularly seemed to rise above it.

Laminated chair legs sometimes broke if you leaned back hard enough, although at this age we had yet to indulge in mindless vandalism.

Right on cue, on 30th September, BBC Radios 1,2,3 and 4 fired up. Breakfast would now be Weetabix with a tinny tranny, Tony B and his dog Arnold.

Oh dear.

Within 10 days, the pound plumetted and Che Guevara was shot in the Bolivian jungle.

In that Autumn term, a few of us had window seats, with a view through the aluminium frames, over acres of playing fields, as far as the Shropshire Wrekin to the West, or the nearly-new high-rise blocks of flats beyond the lard belt in Bloxwich and Walsall to the South.

Over the brow of Cannock Chase, a few miles north, you could, by leaning out of the window, see Pye Green tower and the steaming top rims of Rugeley power station’s cooling towers. These marked the River Trent, the oatcake frontier and the linguistic divide where the Midlands/Black country accent of Mid Staffs blurred into a more northerly variety.

In the foreground was the industrial South Staffs haze from a hundred factories, mines or brickworks. Later in the year, on still summer days we would hear the drop forges at Churchbridge as well as the sounds of tennis just below, adding a note of aspirational gentility.

I remember thinking of my thirty-two primary school classmates, feeling like Charlie in the Great Glass Elevator, or a third-class English train passenger who, by the mere virtue of an 11-plus “Golden Ticket” pass, had been wrongly seated in first class…

Would it all last, even with Harold Wilson devaluing the "pound in your pocket", and Johnson’s B-52’s bombing Hanoi?

One Wednesday morning, after assembly in the dining room (more oak floors and sixties formica tables) the sky turned a biblical black and there was a dramatic lightning storm.

I sat next to the upper-floor metal window frame during Mrs Foote’s Scripture lesson, and, stifling hysteria, prepared to die.

Lynette incurred Mrs F’s displeasure by making a rather obvious (for a self-avowed Sunday School graduate) spelling mistake that day.

Was this the explanation for the storm??

We stood up at the arrival of each teacher; and changed rooms for science, sport & activites.

This meant corridor journeys.

The design of the school, one (former Walhouse boy) expert had informed us, had to accommodate the risk of subsidence due to coal mining.

So there were several two-storey post-modern brick and glass blocks, connected by flat-roofed corridors.

It looked like a Gerry Anderson Moonbase as designed by a draughtsman on graph paper with only one pencil, a ruler and a budget set by a post-austerity planning committee. Little concession seemed to have been made in the original concept to the requirements of student supervision.

“Second day of school I was off ill, I'm sure it was a panic attack, I must have missed the bit about keeping to the left and can still recall trying to find my way through the corridors on the wrong side, and swamped by giants. I really was physically ill.” (LR)






At the sound of a bell, a thousand green chattering ants migrated in two opposing single files, scowled upon by gargantuan folded-arm prefects.

Swinging sixties and a progressive activities programme meant that the girls had a go at Mr Lees in mixed woodwork, which removed a little of their mystique, brought them briefly onto the boys’ planet, and resulted in a few laddered tights and broken fingernails.

A few of the girls turned out to be more skilled at the plane and the lathe than some of the boys.

We made wobbly, octagonal, (formica again) tea-pot stands, or carved stylised mantlepiece animals...

Boys did sewing & domestic science too, and learned to wash their socks and polish their shoes.

My mates at Great Wyrley secondary made a big joke of this, as it confirmed their conviction that the masculinity of all "Grammar Grub" boys was questionable.

Back in our ivory, brick and aluminium towers, new arrival Miss Austin (Latin) greeted us with RP Latin;

"salvete discipuli"...

we replied "salve magistra" and we all sniggered inwardly when she poshly proposed a conjugation of the verb mitto;

"Mitto, mittis, mittit (already funny with more to come) mittimus, mittitis (wait for it)........Ian Walton biting the insides of his cheeks near the back row, Carole Freeman rolling her eyeballs...

...mittunt. "

We hung on her every syllable, and thought she was really upper crust.

It must have been effective teaching, because the memory lingers more than 40 years on.

At age eleven, my own experience of the Romans was restricted to what we had gleaned on a Cheslyn Hay County Primary day trip to the Roman baths at Wall, near Lichfield.

The other baths we had visited from primary school were at Bloxwich. These were Victorian buildings of faded industrial grandeur.

We had gathered that the conquoring legions of the second century AD were posher than the Victorian Bloxwegians.

This may have explained the RP-sounding verbs.

Whilst the Romans had slaves who would massage you with warmed olive oil after a dip in the tepidarium, the creature comforts of Bloxwich nineteenth century bathers seemed to be restricted to the sipping of Bovril from a cardboard cup. (Although you could see into the ladies' changing cubicle if you stood on tip-toe on the top diving board.)

As a linguist-to-be, I surrendered to lazy mediocrity, stuffed up the exam and, of course got weeded out of Latin after a year.

Worse was to come.

Some classmates showed more consistency after only a week, and got a "bene"…

Miss Austin's Latin legacy re-surfaced with approbrium, at the turn of the second millennium.

Our younger daughter was eleven, and had just started at the local collège in Chantonnay. She had a couple of friends around, and they were doing their Latin homework.

Her friends were both teachers' kids.

(It is a fact that the offspring of "professeurs" are statistically those most likely to succeed in the French system; despite the credo of "égalité des chances", they get put into the subtly élitist classes. Latin, German, and now...Chinese.)

Anyway, I thought I'd impress them with a quick conjuguaison of Mitto...

Finishing with a mittunt flourish, one of the girls said;

"Trop cool Marie. Ton papa parle Latin avec un accent super anglais!"

Miss Simpson (it could well have been her first year teaching; we’d never have guessed…) only ever spoke to us in French from day one.

I knew on 5th September 1967 that I was hooked and that I wouldn’t have been averse to eloping with her to St Tropez, where we would be able to co-write a French version of "Puppet on a String" and walk barefoot by the Med.

Or even Calais…

Failing that, I wanted her job.

There were weekly dictées, filmstrip slides of La Famille Thibault, and monthly copies of Bonjour magazine.

Rob Walker always got the best marks. He was a natural.






Then, like a few others in our year, he emigrated to Australia.

By the third term, the Gals were writing French compositions about the musical tastes of their parents: "Le chanteur favori de ma mère est Vince Hill"....

Mr Hudson, returning from the diminishing Colonies, newly-arrived from Zambia (although he never told us...) read his Daily Telegraph on one occasion while we coloured in maps of Africa, imprinted onto our damson-coloured exercise books by a giant, roly-poly rubber stamp.

We wrote about the Cannock economy, or cacao production.

Telegraph or not, it was clear to us that things were changing in the world, even if you could still get a bar of Whole Nut for 8d...

Applying the "Bernard Manning/John Prescott" approach to student motivation, Mr Hudson gave me a "Ugh - D minus" for a piece on "Uses of Coal."

Since I had spent two hours at home, struggling with Be-Ro flour-and-water paste, blunt scissors and a flagging King Coal fire, I felt a bit miffed.

At least I now knew how to spell "Ugh".

What a contrast when brright Mrs Brrooks brreezed in brrashly, rolled her 'r's and rraced us through maths lessons.


Didn’t you hate it when your ruler did this ?

Remember singing “moo-oh-ah”, and “food, glorious food” and C.O.F.F.E.E. just before lunch with Mr Hunter in the big assembly hall, and kneeling on the polished parquet to lean on the chair and write in our music books with class 1X?

I sat next to a grinning Tim Dawson.

Did anyone in the year ever ENJOY singing Gilbert and blooming Sullivan?

For some of us, it was nearly as painful as those TB (Tony Blackburn again?) injections we all had, lined up in the foyer next door.

One music lesson, we went on a foray to Calving Hill Secondary Modern. Again another planet, all of fifty yards north of the woodwork room. We were treated to a dress rehearsal of the musical "Salad Days". A bit fifties, but a welcome change of diet from G&S.

In Nuffield hands-on science with Mr Horne (moustache-less beards were apparently in vogue, see also Mr Hunter) we made table salt by crushing and dissolving rock salt, then evaporating the water from the saline solution in a porcelain crucible.

Wyrley-ite graduates/soccer stars Steve Wilson & Ian Walton turned up the gas full bore and sent searing hot grains of sodium chloride over 3 rows of benches in room E1, taking Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” right up to the pointy end of education.


I got a bit in my eye.

We had not yet discovered that Bunsen burners made great water pistols, or that an impressive flame could be produced by setting fire to the gas taps or farts. Or that stealing mercury gave you dermatitis (and possibly worse).

We found these things out later when we had a science lab form room in (still pre-health and safety) third year.

Mild electrocutions and firework manufacture were among other discoveries yet to be made.

Lynette drew a map for Miss Bratby. Oops.

....And it was first year as headmaster for DP Adams. It must have been a steep, eyebrow-raising learning curve for him.

Just after the first heart transplant in South Africa, and as Concorde was rolled out in Toulouse, we First Years had the privilege of a Christmas film from a whirring Cinema Paradiso projector, (starring Leslie “He…llo…” Philipps. Daring stuff, but we would, sadly, have preferred recent bra-popping release "Carry On Camping").

Lynette recalls; We had a Christmas party , I think in the first year, and Nicolette Dzuba wore a gold dress, it was in the dining room or sports hall and it was the first time we saw everyone out of uniform. (I wanted a gold dress after seeing Nicolette's, but to no avail). No one else seems to recall this, and I think it was a one off as I can't remember us ever having another one. I think we had to take our clothes with us to change into and someone played some hip and happening tunes and we all tried to show just how cool we really were.

One of the boys wore a cravate.

Classicist Mr Lloyd


did a mind-reading act involving Mr Adams’ Dormobile Campervan.

He was not able, ‘though, to ascertain the whereabouts of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who disappeared forever into the Melbournian surf on December 17th, launching a thousand conspiracy theories about sharks, defections and Russian submarines.

WATER HAZARDS
Back in Cannock, we had our own water hazards.

The school swimming pool always seemed cold, its wheezing 1950's heating technology perennially engaged in an uneven struggle against the elements, a four-seasons thermostatic chill setting, and absent insulation.

The sides were like blue sandpaper, encouraging an economy of breast-stroke movement if you picked the outside lane and wanted to preserve your verrucas.

There were diving boards, recently out of bounds, since the water was only six feet deep, imposing the choice between a belly flop or concussion. A whiff of over-chlorinated air was usually enough to bring a victim back to his senses.

Russet Mr Horne, as apparently was customary, joined us in the communal shower.

I had never seen a naked man before, and, judging from the furtive glances of the other lads in among the red tiles and tepid water, nor had they. We wondered if we’d get to look like that one day, and all agreed that the red squirrel was not yet extinct from Cannock Chase.

The wearing of a “bathing cap” was deemed compulsory. Kev had the School Outfitter official brilliant white Rolls Royce model, size 6 7/8”, made of vulcanised Malaysian rubber with a British Standard kite mark over each ear.

I had the Cheslyn Hay “Harold Lockett, suit your pocket” High Street outfitters economy downpayment + 20 weeks instalment economy special. Off-white, one-size-don’t- fit-all.
Manufactured by an offshoot of Durex Ltd.

This was probably why getting your short back & sides haircut into it presented a challenge not dissimilar to that of inserting your head into a condom.

Except that the bathing cap trick was more difficult. Unless you were Patrick Darby, (sole future Tory party activist in a group of paid-up Monster Raving Loonies, AKA the notorious class 1B), and wore Brylcreem.

FAST FORWARD: (Incidentally, the head/condom trick appears in the 5E chapter. 5 pints of Worthington E in this case).

Mixed bathing would not occur until that 5E year, when we would at last get to see Judy’s wet-leather-look bikini, a sight of which we boys had all made mental fantasy video clips, and had awaited feverishly by then for nearly half a decade .

(Admit it reader; now you’re hooked.)

Conjouring up images of Marge Simpson, Lynette wrote in 2008:
…All that I now needed to do was get rid of the blue swimming cap(complete with chin strap) that, because of my then long hair, looked as if it was worn over a traffic cone.

The end of the Autumn term brought a solution to my own weekly bathing cap fitment struggle when, no doubt as a result of being stuffed into my briefcase with damp black regulation trunks and Daz-scented pink towel + geometry set + rough book + potato puffs + assorted other indispensables, it developed a brim-to-crown split.

Thank-you Durex.

It still passed inspection if you wore it back to front, ‘though.

Blue Peter Health & safety notice to Durex users; don’t try this at home.

FAST FORWARD As a last bathing irony/ example of laconic antipodean humour; In 1996 I did some team teaching with Australian colleague Helen Warnod at Camberwell French-English bilingual primary school in Melbourne, test-running a programme we developed around the theme of the Citroën 2CV.

We took the kids on a French/swimming activity to the local heated pool. The sign in the foyer read:

“Welcome to the Harold Holt Aquatic Centre”…

There I was, back in 1Z, December 1967…)

From water to snow...

Didn't it snow that winter of '67-'68, after the rains, discarded combs and worm-casts on the grassy knoll above the tennis courts, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in provided us with punch-lines?

Budding émigré Rob Walker turned up with an incongruous "I'm Backing Britain" badge.

We practised our imitations of "Sock it To Me" or "Here Come de Judge".

Richard Nixon turned up on "Laugh-in" and said "Sock it to Me?"

We realized that this meant he would win the presidential election in the coming November.

In another sketch "News from the future", R & M got a huge laugh when they referred to "President Ronald Reagan...."

Even R & M at their most burlesque could not have made a joke about George Dubya Bush, though.

There was a craze of bringing hot drinks in flasks to the D6 mirador.

Then private enterprise started to install vending machines, leaving Mrs Thatcher freedom of manoeuvre to forebodingly snatch our free milk.

The chilled fluorescent green fizzy pop started another craze: vomiting.

Just my luck, when Marcel chucked up over Graham Price's corfam slip-ons, to drop on head of French Mr Draper at the top of the staffroom stairs. I knew what was coming.

"En français" He smiled derrière les spectacles noirs......

"Marcel a spewé sur les slip-ons de notre ami Graham, Monsieur. C'est le pop vert et froid. Et un peu sur mon blazer vert. Regardez. Ce n'est pas beaucoup. J'irai à Sketchleys dans le centre de Cannock, ils ont une offre spéciale pour les mini-skirts en ce moment, seulement deuxpence par deux point cinq centimetres..."

Monsieur D interjected at this stage, mumbling something like "personne n'aime les smart-arses, voici un cloth de dish"...

Le pop vert conceivably set the scene for two generations of institutionalised nutritional abuse.

Martin Luther King was gunned down on 4th of April, a dream shattered. There would now be four decades of picking up the pieces.

The shiny, new 5p and 10p coins arrived later that month. A “cafeteria” school canteen system may also have appeared shortly afterwards.
The school canteen aspired to the ultimate heights of sophisticated chic by serving doughnuts and coffee in their regulation 'arcroc' glasses. (LR)

Our school panoramic group photo was taken as riots erupted in Paris in May. But all was quiet on the Grammar tennis courts as temperatures rose, and staff/student tennis matches were arranged. Judy and Karen became avid watchers. Liz Myers from 1X was a star.

Peter Gethin missed the panoramic photo opportunity.

He returned the following week, Alan Whicker style, with an orange sun tan, a new cravate in his pocket, and a seventeen-shilling Spanish guitar, on which he expertly picked the first half-dozen bars of "Spanish Eyes".

He informed the lads, in a series of stage-whispers behind his BBC hymn book in junior assembly, that the Costa Del Sol was where it was all going to be at in the near future. The beach culture was eclectic, there was bikini-clad tangerine pre-teen Dutch crumpet everywhere.

He had even precociously picked up a bit of the lingo.

"No Tango Dineero" he claimed with a semi-Cannockian RP inflection, was a sure-fire way of shoo-ing off insistent ice-cream sellers on the playa when, an Amsterdam-ette on each arm, you'd pigged out on "helado" all morning.

In our swimming lesson the next week, he impressed us with his new-found crawl, and further managed to inform us, with characteristic modesty, that he had swum a kilometre in the hotel pool on the morning before the Cosmos BAC one-eleven had whisked the family back to Gatwick.

Additionally, he would be approaching BOAC for training as a moustachio-ed airline pilot in August 1974 as soon as his A-level results were confirmed.

We all tried to picture what a kilometre looked like, and assumed that "our" girls would be honoured to have this modest maestro, this globe-trotting neo-Nemo in our midst.

Summer term arrived.

One June day we were given an afternoon off when the sporting types went in a green procession up Pye Green Road to the stadium.

Paul instigated a Cannock Cultural/Magical Mystery Tour afternoon for a gaggle of us athletic rejects. The programme involved cottage pie with chips and gravy, in Cannock's top gastronomy spot; upstairs at the Civic restaurant.

Partakers were me, Paul, Marcel/Nige, Kev & Graham Price.

We saved up for three weeks, foregoing potato puffs, Marcel's racing tips and le fizzy green émétique.

Paul, as a future literary expert, taught us the phrase "to go Dutch", as, unable to eat another mouthful of apple pie and custard, we scoured our blazer pockets for green fluff and dinner money.

The Civic experience was followed by a quick grab of the Pick n'Mix, across the square and through the traffic, in Woolworth's.

Activity three was a matinée reprise performance of "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" at the Walsall Road Picture House.

We settled into the blue velour, and treated ourselves to Westler's hot dogs, Butterkist popcorn and Kia Ora during the intermission.

I made a mental note to buy, in the unlikely event that they should appear in Auntie Vi's Great Universal Stores catalogue, some brown shoes like the French bloke flying the Antoinette. I made another mental note to book some flying instruction one day. (Probably not available on the 20-week G.U.S. payment plan).

Graham and Kev, slurping the last gurgle of Kia-Ora from the bottom of the early-model tetrapak container through a waxed paper straw, said this was the best Games afternoon we'd had all year.

In July, there was a Geography field trip to Dovedale. One of the girls lost a shoe in the river Dove, swollen by an English summer deluge. “Diddy” David Yardley waded in, surf-lifesaver-style to rescue it. Then he emigrated to Australia, too, maybe to escape the rain, arriving just six months too late to drag Harold Holt from the clutches of the Russkies.








We discovered a joke shop in Ashbourne on the way home, then bought Itchy Coo powder and stink bombs, which we took back to D6 in order to sprinkle the first timorous seeds of mild rebellion.

Steve Rotherham set off a stink at the top of D-block stairs. I pointed at the back of Didier/Dave Bowes’ head for an Itchy Coo attack. Dave was not impressed and a brief alpha-male stand-off ensued.

Towards the end of the year, the stink finally cleared, and a delicious air of freedom drifted up the hill. Perhaps this was not only the vinegary odours emanating from the Civic fish bar, or the cyclamate artificial flavourings of the migraine-inducing cider ice-lollies from the ice-cream van, parked next to big-hearted Graham Price's dad's D-Reg grey Austin 1800 at the school gate.

1968’s Summer of Love was not yet a myth.

Reformed salt scientists Steve & Ian were spotted risking third degree burns by doing some chick-magnet shirtless sunbathing near the biology pond.

There had been a speech competition in June, and one of the Second Year girls brought the outside world into the senior assembly hall, moving many of us to tears with a report on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

Our young minds could detect a theme of Americans and guns emerging.

Our loss of innocence began when we noticed that our female classmates were becoming increasingly curvaceous, and we started observing/timing/distracting the fifth-formers snogging outside 'B' block.

They were generally asked to stop by the duty staff.

Snoggus interruptus, I fancy I’d have called it had I not failed Latin.

Miss Simpson had never taught us the English word for voyeurisme. She only ever spoke French, after all.

So we just enjoyed watching in near-innocence.

Biology lessons, formal and informal, would no doubt come along in due course in a co-educational establishment with such a lax culture of "surveillance"…surely?

Lynette wrote about snogging recently, too;
“I well remember as a first year waiting for the No.7 bus home in the bus station and being amazed at how long you had to be able to hold your breath to kiss somebody. I would clearly have to improve my lung capacity before I could aspire to a boyfriend. I usually looked apoplectic by the time I boarded the bus as I would surreptitiously watch a likely couple and try and hold my breath for the length of their long kiss goodbye. How naive were we?”

In between keeping a stop-watch on the snogs, we collected daddy long-legs from the timber cladding of G block. Despite our lack of ability in inter-gender verbal communication, some of the girls faked being impressed by our Neanderthal bravado, and by our macho ability to perform amputations and mutilations upon these frightening insects.

A visiting group of French students appeared, and added their grown-up-style autographs to our little kiddie ones the back page of Karen's Chenet (School magazine).
As the mags were handed out, the stirrings of hormonal change were like the distant summer thunder over Rugeley power station.

FAST FORWARD; CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE
There is a "cultural simulation" game called BAFA BAFA. I first came across it in a Staffs Education Authority youth leadership course in Codsall late '70's. In a previous life as a teacher, I got to use it in places as prestigious as Norton Canes Comp, Bunbury Grammar in OZ & Lycée Mendès-France near here in La Roche sur Yon.

The game was devised circa 1967 by the US army for use with troops en route to Viet Nam. I always imagined it being played below decks on aircraft carriers (probable), or inside very big Lockheed Galaxy transport planes (improbable, but a nice image).

You can see a long explanation if you Google it. But briefly, you divide the group (works well with 30 or so) into Alpha & Beta cultures. Or Zedders if you want. They then go into separate rooms & get briefed about their cultures.

Alphans are highly competitive, and speech is forbidden. You only make contact with another Alphan by saying your initials twice and adding a vowel (hence BAFA BAFA/KAGA KAGA or LAPA LAPA) Their activity involves swapping playing cards in order to make full sets which they then go and register with a Banker, who keeps a tally. They only use facial expressions in order to negotiate. Physical contact leads to an expression of shock or disgust. Smiling is seen as socially unacceptable.

Betans are noisy, gregarious and smiling. They greet with backslaps and negotiate the exchange of beads whilst always touching. They talk incessantly about everything or nothing. The beads have no pecuniary significance whatsoever.

So you set up the two groups, let them practise for a bit.

Then you send an envoy Alphan into the Betan room to observe &, if they can, interact. And vice-versa.

Then the envoys come back & report to the rest of their group, and you finish off with a group session to discuss cultural assumptions.

Or, in the case of the US armed forces, you shout a lot and go and bomb the shite out of the Betans with B-52's.

RELEVANCE TO 1Z in early summer 1967 - (as you are probably wondering...)

Anyway, since it felt a lot of the time that we were living in two universes, Kev worked out the next step in intercultural mining village/Cannock Cosmopolis relations in 1967.

He invited one of our Grammar year mates from Pye Green as BAFA BAFA envoy to the badlands of the Cheslyn Hay "Mount" = slag heap.

Yes, we tried out the Tarzan swing over the Brook (1" steel cable with prickly wire bits for tetanus). Then we slid down slope B on the car bonnet, and went to look at the volcano (eternally smouldering slag on the south slope.).

Our guest then showed approval by demonstrating his skills, recumbent in the grass of the north face of the slag heap, the Cannock skyline and window frames of Moonbase Grammar illuminated by the fading evening rays of a July sun, as a prospective soloist sperm donor.

Boy, were we impressed.

As losses of innocence go, it wasn't exactly Cider with Rosie, then again it wasn't Famous Five either.

Except our guest had, in lieu of a packed lunch and lashings of ginger beer, brought along his own Famous Five fingers.

Famous Five pull it off?

I can't for the life of me remember who our "Semen on the Mount" (Scripture spelling corrections again) guest was, and I'm sure Kev won't either.

At least not in writing...

The following week, back in D6 watchtower, and as if as a precursor to our changes, the halfpenny disappeared from circulation with the end of term.

The boys would have to invent alternative activities to “shove ha’penny” played on a graffiti'ed desk top.

What would they get up to next?…

1Z was to become 2E, Physician “Nobby” Griffiths as form teacher.

The girls would become even prettier, and their mini-skirts would get even shorter, as my short trousers-thankfully- morphed into long ones.

And our elbow-less, faded and, presumably smelly blazers walked themselves to Sketchley's dry cleaners.

Watch this Space for the continuing Odyssey.

Alan BROWN albrown@wanadoo.fr

October 2008

In Memoriam, Nick HILL, Angela BINKS, Denis BOULD, Tim DAWSON, Donna JOVICICH

In November 2008, Lynette wrote:

Angela was a much-loved only child. She had lovely dark shiny hair, olive complexion, and a good figure.

I always wished I could write like she did, her exercise books were filled with pages that were really neat and tidy.

She moved to the area from Tamworth, and attended Broomhill Junior School. I have some Sunday School photos that she is on.

She always seemed to keep a low profile, was quiet and unassuming.

After leaving school she worked for the Coal Board at the Computer Centre on the Walsall Road. She married young and had three daughters.

She was very friendly with Nicolette Dzuba, and also had a Parker ladies fountain pen in maroon. I was ecstatic when I received the same model one Christmas.

She was also my carol singing partner my only foray into the world of festive begging, and knew a jolly Christmas song which went down a storm!

Appendix;

My first week at the “Grammer”…LR