Residing at the very bottom of the list of Grammar schools I wanted to attend was 'Alderman Newtons School for Boys'. Founded in 1066, or maybe earlier, by Alderman Newton for eight deserving lads, it was the oldest and most decrepit of all the Grammar schools in Leicester. It was the one that no-one wanted to go to. The bottom of the heap.
A brooding,gloomy pile of red brick and dark windows, it had been a paupers hospital for many years and in one mossy corner of the barren playground there were gravestones with eroded names of those who had died and then been carried the short distance to be buried.
I remember tearing open the envelope when Mum picked me up from junior school, to see which school I had been assigned to. All of my friends had already opened theirs and were all going to Wiggie Boys, the undisputed leader of grammar schools and always top of the list. The Attenborough brothers were among its most famous alumni. I pulled out the letter fully expecting to see Wyggeston Boys...... but it was not to be.
There in my already blurring eyes were the awful words I had been dreading to read. I collapsed into sobbing and my pals Cooker and Craig craned their heads into the car see what was wrong. I couldn't speak nor look at them. I just buried my face in my hands and Mum said that I was too upset to talk right then and drove away. I think my parents tried to change things, but it was no good. Dad muttered something about " social engineering " and that was that. My future path had been chosen.
The teachers at Alderman Newtons were a very mixed bag. At one end of the spectrum were the 'Old School' guys in their fifties and early sixties, who cut their teaching teeth in the thirties and forties and whose qualifications rested on years of dictatorial experience, as opposed to clearly defined teaching skills. At the other end of the scale were fresh-faced grads right out of university, full of pep and optimism and 'new ideas'. These were eaten for breakfast by the piranhas of the classroom and their dry bones dumped out the window and kicked behind the bike sheds.
We did, however, have a very attractive French teacher, Miss Ward, for our 3rd year. I used to have dramatic, overblown masturbatory fantasies about her. Usually involving having to stay behind after class for misbehaving and somehow ending up having my cock sucked under the desk. I remember one frenzied afternoon I was so horny that I had to have a wank while sitting shoulder to shoulder with my desk mate. I recall with a frightening intensity my efforts to keep my breathing normal and regular and when I did come, prickles of sweat broke out on my forehead and down my back. If my desk-mate did notice he was either too polite or mortified to say anything.
Anyway, I think she lasted one term. Never came back for the second and the deputy headmaster, Mr Grandy, had to take over until end of the year.
His molecular structure was entirely metallic and no-one ever messed with him. Not even Gavin Hind or Danny MacNess, the Two Kings of the hard lads. They mostly hung out in the bike sheds to smoke fags and pull the heads off birds or gob on the backs of First Year students.
Those French classes were memorable only because of the prevalence of the 'teach by humiliation' methodology.
Mr Grandy, "Mills. Come up here and tell us about the inside of a ping-pong ball. En Francais!"
Me " Errrr, ummm...... Demi baguette?"
Mt Grandy, "Mills, you are nothing more than a complete imbecile. Go and stand on your desk."
Hardly any wonder that my French conversational skills extended no further than chatting with furniture.
Many years later I went on a back-packing trip to Paris with my friend Tim Millar. His French was light years ahead of mine and came in very handy when booking youth hostel rooms, ordering food and, most importantly, talking to French girls. He would be charming their knickers off with droll comments and jokes in French, while I was making crude gestures for food and drink and repeating my name a hundred times.
The slim, dark-eyed jewels would soon lose interest in me and muttering something about mon ami would drift off again into the Parisian night leaving me dumb and depressed.
Our Latin teacher, yes, they still taught Latin!, was about 160 years old and drove to school in a chariot. He was as wrinkled as a walnut and his head had sunk into his body leaving his ears parallel with his shoulders. His crumpled suits were eight sizes too big for his wizened frame and in high winds he would turn into a kite and we'd fly him from the rooftops. He couldn't understand why 15 year old boys didn't arrive an hour early for his classes on verb conjugation and the founding of Rome by wolves. His classes usually descended into total chaos as paper planes and balls of glossy porno whizzed through the air and boys climbed out the windows for cigarettes and wank-breaks. I am pretty sure he was legally blind, even with his coke-bottle glasses reducing his watery red eyes to pinpricks.
He finally retired by the time I reached the 5th form and he was not replaced. I doubt they could have even found a Latin teacher by that time.
Of our other teachers throughout grammar school?
Geography. None memorable enough for me to recall their names, but one I do remember had fashionably long hair and asked if I liked Joni Mitchells' 'The Hissing of Summer Lawns'? This was in the sixth form when I had long hair and sported a black, velvet jacket and pachouli stained jeans. I had to confess that I didn't. If you couldn't take drugs to it I didn't listen to it. A rather narrow approach to World Music, but supplied a rather easy filtering method to the vast amount of musical material on offer. This same teacher took the Sixth Form on a field trip to Swansea and we stayed in a YMCA for a night. I picked the short straw and wound up sharing a room with him while everyone else slept in a large dorm room. I have vague,but fond, memories of that trip. I think we had to traverse Chesil Beach (?) measuring stones and sketch maps of dune formations etc etc. I ended up with an A in Geography, much to his chagrin.
History. Not only do I not recall any teachers, I can't even recall a shred of what we must have learnt. Vast gobs of English history, replete with birth dates of Kings and Queens, all lost. Although I do recall I found the World Wars interesting stuff. At least it felt more relevant to me than the Elizabethans. May as well been teaching us about aliens.
Mathematics. By law, all math at Grammar schools was taught by the Physical Ed teacher. Invariably they had a powerful, but misguided, passion for Institutionalized Violence…..otherwise known as Rugby. They sought to impart the principles of math in the same strenuous and muscular manner they used on the muddy Fields of Glory. Or, in my case, the Killing Fields of Hell. Every Wednesday afternoon we were bused to Glenfield Park on decrepit double-decker buses. There we were disgorged onto acres of frozen or sloppy mud and made to either catch a greasy rugby ball and then run with it pursued by howling wolves or defend three little sticks of wood with another little piece of wood, while balls made of red concrete were hurled at our shins at super-sonic speeds by sadistic bowlers. And all without the benefit of sight. I had to remove my glasses for these sports and consequently spent the entire afternoon squinting pathetically in the sunlight or winters grey gloom vainly hoping to see the ball before it either cracked me on the head or fell ten feet behind me. Although this was vastly preferable to actually catching it by sheer bad luck and being instantly jumped on by half a dozen members of the opposite team and my face ground into the mud. After a while I was grudgingly requested to go and run around the pitch for the remainder of the afternoon. This I did rather visibly for a few laps and then rather less visibly the rest of the time. I ducked behind the changing shed, along with the other shattered remnants of Physical Culture, where we discussed stamp perforations or searched for tattered porno under the shed.
Math was never my strong point. In fact, it was an anathema to me. A confusing, bewildering world of people digging precise holes by their stop-watches or consulting arcane little books full of dense tables that somehow related to that triangle on the blackboard with the funny squiggles nestling in the corners. In Math if you lose track of things for even a week or two you're toast.
" ….and as you will all recall from last weeks lesson, where we showed that pi is equal to the sum of the sine and cosine.."
If you heard that sentence and your first thought was, " What's pi?", you're in Big Trouble. And by 'you', I mean me.
Try as I might I just couldn't grasp what was going on. Or, for that matter, Why? If we had had better teachers I am sure I would have fared far better. But my memories of math are clouded by the tears I shed during class exams watching the whizz kids zip through the questions with tongue at mouths edge and asking for more paper while I was still taking my socks off to count on my toes. I was deep in the rut of believing I was stupid at math and try as my Dad did, I could not be hauled out. I must have scraped through O-level math by the skin of my teeth.
Perhaps that's why I ended up at Alderman Newtons Grammar School for Boys.
