Tales Out of School 2

It seems Section 1 of 'Tales is now too big to add to. This is the second section.

Chapter 1

It is a common fallacy that English teachers are good at INTERVIEWS. Apparently, their language skills and sensitivity to people are such that they are able to smoothly lie their way into all the top jobs in Education. After English teachers come Historians who have language plus political awareness. In my case, however, sensitivity outweighed language to leave me a gibbering hulk in interviews. I remember one interview which took place two days after an operation to remove four wisdom teeth. In mid-answer I felt my stitches fall from my gums and hang in the middle of my mouth. That was another failure!

As I moved slowly up through the ranks, I found myself on the other side of the table; conducting or at least taking part in the interrogation part. Initially the interviews were low key; the Head of Department and I would conduct informal conversations with temporary supply teachers for short term contracts like Maternity Leaves. We had a rough rule of thumb, Brian and I; when in doubt, the one with the best legs got the job.

We used to have hysterical preparation sessions where we drew up a list of possible questions to ask the nervous and anxious young ladies. When we were satisfied with our list we would admit the first candidate. The trick of course was not to laugh. Most of the questions contained double entendres or keywords from the latest joke list circulating round the staffroom.

‘I see Miss Jones that you have two outstanding features ….on your application form.’ This to any large breasted applicant always got us off to a good start. ‘Where do you stand on the question of administering a beating to naughty boys?’ We would listen seriously to the answer, occasionally licking our lips suggestively. At the end of the interview, before we began our deliberations, it was customary to ask ‘Are you still a firm candidate for this position?’ With the right set of pauses and a suggestive stress on the word ‘firm’, it was possible to reduce both of us to hysteria as our possible new colleague left the office.

We were found out only once. A black-eyed beauty, who would probably have got the job anyway, in answer to our shoulder-shuddering, ‘And what can you offer us in the way of extra-curricular activities?’ She considered our tone and in exactly similar vein responded, ‘Balls. I love playing ball games; the rougher the better. I can’t get enough. I would like to start a soccer team for older students, the younger ones, I find, have no control over their balls.’ We took her to our hearts immediately.

My career up the ladder had been put on hold. After Comprehensive Re-Organisation, I found myself second-in-command of the English Department and wanted the number one spot back again. In a fit of pique, I applied for a job at a school in Salford and found myself in a room with only two other candidates. I evaluated them and decided I was in pole position: one was too young with only a couple of years’ experience; the other looked well past it – even older than me. As a consequence of this confidence, I delivered probably my best interview.

The Head came into the room in the late afternoon and began to dismiss us in reverse order; the young one was congratulated on a good interview and with more years of experience would become a successful Head of Faculty. I forget why the old guy was dismissed (probably the quality of his suit). By now I was surreptitiously wiping my hand in preparation for shaking my new Headmaster’s hand. He turned to me and said, ‘As for you Mr. Bell I find we have irreconcilable differences in our views of Special Education so we are going to re-advertise!’

I shrugged nonchalantly; I didn't really want it anyway.

Eventually I became Head of English in my own right. Remembering my own stumbling efforts during my own failed interviews, I insisted on a short one-to-one chat prior to the formal interview with all candidates for jobs in my Faculty. I explained how nervous I had been and told them I was sympathetic to their situation. I also revealed the first question that they would be asked later so as to get them off to a flying start with a prepared answer. The question would be ‘What project/lesson do you rate as your best/most successful? The candidates were forewarned when invited to interview and asked to bring printed materials/lesson plans. During lunch before the interview proper, I and my deputy would photo-copy/steal these materials for the benefit of the Faculty.

It was customary for the Head teacher to end with, ‘Is there anything you would like to ask us?’ I told all would-be colleagues that if they directed a question at me, the Head of English, their application would prove to be unsuccessful.

This was ignored only once during twenty years of interviewing. The candidate was an Internal; someone on a temporary contract already who was now looking to make it permanent. We’d had a bit of previous during departmental meetings earlier in the term. She was a bossy, over-confident woman, who I was not anxious to employ full time. She was, however, by far and away the best candidate of the afternoon. When it was time for her to vacate the interview room, (the job almost certainly hers, she turned to me with a vicious glint in her eye. ‘I have one question to ask the Head of English.’

Then she asked it. I cannot remember what it was she asked, so enraged and, yes, nervous was I. Luckily it did not matter one jot as she proceeded to answer it herself in what became a very long, obviously rehearsed, critical statement against some/all of my policies. After an age she fell silent and I added my response. ‘Thank you.’ When she had left, the Head asked me why I’d thanked her. ‘Because she’d just saved us the trouble of considering her as a serious applicant.’ He nodded and we moved on.

As a side note, this bossy, posh woman was employed as a Support teacher and would sit in my class of ‘difficult’ students with special educational needs. She was universally disliked (by both the students and me.) She was nick-named ‘Beaky’ on account of a rather prominent nose. Someone in the class, not me, produced a plastic doll and managed to tweak its facial features into an extremely life-like facsimile of her. This doll made regular appearances by peeping round desks and being passed quickly from one to another so no-one was ever caught. It would send Beaky into screeching fits of rage and the class into fits of helpless laughter whilst I struggled to keep a straight face in a futile search for the offending doll.

Chapter 2

As I grew older, wiser and more experienced, the job got steadily more complicated on account of all the help the Government decided we needed. First came The Raising of the School Leaving Age. At fifteen, students were given a choice: stay on another year and sit some academic exams variously known as GCEs, CSEs, GCSEs. The ones who weren’t academic left to seek Trade Apprenticeships and learned how to bore holes in coffin lids.

It dawned on the Government, too late, that thousands of extra school places would be needed to accommodate these undiscovered Einsteins. The ROSLA block was born. Some apprentice architect was given fifteen minutes to draw up plans for rapidly erectable extra classrooms. His budget was severely limited; the building should cost no more than a second-hand ice-cream van though much larger. Thus, the blocks were built of plastic! They were two storeys, though there were insufficient funds for an upstairs fire escape. Known popularly as Death Traps, one burnt to the ground in twenty minutes luckily over a weekend when only the caretaker was about. It was rumoured that all the roofing was of grey asbestos. This would ensure many teachers would not draw their pensions for very long and only those students immune to asbestosis would make it to sixty-five and an old age pension.

To save more money there were NO inside walls except round the toilets and staffroom. This was grandly called Open Plan teaching. It allowed for Team Teaching whereby two teachers could occupy fifty odd students by showing them a video. Naturally the sound had to be turned up to maximum irrespective of the other class next door-less.

In inner city schools sometimes, there was not enough room on the playground so it was sited elsewhere. One of the principal reasons behind England’s rubbish World Cup teams was the number of soccer and cricket fields which were ploughed under to accommodate these architectural blights. Teachers were required to commute during their breaks and dinner times. Some travel expenses were paid but it was no substitute for not having a coffee all morning. (Thus adding kidney failure to the growing number of obstacles against drawing a pension for very long.)

To avoid classes sitting waiting for commuting teachers, different time zones were created; the big school started five minutes earlier than the ROSLA block whose students still turned up according to GMT. Any educational gains that were claimed for ROSLA block students, (and I have heard of none,) could be attributed to studying an extra fifty minutes a week. No overtime was paid for staff also working extra to compensate for the time lag.

The students themselves were split roughly fifty-fifty between those academics who would have stayed on to sit external examinations and those who would have left to earn good money as apprentice plasterers, electricians, coffin-lid grinders. Naturally this group resented the loss of income and contrived to convey their displeasure at this infringement of their civic liberties. Their targets were threefold.

The building itself was fair game: great strips of plastic cladding were ripped off revealing the fibre glass insulation inside. The cheap-jack furniture seemed to have been designed to fall to pieces under a merely malevolent gaze from a recalcitrant pupil. One lesson collapsed in sadistic laughter as the avant-garde teacher gathered his students round his desk to create a better atmosphere for discussion. His students responded by loosening the supporting screws until the whole desk dissolved.

The second target was naturally the teachers themselves. We were fair game and the pranks played on us were many. One poor, (and I use the adjective literally to mean impecunious,) teacher wore cheap cardboard soled shoes. During snow and wet weather, he skidded his way between classrooms. One of his lessons was in a Domestic Science room complete with cookers. Being intelligent he saw no harm in putting his damp footwear in a gas oven on low to dry them out before his next commute. Being inexperienced, he took his eyes off the cooker long enough for a student to turn up the gas. Thirty minutes later his shoes were nicely done; they disintegrated into a pile of black charcoal dust.

The third target for the ROSLA kids, as they became known, was their fellow students; the snobs, academics, swots. Like Cambodia’s Pol Pot, the next generation of our country’s intelligentsia was subjected to a merciless regime of derision and intimidation (thankfully without the Killing Fields). So was born the wave that has swamped all our schools except Public, fee-paying ones: studying, exam success, attention in class, and respect for teachers are all uncool and punishable in many ways both subtle and otherwise.

Chapter 3

Despite this catastrophic failure, the Government decided to go another stage further down this egalitarian path; the Comprehensive Revolution. It was decided to scrap the 11+ exam and send all pupils to the same secondary school. Why just tinker with a few Secondary Modern schools, went the clever thinking? Why not ruin the Grammar schools while we are at it? Of course, some Councils saw right through this complicated plot to eradicate the Intelligentsia and clung to their Grammar schools. The Government, however, ploughed mercilessly ahead; they seemed determined to kill off the idea that study and knowledge is enriching. Despite ample proof to the contrary, they seemed determined to make Life fair. But it patently isn’t.

There are some students born, by dint of parental genes, more intelligent than others. There are some children more bent on academia than sanding coffin lids. Be that as it may, everyone under one roof went up the howl.

As Head of English in a Secondary Modern school, it was my job to re-build the students’ confidence shattered by the 11+ exam and to coax a late learning spurt from those who had never really considered themselves academic. I did it by making them feel special – they were big fish in a little pool. I milked the exam system for all it was worth; I entered students for two exams simultaneously in the same subject. CSE exams came in the month before GCE so timing wasn’t a problem. Sometimes a student passed this but failed that; it didn’t matter, one or the other pass would equip them for life in the adult world or Sixth Form College.

My/their exam results improved year on year. I had a demonstration of how much faith students had in my teaching abilities. I taught English Literature by performance. One year a CSE set book was Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. There are fifty seven characters in the play. By popular demand I ended up reading them all! With a different voice! The class were much amused at my accent which drifted between Welsh and Pakistani. I sneered at Richard Burton grappling with just the one character though I admit his Welsh accent was better than mine.

I enlisted as an Examiner to supplement my income and marked late into the night in the weeks following exams. I saw a pattern in the successful answers and incorporated it into my lessons. I reduced it to a formula: P + Q = 2. My candidates were instructed to make a point about the text or character (P); support it with a quote or textual reference (Q) and this would ensure 2 marks. To score a CSE grade 1 pass, a mark of 75% was required. There were four essay questions on four set books.

Les was an intelligent and trusting student, in my mind a certainty to get his pass. On the day of the exam, I strode importantly up and down the hall, peeping over shoulders at answers, wincing occasionally. I arrived at Les’ desk just as he screwed the top on to his pen and set it down with a satisfied sigh. There was still a half hour to go. I glance at his paper and saw, to my horror, he had written on only three of the texts. In vain, I harrumphed and raised eyebrows and nodded dementedly at his answer sheet. I was not allowed to say quietly, ‘Why have you only attempted three quarters of the paper you blithering idiot?’ He smiled confidently at my antics.

I cornered him later on the corridor and began my tirade. He heard me out politely then explained as if to a three-year-old. ‘P + Q = 2. In each of my three essays I made at least fifteen points each with a quotation. I reckon I got full marks on all three answers. 75%.’ He smiled at me pityingly. On results day he airily waved his pass certificate. He had been 100% correct on 75% of the paper. (In later years he became an accountant.)

Chapter 4

UPDATE - Susan Wroe (circa 1974) wrote to me this week from Chicago. She reminded me of another story about the above Les Whitworth. Because he lived close to my house in Ramsbottom, he (& his steady girlfriend) became my regular baby-sitters. For his mock English Language imaginative essay, he wrote a Horror story that took place during his babysitting hours. It was so good, I read it to some of my other classes. Needless to say I gave it an A*.

All of the above 'Tales Out of School 1 & 2' has been posted on my free blog to be found on my website; Living History with Mike Bell. Within the first week, there were five hundred members of the FB page. I was entranced and read all the reminiscences; recognising familiar names; being reminded of unfamiliar staff (there were 100 teachers on the staff when I left.) It would be impossible to write chapters about them all.

I attended reunions in Waterfoot of the final year group at Ryfield Avenue when they all reached 30 and then 40. Les was one of these. To right the balance, it seems only fair to mention a student with whom I had a similar mutually close relationship on Broadway; Ian Fleming. No not that one, though I did discover a Thai equivalent – Somkinda Tealeaf! (You can read about him in ‘Amusing Thailand’ Now in paperback.).

This Ian was fourteen and in my year 9 class or Third years for older readers. He was a difficult student; given to expressing his opinions forcibly. I can even quote one of the first things he said to me and our class, ‘Shakespeare is a self-perpetuating myth’; this was in my first Shakespeare lesson of the year! Things could have gone downhill from there on, but they didn’t. He didn’t enjoy these lessons but I enjoyed his contributions. During our, sometimes heated exchanges, I let slip I’d written a book called ‘Skinner’ with the help of a class. He politely showed interest and I lent him the only copy (a handwritten one which I still have today nearly fifty years later!)

He returned it some days later with some grudging praise and a couple of suggestions for improvement. My own suggestion was that he should author his own novel and I would serialise it with our class; his very own captive audience. So, he did! And I did!

Whilst the rest of the class got on with my homework, Ian was excused providing he turned in the next chapters of his book. I can’t remember the title; I expect he can’t remember mine. (Skinner'). His topic was The Mods and Rockers battles in the news at somewhere called Brighton – very ‘Quadrophenia’. I duly read it aloud, uncomfortably, as I remember because of the frequent use of the F-word. Nowadays it is used so frequently on TV it would come as no surprise to hear on ‘Songs of Praise’ screened every Sunday. Then of course was different. I expected complaints from parents or teachers next door.

All too soon the year ended and he moved on to another English teacher. We would pass on the corridor and grin conspiratorially. It came as no surprise to learn he was writing TV programmes for students of Secondary age. A list of his credits can be found here - iandfleming.com.

The last I heard, (last week) he was lecturing trainee teachers and helping his 78-year-old teacher become an overnight success in the film world.

Despite being a rebel whilst at school, he recognised HHS' contribution to his development; Only a few weeks back, he emailed the following;

''Hazzy High was incredibly progressive. You lot taught us about life.'

He reminded me of that great stalwart, Mrs Cherry and her VD lesson.

This took place in the Assembly Hall. There were horrifying close-ups of people's not-so-private parts; suppurating sores; rotted syphilitic faces. A man in a white coat delivered the punchline: 'If you have had sex with four or more partners in your lifetime, you are almost guaranteed to contract one or more of these venereal diseases.” Can you imagine the impact this might have on sixteen year old, boys, in particular? No need to imagine Ian sent me this report.

' Stewart ‘Jasper’ Beardmore asked Miss Cherry if that meant we had it as we’d gone past that tally by then! So we went back to his, as we usually did after school. He was the very first person I knew who had two bathrooms. And we were each over a sink, running tap, tackle in hand, soap galore and nail brushes, scrubbing the bejeezus out of our manhoods! True story.'

Despite this, Ian went on to father children. I think I would have entered a monastery!

Chapter 5

STOP PRESS

A former student on the Love Haslingden site reminded me that whilst Alder Grange had Jane Horrocks (Ab/Fab fame) we, HHS had celebrities too, most of them named Aston. Both Emily, Thomas and Sam appeared on Corrie regularly and for several seasons.

I knew of Emily’s fame even before she arrived at the High School. I watched the movie ‘Oranges are not the Only Fruit’, entranced by the red-headed heroine as an eight year old. I was agog when I heard she’d begun school and actively sought her out. We met on the corridor near the changing rooms. I was star-struck and asked her for her autograph! We became firm friends as she progressed through the school.

By this time Mr. Guppy and I were involved in making scenery for the school productions. I graduated from playing Widow Twankey in the Sixth Form Pantomimes to more serious roles opposite Emily.

She was mischievous and frequently got me into trouble with The-Powers-That-Be. I was notoriously poor at remembering lines and took to writing them on various props which I could hold or see on stage. She stole or moved them at every opportunity. One time she asked me to rehearse with her behind some scenery whilst the drama unfolded before a live audience. We were caught high and dry in full view at the end of the scene when the scenery was changed.

During ‘West Side Story’ I played the racist Detective Shrank and we had a scene where I had to interview Maria (AKA Emily.) I was confident about my lines in this scene as I’d written them down in my ‘police’ notebook and could consult them openly when it was my turn to speak. Whether by accident or design, Emily forgot her lines and began answering my questions with the wrong answers. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Three months’. ‘

How long have you known Tony?’ ‘At the dance in the gym.’

It was obvious to everyone in the audience that I didn’t belong on the same stage as this professional.

Even after she left and turned professional I saw most of everything she did (so long as it was at The Octagon or The Exchange. She always knew when I was in the audience at the final curtain; my piercing whistle earned me a smile and a wave.

Chapter 5

1974?

The countdown to C-day had begun. A lovely little two form entry rural Grammar school was about to attempt to swallow the local Sec Mod which was twice its size. A huge building programme was begun on the Grammar school site as they had fields and we had an asphalt playground. Millions of pounds were spent to ensure Comprehensive education didn’t fail. It wasn’t just the expense of the buildings that would cost. Each school had its own management structure. There were two Headmasters: two Deputy Heads and of course Heads of the different departments: English, Maths, Science etc. None of these could be demoted – their salary scale was protected.

How were the decisions about the new Heads of Department made? Easy – if you were a Sec Mod teacher, you taught thick kids so you were by definition thick yourself and incapable of running an Academic Department in a Comprehensive school. All the academic Heads of Department in the new school were taken from the Grammar school staff on account of their ability to teach ‘A’ levels; all except PE and Tech Drawing – these were true Sec Mod subjects! In most cases this meant huge salary raises for these lucky academics. No account of scale was considered. The new Departments were much larger than previously. In the Sec Mod I had a Department of twelve staff. The Grammar school English head had one and a half!

Naturally there were casualties. Within the first year a small number of Grammar school staff had nervous breakdowns or took early retirement. They were unused to students who got in your face albeit in a fit of zeal. The opposite was true for Sec Mod teachers; they were introduced to whole classes of students who stood respectfully to greet you; who listened quietly to your every word. When I was finally entrusted with a Grammar school class, I thought I’d gone deaf!

How successful was it? In terms of exam results, not at all. I’d kept careful records of the numbers of my Sec Mod kids who secured GCE passes. The number had crept up annually. I separated the annual Grammar school’s 90+ % from their creamed intake. In the next five years, the new Comprehensive school’s results never once matched the combined total for the old Grammar school and the old Secondary Modern. I suspect this pattern was repeated across the UK. I expect statisticians, given long enough, could come up with reasons.

My own simple take was down to basic human nature. Take the high-fliers in the Sec Mod and suddenly place two classes above them in the ranking order. These kids immediately feel less special, their worth diluted. Now take the two Grammar school classes and surround them with several hundred pupils lacking their drive, intellect and high standards of behaviour. There is a resultant slackening of attitude; it is easier to float with the tide than swim against the current. Despite the millions spend annually on Comprehensive Education; this simple fact of human nature seems to have escaped the attention of the experts.

As these exam results began to filter back to the Government, they realised, with some desperation that this catastrophic experiment had gone horribly wrong. What to do? What to do? A simple answer stared them in the face: make the exams easier. So, they did. As the number of passes soared so the public would accept this dumbing down as the norm.

[PS In the year 2016, the Government of the day has just announced plans to begin the introduction of new Grammar schools. I make that nearly fifty years of wasted student opportunities + billions of pounds in new buildings + paying extra salaries for newly promoted Grammar school teachers + early retirement pensions for staff with nervous breakdowns + extra stock + extra salaries to cope with a new strata of pastoral staff necessary once a new year group exceeded 200 + ….. [oh well never mind, you get the idea.]

Chapter 6

It began innocuously enough; combining GCE with CSE and calling it GCSE. They trialled it with English teachers first; these stalwarts had prided themselves as always being ‘first over the parapets.’ If it could be sneaked past them the other difficult group, the Historians, would fall into line.

Lots of promises were made. The set texts for English Literature would stay on the syllabus longer; the choice would be widened; you could avoid Shakespeare. There were hints about Course work, even 100% Coursework – no EXAMS! I am ashamed to admit, we fell for it.

As a Head of Department money was the root of this evil. I had only a finite sum to spend on set texts. If these texts didn’t change so often I could save the exam text money and spend it on, say, chalk. These were the hard choices you had to make. I once sold a lot of old library books to a second-hand dealer for a penny a book. I asked what someone of his obvious entrepreneurial skills would want with such a load of old tat. He confided that locally there were lots of old Mill owners’ houses – huge stone edifices with oak-panelled walls. The new owners converted rooms back to libraries and bought rubbish books to line the walls – the first attempts at insulating walls, I surmise. With the penny-a-book money I bought paint. One of my classes and I spent a week’s holiday painting the walls and ceiling of our own library – what a way to spend Easter.

Thus, we allowed ourselves to be bribed into accepting the new exam. We all knew that you could set essay titles that would tax the brightest whilst still allowing the weaker candidates to score. We also knew that there was not an author alive or dead whose writing would be a challenge to the comprehension skills of the ‘A*’ candidates without being total gibberish to the ‘G’s.

Gradually coursework crept up and up. With 40% awarded for a folio of writing plus 20% awarded internally for something called Orals, English teachers were now in control. Of course, to avoid accusations of cheating there were Moderation meetings for all the local schools.. These were great fun. The English Heads of half a dozen local schools would gather at a host school like Fearns or St Ambrose where their candidates were judged; marks were awarded and discussed, then you were sent back to adjust your marks in the light of the discussion. Naturally you were very mean on the day and accepted, reluctantly, that all your marks should be raised.

Ultimately this trend culminated in 100% Coursework; that is NO EXAMS after five years of study! .Naturally as there were no exams in English after five years, there were no exams necessary lower down the school. For a teacher who had had to mark maybe two hundred scripts every other term, this was Nirvana. To say we were envied by other subject teachers would be to state the obvious. Whilst the rest of the staff was ploughing through exam marking, we English teachers were already on our report writing.

There was a price to be paid. There were two days of being closeted in the library with over 230 folders each containing a minimum of seven essays. All had to be rank ordered and a decision made as to where we drew the ‘C’ or PASS line. The other cost was of credibility. However good our results were or were not, we never received any credit either from other staff or Head teachers. Again, I kept careful records. When 100% Coursework was finally killed off by greedy, cheating English teachers, (in other schools) our results improved year on year, suggesting I had drawn the line too high. How many of my students had I failed by my determination to be fair?

Chapter 7

For most of this time, I was still 2-i-C of what I always considered to be my Department or Faculty as the new trendy word would have it. When the old Grammar school Head of English did the honourable thing and took early retirement because she hated the new monster that had been created, I thought at last justice would be done and I would become HOD (Head of Department) again. It was not to be.

A school of 1,500 students with a strong Sixth form attracted all sorts of high-flying candidates. I suspect I only made the short list out of courtesy. Once again, my interview was doomed and a new guy took over. Despite my disappointment I had to warmly applaud the appointment of Mr Bryant. He was an excellent boss and always made me feel valued and credited me with areas of responsibility. He asked for advice and listened. We became unlikely friends. It was no surprise when he was promoted to Deputy Head after four or so years.

Again, my hopes soared and again were dashed as a new HOD was appointed over me. This time it was someone who became known as the Dunlopillo woman for her uncanny knack of gaining copious rolls of rubber during the year before losing it near the summer hols as she got her body beach-ready. Maj, short for ‘Her Majesty,’ was a megalomaniac and a liar.

One of her first decisions was to lock all the storerooms. If you wanted a set of books – text or readers, you had to queue humbly outside the door and await Her Maj’s arrival. She would count out the books, write the number in an exercise book and would reverse the process at the end of the lesson. This had a catastrophic effect on her relationship with her staff and I suspect her own classes’ progress as their lessons began anything up to 15 minutes after everyone else’s.

Maj consulted me on English Department matters, usually ten minutes before a Department meeting. I was astonished to hear my words airily coming from her mouth with no acknowledgement as to their source. The downward spiral began. The average teacher has never left school. After Sixth form then University they return to teach. S/He has never experienced the rough and tumble of the real workplace in the wider world. We were totally unprepared for adult liars. Of course, we expected kids to lie especially about missing homework but failed to grasp that Maj could look us in the face and glibly lie.

It took us maybe two years and one Extra-ordinary General Meeting to suss it out. The meeting was called by one of the most intelligent women it has been my pleasure to work with. It was extra-ordinary in that the Head of Faculty was not invited! There were maybe eight specialist English teachers who, by this time, had been together many years. During Maj’s reign, relationships had deteriorated to the point of almost open hostility. During the course of this meeting we discovered Maj had operated a divide and conquer policy. We all put our cards on the table and discovered the full extent of her deceit. The verdict was either Maj was mad or we had been part of a psychological experiment. She had lost our love, our support. In football manager’s jargon, she had lost the dressing room. There was only one option open to her: leave.

Chapter 8

RIP - On learning of John' death 26/1/2021

One of my special drinking buddies was Mr Birtwell. A rugby player built like a prop forward who liked his beer. His preferred tipple was draft Guinness. On one of the end of term celebrations, he over did it. He’d had, maybe twelve good pints before he drank ‘a bad ‘un.’ We were walking home when he began to vomit. Great gushers of black fluid spewed forth into a neighbour’s garden. I gently supported him as he evacuated the bad pint. He paused, looked deep into my eyes and gently murmured, ‘You know draught Guinness tastes as good coming up as it does going down.’

Mr Birtwell was a historian. He told me students had no sense of history; they couldn’t do the maths. To prove it during a Study of World War 2, he told his class about his war service despite the fact he would have been three years old at the time! The class of 14 year olds swallowed it totally. To add verisimilitude, he roped me into the story too.

Every Wednesday the class would have history with Mr B then troop along the corridor for English with me. The first part of the lesson, I had to deal with the latest of his preposterous tall tales. According to him, I had been his Commanding Officer! He told them of our war time adventures. One memorable incident was when we had been in Italy with no supplies and were literally surviving on what we could scavenge. A shell went off close by and I found Mr B covered in blood lying in a field but still breathing.

Being immensely strong and a heroic sort, I put Mr B across my shoulders and half-carried, half-dragged him nearly two miles to the field hospital. All the way there he was moaning, ‘What a waste, what a waste.’ I assumed he was talking about his young life being cut off in its prime; (ie 3 years of age!)

Anxiously I hovered as the doctor checked his vital signs, cutting away his uniform to find the wounds which had produced so much blood. The sound of the doctor’s laughter stunned me as he fished about in the bloody pulp of Mr B’s torso. When the shell went off, he had flung himself to the ground, crushing the tomatoes he had recently scavenged and stuffed down the front of his jacket. There was not a mark on him. What a waste of ten pounds of tomatoes! The kids loved it.

Then it was my turn. Mr B had turned up to his lesson sporting a black eye, a real one; sustained during his weekend rugby match. Mysteriously he refused to explain but urged them to ask their English teacher, hinting it was something to do with our wartime experiences.

I was totally unprepared for the barrage of questions thrown my way so I had to improvise and told them this story.

It was 1945 which made me three years old and Mr B an imminent twinkle in his father’s eye. We were on a mission in Occupied France. I was in charge and I explained our orders to the rest of the team. A prominent member of the French Resistance had recently been captured and was imprisoned nearby awaiting the arrival of Gestapo interrogators. It would not take long for them to unlock the secrets inside his head. We had to free him or ensure his permanent silence – I mean permanent. I watched the class as they realised the implications of my last sentence. Their evident pity at my situation was touching.

Mr B was the dog man. This made perfect sense to the class as he had regaled them with tales of his modern-day pet terrier, taking walks across the moors of Oswaldtwistle. (Yes, it is a real place, difficult to say but instantly familiar to the class of fourteen-year olds, sitting mesmerised in front of me.)

His skills were such that he soon had the Germans’ Doberman guard dogs literally eating out of his hand; drugged meat. We made our way stealthily through the camp in the misty haze of what promised to be a fine sunny French day. Silencing guards en route, we freed our man.

It was on our return journey when all hell broke loose. We fought a running fire fight with the remaining guards and escaped. Unfortunately, our brave Resistance leader was killed by the German fire. Most of the soldiers under my command escaped alive. I paused to let the class assimilate the weight of the word ‘most’. My eyes grew moist at the memory of the fallen.

But where did Mr B’s black eye tie in? Widely reported in the local newspapers was a story about a failed Post Office robbery in Oswaldtwistle. Mr B had been in the Post Office, so my story went. Contrary to what the papers had said, it had not been a failed robbery but the attempted murder of Mr B. A ripple of astonishment swept the class or did I detect scepticism? That sort of thing didn’t happen in Oswaldtwistle.

Some of the class were aware that a foreign man was ‘helping the police with their inquiries.’ I nodded triumphantly. ‘He was French.’ My words fell with the weight of steel girders. Some of the slower ones began asking their neighbours. I hurried to give them the ending.

The Frenchman was the son of the Resistance leader, convinced that his father had been murdered by English commandos. Papers recently released by the War Office had implicated me and my team. The Frenchman had confronted Mr B in Oswaldtwistle Post Office. There had been a struggle, an unspecified weapon had been recovered and thanks to Mr B’s commando training his only injury had been a black eye.

There was a clock on the classroom wall. I watched the second finger tick towards the bell for the end of the lesson. Then I delivered the perfect ending; ‘The police found a list of names on the Frenchman. I was next on the list. Mr B probably saved my life.’ I strode from the room, head hung low, humbly, counting my blessings.

Chapter 9

There’s a great many newspaper reports about violence towards teachers as if this were a new thing . It has always been there; from parents mainly. What is new is the rise in violence towards teachers from students. Society has made ‘youf culture’ all important so it is no surprise that youth feels confident enough to take on the two main bastions of society: the police and teachers.

I experienced my first violence on Teaching Practice near Old Trafford football ground. I taught Games, which in Manchester meant football. The Head of PE needed to leave school early and asked me to supervise the showers then lock up. One student, irked because he’d been on the losing side, decided on a go-slow protest. He was last out of the showers then took an inordinate time towelling himself dry.

Ordinarily I am a patient man but I had a bus to catch. I gave the lad an ultimatum; hurry up or I would throw his clothes outside the building, so I could lock up and leave him to get dressed outside at his considerable leisure. When I carried out my threat, he went into overdrive, dressed then confronted me as I made my way across the playground.

The skirmish was over before it started: I was older, stronger, bigger. The next morning as I handed the keys back to the PE teacher, I casually mentioned the incident. The first lesson of the day, as luck would have it, I was teaching the same class, this time English. The lad was a bit sullen but both of us were taken aback when the Head of PE asked if he could borrow the student to help out at the gym.

At break I learned that no fewer than three other teachers had visited the gym and ‘made the boy feel very uncomfortable.’ Fast forward thirty-seven years to another occasion when a fifteen-year-old offered violence towards my person.

I was now Head of English and as such responsible for discipline not just in my own classes but those of the dozen or so staff in my Faculty. I had been summoned to remove a recalcitrant student from a junior teacher’s lesson. Normally the routine was easy. I was a venerable sixty something; a senior teacher with my own office. I merely had to crook my finger and the problem would be resolved.

Higgins hadn’t read the script however. It took a lot of persuading to get him to leave the classroom. Outside, on the corridor, he became violent. I had two choices; run away to the Head teacher’s office or use ‘reasonable force’. This phrase had come into being with the demise of Corporal Punishment.

Eventually, I managed to overpower him to the point where I got him to the Head’s office. I handed the miscreant over to the powers-that-be and left expecting Higgins to be expelled or at the least have a heavy suspension. (By heavy, I mean ten school days; the maximum allowed under these ludicrous rules.)

There followed an uneasy two or three days when, not only was Higgins in school, but seemingly untouchable, strutting his stuff; glaring menacingly at me on the corridor; being followed by an adoring crowd of acolytes. Eventually I saw the Head. What he said left me devastated. Higgins had told him that I had beaten him up and thrown him down the stairs. He wasn’t being investigated, I was. Furthermore, he had a witness.

For three days my future hung in the balance. If I was deemed guilty of assault on a student, I might be dismissed, face police charges. What would happen to the pension I had built up during my long career? I wandered round in a daze. I couldn’t concentrate in lessons so I began my own investigations. The ‘assault’ had taken place in my English block. The witness had been seated in an adjoining classroom and seen me beating Higgins up through a window in the door. I asked the English teacher to show me where the witness sat in her class.

From my seat at his desk I could see nothing of where my assault took place. Later that lunch time, I conveyed my findings to any one who’d listen to me. A Tech Drawing teacher was sympathetic. ‘Higgins did the same thing two years ago; same witness too.’ He took me to their office and found the relevant report. Higgins had accused a(nother) Senior teacher of assault. His witness verified it but cracked when interrogated further, admitting Higgins had coerced him into lying. Armed with a photocopy of the report I returned to the Head. I was home free; there was no apology for doubting my word; no compensation for the stress experienced when my retirement pension was under threat. Higgins confessed and was punished to the full extent of the law: he had to do two detentions after school! I began to make plans for early retirement. The dice was too heavily loaded in favour of the student.

Chapter 10

It was the worst of times and the best of times. At the last count I had served with nine Head teachers; (a couple of them were temporary appointments due to the most amazing circumstances involving forgery/corruption/sex scandals – have I got your attention?) Only one of the nine was a woman and she it was at the centre of all the illegality. Let’s call her Rumba to protect the guilty after all she led us a merry dance.

She came highly qualified as an Assistant Headteacher – the nameplate on her office door proclaimed her to be Dr Rumba. In a few short years she was duly installed as the school’s first female Head. What a mistake that was! It is difficult to put things delicately in these days of Political Correctness – perhaps the words of our Senior Mistress best sums it up – ‘The bloody school’s being run depending on what time of the month it is,’

I fell foul of her almost immediately. I had thought my cheerful personality and charming smile would be enough to win her over – to no avail. At first I thought she just didn’t like me. Again, trying to put this delicately, I later found out she did not like men generally.

She embarked on a policy of ‘suite-ing’. This latest Educational buzz-word in theory had a lot going for it. Subject areas were grouped in classrooms geographically. It meant you were surrounded by staff teaching your own subject. Your Head of Faculty was always close at hand. Your text books were in close proximity. Unless you drew the short straw – the dinner rooms.

The school, despite extensive new building during the Comprehensivisation and ROSLA fiascos, never saw fit to build a dining hall. Instead they built a huge kitchen with two serving hatches surrounded by four classrooms. Guess where our dancing queen decided to suite her most academic Faculty!

When I heard her plans, I am not ashamed to admit there were tears in my eyes when I pleaded long and hard to be spared this attack on the most successful subject in terms of GCSE results. I pointed out that noisy preparations for dinner would disrupt the final half of the lesson before lunch. I pointed out that the smell of cooking food would disturb students’ concentration as their bellies craved satisfaction. I pointed out that the smell of cooked food would linger well into the lessons after lunch. I pointed out the tables were never thoroughly cleaned and many books, both text and exercise books would be disfigured by slops on the desks.

She pointedly ignored my pointings out. My team was expected to move from new classrooms with electrically operated Venetian blinds to pig-sties. Thousands of text books had to be trundled from one building to the next. What a waste of man hours and education time! I don’t want to cast aspersions but the Chairperson of our Governing body was an ex-dinner lady whose son had fallen foul of my ire on account of him being a lazy, good-for-nothing arse. Head and Chair were good friends. Remember this last sentence.

To rub salt into my wounds, it was rumoured that the Head had successfully asked said Chair for a rise. Remember this last sentence.

Everything Educational was set to one side as we were given the news of an impending School Inspection. The word impending is a misnomer. We had the best part of a year to set aside teaching and make policies and create Faculty Handbooks and prepare Policies on Health and Safety; policies on Teaching and Learning styles; Homework Policies; all on a variety of things we had been doing successfully for years without carving them into tablets of stone.

After all the months of pressure building from the top down, you would think the actual Inspection would be a light relief. Not a bit of it. The most nerve-wracking thing was to have an actual Inspector in your classroom or maybe it was just the prospect of one as you never knew who was getting ‘done’ beforehand. Every shadowy figure going past your door during the 1st part of the lesson sent your pulse racing; dried the inside of your mouth and caused your tongue to swell to three times its normal size.

I appealed to the humanity of our English guy and explained our nervousness. Unbelievably he understood and told me every two lessons where he would be and who he would see. I relayed this information so we were all prepared. The object of this ordeal was to secure a grading of ‘Excellent’, ‘Very Good’ or ‘Should Consider Joining the Army.’ At the end of the week these scores were aggregated across each Faculty and a report was delivered to each subject Head explaining our strengths and weaknesses.

Senior Management was also subjected to this ordeal. One last sentence that must be remembered was ‘The school has sound financial management.’ Is the suspense killing you? Oh all right then.

Chapter 11

Rumours began to circulate. One of the secretaries was less than discreet after a couple of gin and tonics. Apparently, Miss Rumbar, before sending the salary structure for Inspection, had asked the afore-mentioned alcoholic secretary to make a change or two – specifically to the Head’s salary scale. Another Deputy Head discovered this; questions were asked; brows were furrowed.

The Dinner lady in her capacity as Chair of the Governors had agreed a salary rise for the dancing queen but had foolishly signed a blank cheque for Miss Rumbar to complete. A simple mistake had been made obviously, which no one had picked up on until the Head herself had the salary scale altered back to what it should have been. Surely it could not be deliberate embezzlement? Surely our first female Head could not have made such an error? A police investigation was begun.

Suddenly all my dinner room problems shrank to tiny proportions. Suddenly I could not wait to throw petrol on the flames sweeping the staffroom. Irregularities in Miss Rumbar’s qualifications were discovered in that she was no more a Doctor than I was a Professional footballer. She had left her previous school under something of a cloud. A check of the school’s telephone bill revealed long conversations during school time with her lover. Expense claims were examined. A trip by plane to a conference in London was found to have been ‘unnecessary’ as the conference was cancelled due to a fire. Miss Rumbar still went. A date for a trial was set.

Once, whilst driving my first car; a three-wheeler Robin Reliant, in Shuttleworth, Edenfield, I was adjudged to have broken the speed limit. The policeman, whilst struggling to keep a straight face, told me I was doing 46 mph in a 30 area. I had heard there was a statuary fine plus a pound per mile over the limit. I elected to go to court and fight my alleged speed. The night before I rehearsed my opening plea in front of some helpful Youf Club members who offered copious words of advice most of which cannot be printed here.

A friend on Senior Management who was due to testify in court the following day employed me to listen to his evidence and encouraged me to grill him as Miss Rumbar’s expensive barrister would. What fun we had as, in my interrogation of him, I had to refer to the lady who had jailed me in the dining rooms as ‘The Accused.’

In the event, despite it being great fun, it became unnecessary as our esteemed Head pleaded guilty thus avoiding the whole stack of evidence being paraded in public and before an electrified staffroom. Throwing herself on the mercy of the court worked in that jail time was avoided. Resignation meant she was not sacked and goodness knows what happened to her pension. Last heard of she was managing a clubhouse bar on a golf course. I wonder what qualifications she needed for that job?

Chapter 12

As a footnote on Inspections there were occasional victories. Nowadays, a school is no longer served with many months notice to sweat and fret over – less than a month’s notice is about standard now. The other victory was when I was forced to use violence on an Inspector!

Security in schools is tight nowadays. We’ve not got to the American level of using metal detectors on students but strangers/visitors are required to attend the office where they are given an official badge. On the above Inspection we were told all Inspectors would be wearing a badge from the office.

On the first day I was on corridor duty supervising students as they entered the building. Coming towards me was an obvious Inspector wearing an expensive suit and that ‘I’m important’ face. I stopped him with a hand on his chest. ‘Excuse me sir, where do you think you are going?’

‘I am one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors and I am about to attend Registration in room 6.’

‘I see, and have you any proof that you are who you say you are? The whole staff have been told that Inspectors would be wearing official name badges. Could I see yours, sir?’ A lifetime of being addressed as ‘sir’ had prepared me to deliver the word in such a way as to mean ‘paedo’ ‘terrorist’ or ‘mere scumbag.’

He bristled visibly, whilst I kept my hand on his chest. ‘I’m sorry; I was in a rush to get here quickly and forgot to pick it up at the office this morning.’ He pushed ever so slightly against my hand.

‘I can’t let you into the school without your badge, sir. There was a case recently where a loonie got into a school and caused problems. Let me escort you to the office where you can pick up your badge, sir.’ I pushed him back.

‘For goodness sake, I am part of Mr. Knowall’s team. I need to make it to room 6 before 9am.’

‘Even if you are part of the Inspectorate team, this could be a test of the school’s security routine. You are not entering the building.’ Another push in the chest caused him to take a step back. ‘I’ll escort you to the office and we’ll pick up your badge together, shall we?’ He began to retrace his steps with me two paces behind.

At the office he announced his name to the secretary who handed him a name badge. (I was relieved it wasn’t the English Inspector’s name.) Pinning his badge on, he turned to me triumphantly. ‘Now I’d like to know your name so I can discuss your treatment of me with your Head teacher.’ I knew he’d get all the support he wanted from Miss Rumba.

‘I have a better idea,’ I countered. ‘Let’s go and see the Chief Inspector himself and we can explain to him how you were late on your first day; failed to pick up your ID badge and then tried to intimidate the Head of English into circumventing the school’s security policy.’ No ‘sir’ this time. He declined.

Chapter 13

After thirty eight chapters and the same number of years teaching, I guess it’s a good place to sum up the whole world of Education in Britain. Over the years there have been movements which have failed – some of which looked good on paper but failed in practice.

One such was Special Needs. It was supposed to encompass both bright and not so bright. Students were examined by members of what used to be called the Remedial Department. Originally it was for students who were not clever or academic – they were familiarly known as thickies’. I know this is not particularly PC but that’s how it was. A small group of students each year were given Special help with English and Maths by a dedicated group of teachers. After years of failing at school, some of these students naturally developed behavioural problems – they were difficult to teach.

Because I had the biggest biceps in the Department (85% of whom were women), I often volunteered to serve my time. Teaching the ninth stream in any year group is no bed of roses but there was scope for fun. I had one such group for their two final exam years before they left (none went into the VIth Form.)

One of their (and my) favourite lessons was the Handwriting Exercise. Each week a proud member of the class got to choose a page from our class reader. Everyone would then diligently copy it out into their exercise book and I would diligently take it home and mark it the same night. Each student began with twenty out of twenty but lost a mark for each mistake: a missing comma; a mis-spelling; a difficult to read letter. I occasionally awarded full marks to a proud and diligent pupil.

Another fun lesson was the Spelling test. It had been decreed by Know-alls running Education that regular homework had to be set across the full ability range. No account was taken of the fact that these students forgot a whole day’s schooling during their ten minute walk home. They also forgot text books that staff had foolishly entrusted to them; naturally they always forgot any homework.

At the start of the year my remedials got to rip out all blank pages from old exercise books. Each week they would carefully copy from my blackboard twenty words on to this scrap paper and carefully carry it home or as far as the nearest toilet. I would carefully enter this homework in a journal to prove I was obeying Government decrees.

The next day came the test. Out would come their exercise books. I would announce the title by pointing to the board on which were written the words. With a straight face I would read them out one by one. In all the years I did this, nobody ever got full marks despite the answers staring them in the face from the board.

They loved me to ridicule their efforts in a fun way. I used to say I had taught intelligent apes to spell better than they and I would pull a face which I fondly imagined was my monkey face. The kids labeled it (again not PC) my ’Mong’ face. If anyone displayed a particularly low level of intelligence, they would chorus ‘Give him the Mong face, sir.’ At the end of the year, the proud student who was voted the thickest was given a Mong Gong.

Occasionally this familiarity had disastrous consequences. They loved to hear stories about my life and frequently asked questions of an incredibly personal nature. Last lesson in the afternoon was their favourite time: they were tired; so was I. This particular year I was renovating a cottage. We would often put diagrams of the floor plans and work out how many square yards of floorboards I would need or what size reinforced steel joist (RSJ) would be required over a window in a stone wall. There were some remarkably prescient answers.

The job that fateful afternoon was a floorboard one; but these were a special size. New tongue and groove would not do as the rest of the floor was done in old inch thick planks. The question of where to get them was best answered by Higgins. He reckoned a demolition site where rows of old terraced houses were being pulled down was my best bet. I concurred. There was a site near his house where they were just burning hundreds of feet of this timber. If I wanted he could get me the required quantity set aside. That would be brilliant and if he was successful I’d come round to his house with my trailer.

Then I made my big mistake; I said I’d pay him or the foreman for such boards. I then promptly forgot all about it as I’d heard such wild tales before.

A few days later I got a telephone call from the local police station asking me to call in on my way home. The desk sergeant said one of my pupils was in trouble and had given my name as his get-out-of-jail-free card. Of course I agreed to help.

The next hour was the most stressful of my previous twenty five years. I have always maintained that there is a strange relationship between police and teachers. Speaking for myself, I have always respected them as a bastion against the anarchy that bubbled close to the surface. Had I been tall enough I would have joined when I was eighteen. I got the impression that day that the police viewed teachers as left-wing activists whose sole purpose was to undermine society.

I found myself in a room helping the police with their enquiries in the same way Crippen and the Black Panther had. I was viewed as a latter-day Fagin who had encouraged Higgins and other accomplices to break into houses and rip up floors because their English teacher had said he would pay them. I was subjected to the equivalent of water-boarding as the good cop/bad cop routine played out. The questions were of an intimate probing nature asking about my sexual relations as if that were pertinent to the price of floorboards. Eventually I was permitted to leave with no charges to be brought against me. For good measure they had phoned school and alerted my head teacher.

The following morning I was subjected to another interview at least as stressful as the police one as a senior manager scented blood and saw a chance to rid the profession of such a bothersome thorn in its flesh. As each barbed shaft struck home between my shoulder blades; as he feverishly scribbled notes in his ‘report to the Governors’ I realized, with a blinding flash of intuition that this was his revenge for his failure as a father. Years ago I had taught his son, an extremely intelligent and capricious student. On his report card I gave him what was probably the only E grade of his entire school life. It was for (lack of) Effort. I countered it with an A for attainment. This was payback time. He had complained vociferously at Parents Night saying it was victimization. (Incidentally I had exactly the same experience with my own son. I congratulated the teacher on his boldness.)

I returned to the staffroom and broke down into a flood of shuddering sobs. Uncle Eddie was on hand to re-construct me. He had spent a life-time teaching these remedials. He knew how their minds worked and took it upon himself to relay this information to Senior management, in particular my interrogator with the parenting problems.

Chapter 14

So was born The Special Needs Statement. A student with a learning problem or a pushy mother was given a statement of the child’s special educational needs. Each statement was to be included into a teacher’s lesson plan; each need had to be met. To ensure this was done, an army of ‘classroom assistants’ was recruited and attached to a child or two and would follow them around all day into every lesson.

Shortly after becoming Head of Faculty I was awarded a new building. With the money saved from over-paying a dishonest Head teacher and as compensation for the years spent in unsavoury dining rooms, we were to have a purpose built block of six new classrooms; a big office and new storerooms. It was immediately christened Bell’s End.

When I say ‘purpose-built’ it was not built for the purpose of teaching in optimum surroundings. Presumably County architects have never visited a school since they left their own VIth form. In their heads all school children are tiny and so a mythical figure is calculated for a child and a desk. This is then multiplied by thirty as that was how many students were in a class when they went to school. The room is built to that size. There is no input from the poor sods who were crammed in there.

So imagine a room built to house thirty dainty bodies sitting in perfect silence. Then turn them into hulking sixteen year olds; then add a further five or six (we frequently taught classes of 35.) Now blend in the Support staff! It was not uncommon to have four students with Special Needs AND their private tutors. What about that most basic special need – oxygen? With windows shut against the harsh British winters and even harsher Rossendale summers, the classrooms became the second most toxic environment after Chernobyl.

Individually I had nothing against any of the Support staff who found their way into my lessons – except I liked being silly with children and found myself inhibited in their presence and a worse teacher for it.

There was one qualified teacher who loved having a certain support teacher in his lessons – she was a better disciplinarian than he was and he found he could teach better. My view is different. I often used to say I was the funniest man I knew. I used to listen to me teach and really enjoy what I heard, until the alien invasion. In my classroom usually the only sound was of my voice or the occasional answer from a student. With the advent of ‘translators’, there was a constant low level murmuring of four other adult voices explaining what I’d just said to their individual needy ones. I suspect the UN conferences were like this before the introduction of headphones!

The Support staff themselves varied enormously. Some would do all the children’s assignments themselves with no input from the child. (I always gave A* s here so the exam grade would come as a complete shock to their system.) Others, I think, failed to understand the lesson completely so the needy student’s response was useless. There were some whose ambition needed reward; so was born the scheme whereby QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) could be attained by serving an apprenticeship. It was a cheap (to the Government) way to put more bodies in the classroom as desire to enter the profession declined in proportion to the salaries earned in Industry.

Chapter 15

What other taboos can be broken here in this irreverent view of Education. I know, Muslims – that should raise a few hackles. Before the invasion of various Middle Eastern countries and Islamic terrorism, the main problem with ‘them’ was their diet. There was about a 10% Immigrant population in my school of 1,500. A few of these arrived at various times mid-term; some with little English. They were placed in a classroom that was rapidly christened ‘The Curry room.’ Over time the exhalations of so many students was absorbed into the very fabric of the walls. It was impossible to spend thirty minutes in there without coming out hungry.

In many ways they were a joy to teach. The early immigrants were pathetically grateful for Education. They respected their teachers (partly because they had been soundly beaten in their previous schools); were determined to succeed in this foreign world. There were no discipline problems and the language shortfall was quickly made up.

The girls were very shy and their shalwah kameez helped hide their emotions and embarrassment. I remember two in particular who took ‘A’ level English with me. Halfway through the course the more intelligent of the two disappeared. Her friend told me she had been sent back to the motherland for an arranged marriage. I’m not sure if it was arranged for the groom to come to UK, I only know he was 52.

After a generation or two some of the boys began to adopt a new identity. They were black but noted blacks in Hollywood films were treated well, even idolized. So was born the Muslim rappers. They took to wearing caps back to front; cultivated an American speech pattern and made me an honorary Muslim. I was given a new name; I learned to chant Allahu Akbar before it became an infamous prelude to suicide and attempted murder. I was taught to salaam alaikum casually – it means ‘peace be upon you’ and the reply Alaikum Salaam means ‘likewise I’m sure’. I never saw anything sinister in it. The Jews have almost the exact same greeting and answer - Shalom Aleichem and Aleichem shalom.

I hope some of my encouragement was responsible for Asian parents attending Parents Nights (complete with their son/daughter acting as interpreter). I had no way of knowing, of course, that when I said, ‘Your son is a lazy good-for-nothing idiot who would benefit from a daily beating with a bunch of willow sticks,’ if it was translated as, ‘I am extremely pleased with his attitude to study and expect him to become a highly qualified Doctor in years to come.’

In time we had Asian Governors; Asian teachers; Asian friends. Where did it all go wrong? We had our first race riots. In my day, gangs of boys met for fights; sometimes individual on the back pitch; sometimes against a gang from a rival school. Our weapons were our folded up school caps in the school colours. I maintain to this day that our race riot had nothing to do with race only colour. One gang was black and the other navy blue. The papers saw it differently – lurid stories were printed in the National press; interviews were sought from some of the combatants (lots of interviewees had words put into their mouths from reporters who wished to sensationalise the reasons behind it.) My own private conversations revealed it to be a quarrel over a girl dumping a white boyfriend and taking a black one. It was rumoured that Enoch Powell was to be our next Head teacher!

Chapter 16

At the insistence of Vicky Gore, I have been nagged out of retirement to continue the inside story at HHS.

As students gained more rights and schools gradually lost the power to enforce them to honour their responsibilities, my retirement grew ever nearer.  I actually decided to go two years earlier than I eventually did.  I had fallen foul of my latest and final headmaster and decided I could afford to do without this daily angst.  As I wrote that last sentence, I got déjà-vu all over again.  Presumably earlier in these memoirs I had said something similar, so I totted up the Heads with whom I served and examined my relationship with them.

The first one who lives on in my memory was Tricky-Dicky.  This nickname suggests a likeable rogue when in fact he was the stuff of nightmares.  He ran the school with an iron rod.  He had no fear of public confrontation and would challenge adults or students for the tiniest things.  He could browbeat and belittle any who were unfortunate to fall within his sphere of office.  I was terrified of him.  I was a student teacher in his school for only six weeks yet it seemed an eternity.  His one and only appearance in my classroom reduced me to an incoherent mumbling wreck. 

My first proper head was the most beloved; Ross the Boss.  He ran a happy school; staff and students responded positively to his endearing ways – sing-a-longs in assemblies or extended breaks, he was a joy to work with.  He  might not have known ‘owt about education’ but his school was a joy to teach in.

I have already rated Nat highly; a listener; a prompter; urbane and articulate.  His successor was less so.  Pacman knew he was a stopgap.  He performed that way too.  His school was already under sentence of Comprehensivisation when he arrived; he was only keeping the seat warm for the Grammar school head until the new building work was finished.  I suspect this was why most staff didn’t take him seriously, least of all himself.  We crossed swords seriously only once.  I wrote a smart-arse comment on a lazy boy’s report.  ‘He merely occupies space.’  I refused Pacman’s order to rewrite it.  He wrote another version in which, never having taught the boy, nevertheless sought to imaginatively hide the student’s idleness.  I refused to sign it.  I also taught his son for which I was never forgiven.

The head of the new behemoth Comprehensive school was the former Grammar school.  He was a gracious, polite and charming man.  His main fault, as far as I was concerned, came each month on pay-day.  Perhaps in an attempt to learn all our names, (his school had just had an influx of maybe fifty new staff,) he introduced the rather demeaning idea, popular among Victorian mill-owners, of giving us our cheques personally.  During break on payday, we would form a queue and shuffle forward, state our names and he would rummage through the seventy or so envelopes and hand us our monthly stipend.  I always wanted to touch my cap to him on receiving my envelope, I desisted however because I obviously had a very forgettable face.  He persisted in giving me another colleague’s envelope. After two or three months Mr. Hall no longer needed any name-prompting and handed me my cheque.  I would tug my forelock and seek out my alter-ego then we would solemnly exchange envelopes.  It was flattering in a way as the recipient of my cheque was much younger than I (though he was also paid much less.)

After Mr. Hall retired (he was turned 65), there was a spate of short-lived reigns: a lesbian tea-leaf and a number of temporary acting heads.  A teacher’s pension was calculated on the average of the final three years salary.  It was advantageous, therefore to get a year’s worth of an acting head’s salary which massively increased your final pension then plan for a retirement three years down the line.

Eventually came my final head.  The wheel turned full circle in that almost everyone was terrified of him.  Mr. Hurt was big on systems and management, not so good with people management; he was a bully.  When I began this list I revealed my terror at my first head teacher; I was twenty-two then.  Almost forty years had elapsed since, during which time I had become a much-loved institution (well that’s how I saw me); had experienced a number of varied heads and, most importantly, retirement was flickering on the near horizon.  I did not fear this last one.

We had a few tussles, enough to convince him that my retirement ought to be as early as possible.  My first tentative venture was at 58 but the bursar helpfully explained that every year before sixty, reduced my pension by 5% pa.  I could not afford a 10% cut in my half pay, so I bided my time.

My next venture was made at the start of the school year directly to Mr. Hurt who could barely contain his elation but tried anyway.  He wanted my letter of resignation in early January so he could begin the impossible task of finding a replacement for me well before the annual stampede began at Easter.  I agreed on condition he promoted my second I/C to Head of the English Faculty.  He refused so I settled in for another year of skirmishing.

He began negotiations early the next academic year and I knew I had him.  He began to explain he could not guarantee my preferred candidate would make it through the selection process.  I countered by saying he was talking nonsense.

Usually a short list of candidates (usually about six) is drawn up from the total number of applicants possibly as many as forty if the job was a plum one.  I did once hear of a Head who once had over sixty applicants.  He quickly whittled it down to more manageable numbers by throwing every envelope with a second class stamp on, in the bin.  ‘They didn’t want it enough.’

Mr. Hurt’s tactic had been honed over years and repeatedly discussed by interested staff over the years.  He would often have a favourite candidate; the grapevine often came up with recommendations; or they were from a previous school.  I have no qualms with this.  He was senior management and should be allowed to manage.  (I once phoned my favoured candidate the night before the interview and read out all the questions to be asked the next day.  I will deny this, of course, if challenged as mere poetic license.  It backfired, if it ever happened, as she left my faculty a year later to teach History in the same school.)

Mr. Hurt’s main tactic was to compile a weak short list.  First would come ‘the chosen one’ then another five odds and sods.  The successful one would shine like a candle in a darkened room; ‘a good deed in a naughty world.’  Gossip had centered round the exclusion of several good candidates known personally to members of staff who never made the final list.  I explained this to mein führer and he was aghast to have been rumbled and quickly acceded to my plan.

So the deed was done; my letter of resignation written; (received with great cheer by some members of SMT – Senior Management Team as another thorn was removed.)  To his credit Mr. Hurt kept his part of the bargain and appointed my chosen candidate.  He gave a lovely speech on my final day and even made it sound as if he regretted my future absence.  His speech was far better than mine as I struggled to hold back the tears at the thought of losing my friends and colleagues in some cases dating back over thirty years.  I also wept inwardly at the pang of losing my classroom audience.  Even today,25 years on, I yearn for the buzz I got when I faced my favourite classes, especially sixth forms.

Chapter 17

Before I left, I had a major educational experience which was to shape my future for the next few years: I became a pupil!  Apparently, many retirees did not make the transition from teacher to pensioner easily.  Accordingly, there was an initiative put into place called ‘Preparing for Retirement.’  I was urged to choose a course which might benefit me in my twilight years.

Having already been to Night School to learn how to type when computers got small enough to fit into my office and in the absence of a course called ‘How to turn your pension into millions’, I elected to become a bricklayer and signed on at Blackburn College to begin my education in a new field.

Winston Churchill swore by bricklaying as a form of stress relief and the simple mathematics was stimulating and thus helped him save the country.  My motive was less altruistic.  At fourteen hundred bricks a day, a good brickie could earn a lot of money and leave a lasting testament to his skill for generations to admire.  I was more interested in the former reason.

So it was that each Thursday I drove to Blackburn College where I was introduced to an amazing invention; non-setting cement!  It looked, felt and behaved like ordinary cement except that at the end of the session, we students scraped it back into a container where it stayed until the next set of apprentices arrived.

I learned the dimensions of a normal house brick; the different patterns known as bonds – English; Flemish; I memorised them all.  I learned how to use a trowel; a spirit level; a pointing trowel; string to keep your courses in a straight line.  It was tremendous fun and it was paid for by a grateful County Education Committee.  (It was not exactly free as I ran a red light and was dinged by post, but the skills I learned paid for the fine many times over.)

In my pathetic final day speech I advertised a new company that was just starting up; the alliteratively named Bell’s Builders of Burnley.  (Otherwise known as Mr. Bodgit’s.)  I had 500 business cards printed (free off the internet) listing the Managing Director as Michael Bell.  The cards did not explain that the Managing Director was also chief labourer and sole employee.  I began work almost immediately I finished teaching.  Little did I know it was an interim job before I returned to the classroom albeit in another country.  (Wait till the next chapter.)

Initially the jobs were small but my fame grew.  I liked to think it was the quality of my workmanship that grew my reputation but on reflection, it was probably my pricing.  I argued that as I was being paid half my salary as a teacher, I could afford to work for a nominal seven pounds an hour.  In my conversations with prospective clients I made the following stipulations: I was to be paid in cash, (I was paying enough tax on my pension!); having endured school run traffic for nearly forty years I would not start work till after 9.30 am when all doting mums were off the road; I would work until I was bored or tired whichever came the sooner and return the next day.  I was swamped with customers willing to adhere to the above conditions!

After the hustle and bustle of the classroom, working alone and in silence was particularly gratifying.  The variety of jobs was interesting too.  Woodwork; electrics; a bit of plumbing; the only thing I wouldn’t attempt was plastering.  One day I had a phone-call from a housewife who wanted to surprise her husband by changing four doors on the landing before he came home from work.

Another time a lady wanted her old metal bath removed.  For this job I had a partner.  The bath came out easily enough but there was no way it would go down the stairs in her tiny stone terraced cottage.  My partner and I sat and puzzled, working on the principle that what goes up must come down.  Eventually the lady did confess that she had had new stairs put in after the bath had gone up the old ones.  The only solution was to cut it into two pieces.

I had a call from a former colleague (from the Art Department) who said his widowed mother had decided her house needed revamping and would I go and check out what needed doing.  What an amazing lady!  When I arrived, the lady had already compiled two lists.  In an accent that in our area was dubbed posh, she explained, ‘The two lists are divided into outside and inside jobs.  Whatever the weather there will always be something for you to do.’

She graciously accepted my working hours but dug her heels in over my hourly rate.  I was embarrassed; she was the first customer to balk at seven pounds an hour.  ‘That rate is preposterous, Mr. Bell.  I pay my gardener ten pounds an hour and you are far more skilled than he.’  She wanted to pay me more than her gardener but, as I pointed out, there were so many jobs on her list that it might be cheaper to demolish the house and re-build it from scratch.  We agreed on ten pounds.

Some days, she had to go to hospital for dialysis and never knew what time she would be back.  Accordingly, she provided me with a key and left an envelope containing a hundred pounds behind the clock.  Each day I would work my hours; abstract my money (carefully rounding down to the last hour) and leave.  I probably worked off and on there for three months.  We never called each other anything other than Mr. Bell and Mrs. Fortescue-Blythe (not her real name.)

Hers was the last house I worked on before I left to work in another country, (wait till the next chapter).  She approached me one day with a project not on her original list.  She wanted a vast patio laying outside her French windows (presumably it would mean the gardener got a pay cut!)

We discussed the likely cost and I managed to talk her out of having it done in Yorkshire stone which was hellishly expensive.  She said she had set aside 2,000 pounds for the job.  I asked how she had arrived at that figure.  The previous year she had had the front drive brick-paved for that figure.  It had taken two men two days.  The materials I guestimated at 400 pounds which meant each man had earned 400 pounds a day!  I showed her some catalogues and we went for flagstones the same creamy colour as Yorkshire stone at a fraction of the cost.

The hardest part was when all the materials arrived.  There was no direct route to the back garden so the delivery men parked everything on the new, expensive front drive.  I had to barrow everything through the garage and off-load it at the back; there were over 400 paving flags plus sand and cement and gravel to level the site.

Partway through the job, I began to panic.  My plane tickets for my new teaching job in another country (see next chapter) were already booked and the date was looming large in my consciousness.  I finally finished the day before my expatriation.  There were gentle steps down from the French windows.  The creamy colour of the patio reflected light into the back room.  We sat outside and gazed about.  We both sighed simultaneously at a job well done.  It had cost in total nine hundred pounds including drainage pipes round the garage.  Then I left to finishing packing.

 Chapter 18

On the first day of school following my retirement, in early September, I flew off to Thailand to visit my son who, for some strange reason also wanted to teach, but decided to teach in Thailand.  He’d set out to do his Karate black belt in Japan but got no farther than Bangkok.  Following his accreditation of a TESLA certificate (Teaching English as a Second Language) he was posted to Hat Yai in Southern Thailand.  I joined him there for my first holiday as a retiree.

I immediately re-christened the place Rat Yai; during my sixty two years in England I had seen precisely ONE rat despite arcane calculations explaining we were never more than ten feet from the nearest rat.  It was as if the Pied Piper had led a procession from Hamelin directly here.  They were everywhere, obviously darting about amid the refuse of dark alleys but could also be seen sitting under what laughingly passed for restaurants locally.

It was a dreadful place.  Empty during the week, it filled up with Malay men at weekend.  I assumed it was an agricultural thing as my son said they were here for their oats.  My son’s greatest pleasure on our walkabouts was jumping on the many huge cockroaches that infested the place.  Keeping score it was easy to top fifty each night.  I resolved to move on as quickly as politeness would allow.

[I did have one pleasant experience there.  As my son was teaching during the day, I was often bored and alone.  He advised me to go for a traditional Thai massage on my aching back – a result of a three-plane journey at the age of sixty plus.  He gave me careful instructions on getting to the right place lest I receive a different type of traditional Thai massage! 

I duly presented my afflicted parts and was spread-eagled in just my boxers on to a thin mattress.  My wrinkled masseuse had no English so every instruction was delivered by me imitating her movements when she patted me.  It was billed as a two-hour massage.  I thought there’s not very much of me how will she make it last that long?  I needn’t have worried she spent seemingly half an hour on my left arm.  The high spot was when she finally got to my back.

I’d carefully mimed my pain and urged extra care.  I knelt upright as instructed secure in the knowledge that such a tiny lady could not do any lasting damage to a hulk like me.  She placed her knees right on the spot and linked arms.  Before I could protest she jerked me backwards over her knees.  My roar of shock and, yes, pain sent her into paroxysms of chuckles.  Two hours later, I walked out cured; not a twinge; not an ache.  With tip it had cost me less than two pounds.]

I explained to my son that I wanted to see the world now I was retired.

 I had a friend, former colleague and ex-pupil of HHS who had moved on to richer pastures in Brunei; (there, the secret is out).  By the miracle that is email, I asked if I could seek sanctuary from the rats at his home.  He readily agreed and was waiting for me at 3 am when I finally arrived from Kuala Lumpur after an overnight bus from Hat Yai.

I stayed at his four-bed roomed house provided by the school and was invited to see how the other half lived.  Accordingly, I went into his International school in Bandar Seri Begawan.  It catered for children from the age of five to eighteen so was infinitely more comprehensive than the school I had just left: except for one thing – the fees. 

All the students were from Brunei families who could afford it or the offspring of the truly international staff who taught there.  In Brunei, a strictly Muslim community, alcohol was forbidden.  It is a universally accepted fact that teaching is a hard job but impossible without a certain unspecified amount of daily/weekly alcohol.  The social life of these ex-pats therefore consisted of weekend parties fuelled by regular trips across the border into Sarawak or Sabah on the island of Borneo to buy duty-free sustenance.

At first, I found it strange that everyone who brought a bottle to the party took the remnants home with them at the end of the night.  At one of these gatherings I met Miss Prim.  There is nothing significant about the name, it was just the aura she gave off during our conversation.  She taught junior English and invited me to guest star in one of her classes the following day.

I had never taught seven-year olds before and wondered how I would cope.  I prepared assiduously the next chapter of Roald Dahl’s ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ in the hour before the lesson.  I had been out of the classroom for eight weeks; the longest time in the previous thirty-eight years.  I needn’t have worried; it was a riot.  Both the class and I laughed so much it hurt.  I remembered how things used to be in my classrooms during the sixties and seventies.  I did all the silly voices; all the gurning faces; the kids loved it.

The class and I parted reluctantly and I returned to drink coffee in the staffroom and awaited my friend’s final lesson.  Counting back, I worked out that twenty-two minutes had elapsed after leaving the classroom before the Headmaster offered me a permanent job.  Naturally I turned it down: I had plane tickets home and a building business to run.  In the pink afterglow of my Marvellous lesson, I was tempted.  One of the deciding factors was, strangely, gin and tonic.  It is a drink I love, particularly in hot climates.  It was possible to have one in Brunei but there was a rigmarole to it.

You go into a restaurant for a meal.  The waiters will not sell you alcohol but will bring you a tonic, ice and a slice.  They will turn their backs when you bring out a bottle of Gordon’s and add the requisite amount before hiding the bottle back under the table.  So, I returned to England.

Chapter 19

I picked up my business where I left off.  Wads of cash was put in my back pocket almost daily. It was sometimes painful to sit down so then I would go out and buy five hundred pounds of Premium bonds.  I had a business partner by now who sometimes needed my services.  Steve was another ex-teacher.  The difference being he had quit young.  A member of the Senior Management Team at HHS and therefore earning more than me though still in his forties. Like me, he couldn’t take the ever-increasing Governmental interference known in everyday speech as BS.  He figured he could make the same money doing what he enjoyed; he became a plumber.  He charged seventeen pounds an hour – ten more than me though he didn’t have a pension to supplement his earnings.

It became a regular occurrence; he paid for advertising and got so much work he couldn’t cope with the demand.  Irate customers battered him with phone calls to see when he could fit them in to his busy schedule.  In desperation he would phone me.  Together we would rip out the old fittings and whilst he installed the new water connections, I would do the tiling.  Like bricklaying it was a rewarding, geometrically satisfying job.  It was also pleasant for me in that he got all the earache from customers; I was just the tiler.

Eventually he had to pack it in and accept that he couldn’t make the same money as in teaching.  He was getting phone calls in the middle of the night as water had started dripping from some of the joints which he had finished earlier that day.  He went back to teaching and rapidly reached his old wage level.  He hung up his soldering iron. I soldiered on alone.

One day I landed a plum job.  I had been recommended by a friend to a neighbour who, having bought a three storey stone cottage, proceeded to rip it apart.  Unfortunately, he was better at the destructive part but hadn’t a clue at how to re-construct.  I am happy to report he was one of the brigade fond of saying, ‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.’  He was going to pay me ten pounds an hour.  There looked to be months of satisfying work in the offing.  I lasted one hundred pounds or ten hours.

When I took the job on I explained that on Friday afternoons I habitually returned to my old school, HHS where I would play five-a-side soccer in the sports hall.  I did two days work for my new boss and left to play football.  There I lasted three minutes.  Doing a body baffling turn to leave Andy Hewitt bewildered, I tore the ligaments in my right ankle and was rushed to hospital where my leg was encased in plaster.  That same night I had to phone my recent new employer and explain that as I couldn’t drive our agreement would have to be terminated.  I heard later he put what was left of the house up for sale at considerably less than he paid for it.

I went slowly insane dragging my leg upstairs three times a day; stumping about the kitchen and cursing my aging ankles.  Then I got an international call from you-know-where; the Land of Tonicless gin.  A new chapter in the teaching chronicles was about to be written.

Chapter 20

A long distance call from Brunei – how could I resist?  I did for almost fifteen minutes.  Apparently the head teacher had been let down big-time.  He had travelled to London and interviewed a number of candidates in Mayfair no less.  He had chosen two and flown back to Brunei satisfied at a job well done.  Six weeks before the start of term both had reneged on the deal.  He was desperate.  Rich parents expect teachers in front of their off-spring.  He needed me; he was over a barrel.

The (telephone) conversation went exactly like this:

ME – I’m sorry head master but my building business is booming.  (Lying through my teeth and shifting my plastered leg to a more comfortable position.)

HM – Would a salary of X thousand pounds per month compensate you?  (X = an impossibly gargantuan salary far more than seven pounds an hour.)

ME – Well,

HM – Tax-free

ME – I expect I ..

HM – The job comes with free accommodation.

ME – Free, you say.

HM – You could write your own timetable.

ME – Any classes I choose including sixth form?  (The sound of saliva dripping from my mouth muffled his answer.)

HM – Any new texts you wish will be purchased forthwith, just send me a list.

ME – Complete sets of new class readers and exam texts?

HM – Certainly.  We’ll also provide you with first class air tickets out and back + one free flight return for use during the holidays.

ME – To anywhere?

HM – Bali is nice any time of the year.

ME – Would I get free accommodation in Bali?  (Playing hardball.)

HM – You could afford five star from your gargantuan salary.

ME – Go on then.

Chapter 21

So, I began my second stint in Brunei – a four month contract to which I adhered in the face of an almost daily onslaught from HM to make it permanent.  The teaching was everything I could have hoped for.  Still wearing my Head of Faculty hat I decided not to cream off all the best classes for my own delectation.  I chose a fair spread across the age and ability range but insisted on my beloved sixth form.

There was a strict dress code for the school – clothes must be worn.  It was so hot I continually wanted to rip off my shirt.  Before I left I visited Asda and bought a number of crisp white short sleeved shirts.  Rather daringly I also bought one in lilac.  I still have it today; a testament to the George label and to the lack of wear.  Despite the air-con it showed every damp patch in striking technicolour.  It is difficult to hold your students’ attention with your nipples showing through your shirt transparent with sweat.

I formed wonderful bonds with the students who made me feel they were honoured to have me in their classroom.  Because of this I don’t think I have ever taught better.  That is no small statement.  Formerly, my heyday, in my opinion, was in the early seventies when I strutted my stuff as a newly crowned Head of Department. There are numerous testaments on Friends Re-united and Living History with Mike Bell FB, both threads describing my teaching: inspirational; enervating; developmental; are typical of that era.  (There were also stories of how my first car – a Robin Reliant in a lovely shade of yellow was vandalized by being swathed in toilet rolls.) 

In Brunei, I felt I certainly equaled that level.  I still correspond with one of my year 10 students who is now a journalist in Kuala Lumpur. (We have the same birthday so we exchange greetings at least once a year.)

Being a member of staff enabled me to be accepted by the in-crowd and so every Friday after school was the border run to Sabah or Sarawak on the island of Borneo.  To prevent smuggling you were not allowed to take your car across which meant you were only allowed to bring what you could carry during a walk of two hundred metres.  Despite not developing big muscles by wielding chalk all day, some beer drinkers carried amazing loads.  Thankfully being a gin man I always managed my weekly supplies without any visible hernias.

Ordering your supplies was exciting in itself.  We would walk into Sarawak and sit round a table in a shanty town built solely to cater for alcohol-dependent teachers.  You would order a meal and hand over your list to various runners – members of the Iban people.  Whilst you ate (and drank) your order was assembled and delivered to your feet whereupon you attempted to spend a tiny fraction of your gargantuan salary.

Then the games began.  Carrying well over the duty free allowance inside you, plus a further allowance visible to the border guards, teachers began the relay to their cars parked in Brunei.  Whilst spirits were strictly supervised you were allowed as much beer as you could carry.  Some addicts worked in pairs.  Some loners attempted shuttle runs; carrying two cases for fifty metres then placing them on the ground and going back to where they had left their other two packs.  At the crossing itself you had to carry all four in one go – an incredible feat over the no-man’s land between the two countries.  If you couldn’t you had to make two trips incurring an out and in stamp each time.  Passports were quickly filled with a stamp out of Brunei; a stamp into Sarawak; then the reverse journey.  It would be interesting to total up the duty saved against the cost of a new passport.

Chapter 22

I did my week in Bali.  There were three red-blooded males yet we elected to stay not in the fleshpots of Kuta but in Ubud.  I have to say there’s only so much culture you can take before you want to bust out.  The town was an artist’s paradise with galleries every twenty metres.  We watched Indonesian dancing; listened to Indonesian music; ate the local food; we toured and hiked to the top of volcanoes; saw the terraced plantations; all very PC but the day I remembered most was our visit to Kuta.

Rather than make it merely an excuse to ogle pretty girls, we watered it down with a visit to Uluwattu Temple set on a cliff top to watch the going down of the sun.  Nobody warned us about the monkeys!  There were signs and we gathered from them that monkeys could be aggressive.  We gazed out as the light changed to golden.  We happily snapped away in the company of a coach load of Japanese tourists.

The walls were crenellated so we rested our cameras on the ancient stone.  I noted with increasing disquiet a monkey which came and sat three feet from us.  It was stalking a Japanese lady and hid till she came into the open.  Before I could call out a warning it struck.  Jumping onto her shoulder it snatched a silver ear-ring from her, ripping her lobe and made off with it to trade in for some peanuts.  We dabbed ineffectually at the blood trickling down the lady’s cheek, looking fearfully over our shoulder lest the monkey came back to complete the pair.

It was time to run the gauntlet of bar-girls in Kuta.  As we strolled past the bars, our hearts swelled with pride at how handsome the girls found us; calling out to us; touching us intimately without even a proper introduction.  One would have thought after being deprived of female company for two months in Brunei, surrounded by feminine forms shrouded in black that we would have yielded here to temptation.  Strangely we didn’t.  We had first made a pilgrimage to the site of the Bali nightclub where 202 people were killed by a terrorist bomb in 2002.  It left us strangely subdued.

All too soon it was time to return to a UK winter.  I said my farewells; repatriated my gargantuan salary and packed my bags.  After Brunei the cold was wonderful for an hour or two.  So it was that I began to consider warmer climes on a more permanent basis.

 Chapter 22

Before I cut my ties with the UK, I pondered my contribution to my Motherland.  Running parallel with my teaching job were two parallel careers; private tutoring and Youth leadership.  It would be nice to say I did them because I enjoyed the company of young people, but I’m ashamed to say I did it for the money.  A teacher’s wage was insufficient to support a young family and the only overtime available for teachers was unpaid.  (I was once forced to borrow the equivalent of a month’s salary to pay an electricity bill.  It was leant to me by the kindly father of a neighbor who took pity on my family’s plight.  Needless to say I re-paid him within a month by taking a private tutoring post.)

Two of the Famous Four Bees who started teaching at the same school as me had started a business.  It was called Private Tutors.  They paid for newspaper advertisements, fielded the enquiries and initially took on the work themselves.  Soon it grew too big and they took in other impecunious teachers.  They had time sheets printed off to be signed by the parent on a weekly basis.  The tutor submitted them to either of the Mr. Bees and you were paid accordingly each month end.  For each hour the partners took a decent chunk for drawing the two parties together. (One of the founding fathers retired from teaching in his forties and went to live in a place called Paradise.)

We had all sorts of customers; peak time was in January when Mock exam results suggested the candidate was scheduled to fail his/her GCSEs in summer.  I also helped juniors cram for the 11+ exam, there being a number of prestigious Grammar schools locally.  I made it a rule never to take a student long term if I didn’t think I could achieve the parent’s goal.  By this process I had only one failure.

By chance I had two ten year olds both striving to pass the entrance exam of a fee-paying Bury Grammar school.  One was from a middle class family, nice enough but my sympathies lay with a girl whose parents took on extra work to pay me.  (Mum worked most mornings as a cleaner in a school before starting her real job.)  When the results came out, I was aghast to find this girl had failed.  I rated her more intelligent than the middle class girl and suspected some jiggery-pokery.  I wrote to the Headmistress of the-afore mentioned school and voiced my doubts about their entrance procedures.  I was gob-smacked when I received an invitation to see the Grand Lady.  She listened carefully to my concerns then produced both answer papers.  My favoured candidate had indeed outscored the other girl right up to the point where she had turned over two pages and missed a huge chunk of the question paper.  I slunk away to explain to the distraught parents.

Two of my private scholars were memorable characters standing out because they were adult men; one in his mid forties and the other maybe turned sixty.  The younger was a Deputy Superintendent of a large indoor market in Salford.  He wanted to move up a step and felt his English expression was holding him back.  I must point out that he was a very dull man; a crashing bore.  I took him on because he paid me over the odds and wanted two lessons a week at extremely unsocial hours like Sunday morning.  He also came to my house as he wanted no-one to know his little secret.  Last I heard, he had been promoted so what do I know!

The other guy was an impoverished Polish Jew.  I’ve heard it said that there are no poor Jews; well this one was.  His name was Mr. Sikorski and he lived in a squalid tenement flat stinking of boiled cabbage in a slum just outside Manchester.  It soon became clear that what he was paying for was company not tuition.  He often failed to do the written assignments I set him but was prepared to discuss in depth with me the varied topics set.  He had a rich vocabulary delivered in heavily accented English.  He was a very interesting man but ultimately I had to give up on him.  I had the feeling that he was merely passing time till his death and I did not want to be around when that happened.

The pattern of my days was set.  I would leave school each day in my Reliant Robin and go direct to my first pupil.  After an hour’s tuition and fifteen minutes discussion with mum on progress made, I would move on to my next pupil.  I did this five days a week with Mr. Bore at weekends.  The money earned bought a five foot by three foot trailer plus all the camping gear for a family of four (at the time).  I would arrive home at nearly seven, have a quick meal then go out to my other job as a Youth Leader.

Chapter 23

I remember coming home from my interview for the Youth Leader's job, feeling proud and excited at my success.  The brand new purpose built building was 150 yards from my front door so I would not invite ridicule by parking my three-wheeler outside.  Inside was a dance floor; office; snack bar and most importantly for me, a table tennis table.  I loved the game and as I was a Youth Leader I could make the rules.  Rule 1 – Winner stays on. 

Rule 2 – Winner only stays on if it was me.  Sometimes I played all night.  Sometimes I got so cocky I offered ridiculous incentives to beat me: sometimes it was money; more often it was points (I once gave an opponent 18 start in the race to 21.)  I got my come-uppance once when we had a visiting TT star who played for England.  She beat me 21-2.  She was 14 years old!

(Footnote - as I write this my eyes are drooping with fatigue; I have just returned from my 3 times a week TT games; I am a week short of my 83rd birthday. The table-tennis is geriatric but my two opponents are 17 years my junior and rarely beat me.)

The youth of Radcliffe were a rough lot.  Fights were not uncommon.  Our only sanction was to ban miscreants for various periods.  Once a lad came in on his first night back after a lengthy ban, walked into the coffee bar, smashed a saucer and slashed someone’s cheek; he had been in the club forty seconds!

We learned coping mechanisms or some of us did.  The Youth workers came from all walks of life.  We had two things in common: firstly a desire to help young people grow into useful members of society; secondly we needed the money as our day jobs did not pay us a decent living wage.  There was one guy straight out of an office in the Town Hall.  He was small and slimly built.  No one had taught him how NOT to break up a fight.

Talbot was a burly thug who came to the club regularly before he was sent to jail.  When he came back we saw prison life had turned him into a killing machine, putting six inches across his chest and welding boulders to his upper arms.  On the night in question, Talbot attacked someone and drew back his arm to deal a hammer blow.  Our office clerk seized the arm and was then drawn horizontally back and forth with each succeeding blow like a glove puppet in the hand of a demented puppeteer.  I gripped the boulders in his arms and hissed the single word ‘police’ into his ear.  All tension drained from him and our office clerk fell gratefully to the floor.

It was not all fighting there were moments of high comedy.  One night, it was raining and I had occasion to drive my Robin Reliant to the club.  By now I was immune to the mirth which the car provoked.  Amazingly one of the boys did not fall to the ground in hysterical gales of laughter.  Instead he showed considerable interest and listened to my discourse on fuel economy; no rust in the fibre glass body and speedy acceleration.  Some weeks later he proudly announced he had bought one, albeit not in yellow.  I was flattered.

From that day we would always greet each other with enquiries about our cars.  We swopped tall tales about the legendary durability of Reliants.  He reckoned one day he was playing football in Bury.  It was half time so he and his team mates were enjoying a slice of orange and a cigarette, doing their best to ignore the earnest words from their manager.  He spotted a Reliant driving past.  Suddenly a dog ran under his front wheel.  The driver yanked hard on the steering wheel and the car rolled over twice, landed on all three wheels and then carried on smoothly up the road.

 One day he arrived and disconsolately told me his sorry tale.  He had reversed into a lamppost and put a crack in the fiberglass body work.  Being a resourceful lad he decided to weld it!  Within a few short minutes he was left with a blackened chassis and a lesson for life; fibre glass does not handle flames well.

Shortly after, my Reliant and I parted company.  With all the money I was earning as a teacher, tutor and Youf leader, I decided I could afford a car with another wheel.  I advertised my yellow and green-striped three-wheeler in vain; there were no takers.  I even offered it to my friend at the Youth club but he had moved on.

One Saturday afternoon I was driving to the playing fields where my Youth Club team was due to play.  Another dog ran out into the road.  I was careful not to yank too hard on the steering wheel but nevertheless still mounted the pavement and ran into the only lamppost for a hundred yards.  The collision must have jolted the gear lever into neutral.  When my head cleared the engine was still ticking over and I noticed a lamppost growing out of my bonnet.  It had sheared through the fibre glass which had then closed up behind it.  Luckily I had four corner flags in the car. (I managed the club football team on Saturday afternoons.)  Using these as levers, I was able to prise open the body work, push the car free with my bottom and continued on my way.  We won the match though I admit I was referee.

My insurers were very good and offered me the full write off value of the car which was considerably more than I valued it at.  I had to quell rumours at school that I had crashed it deliberately.  I continued to drive it to school until my new car was ready.  Once on a particularly snowy day, the car ground to a halt.  Four wheeled cars created tramlines by pushing the snow into a position where my single front wheel ploughed it up under my bonnet and stopped my fan belt turning.  Luckily the corner flags came in handy for chipping away at the hard packed snow until everything was free again.

When the insurance pick-up truck arrived, the Reliant had stood idle on my drive for the best part of three months.  Before they took it away, I sat in it one last time.  It started up at the first time of asking. 

I was both sad and relieved to see it go.  Everything that could go wrong with it, did.  I had to take a crash course (if you’ll forgive the expression) in car mechanics.  I once drove back from the Lake District with only three forward gears.  I had to accelerate through the first two gears, miss out three and jump straight to fourth.  I toured scrap yards for weeks but the dealers were asking silly prices.  Eventually I tracked one down on a farm near Middleton.  I took my toddler son and whilst I haggled with the farmer, my son explored.  All the way home I was aware of a hideous smell but put it down to having been on a farm.  I eventually discovered my son had been poddling in pig poo.  No matter how many times I scrubbed  those shoes the smell obstinately persisted.  I eventually threw them away.  They had cost more than the gear box!

Another time after springing a leak in my petrol tank, I fitted a new one.  I must have done something wrong as the fuel gauge permanently registered full.  I couldn’t fix it so I kept a notepad and pen in which I would write down the mileage each time I put two gallons in.  I would run it for a hundred miles then put in a further two.  Sometimes it would not take two as the tank was almost full!

I learned that leaky radiators could be cured with an infusion of Radweld or Scotts porridge oats.  My mechanic friend could change a tyre without a jack.  He picked the car up and tilted it to one side while I put on the spare wheel.  You couldn’t do that with a Morris Minor which was my next car.

After being promoted to Head of Department at Haslingden County Secondary School in Ryefield Avenue, I moved to Ramsbottom to be nearer my day job and found myself in a new Youth club in Ramsbottom.  This time no interview was necessary as I slunk in through the back door.  I first became manager of the football team then, after winning the local parks cup, by popular demand I was ‘promoted’ to the post of part-time Youf leader at night.

 Chapter 24

As always there were highs and lows in any job.  The highs were centred on the Lake District.  The club had acquired a barn in a place called Longsleddale.  I remember spending some weekends renovating and converting an outhouse into dormitories.  There I met a number of great characters first as youth club members then in later life as friends.  One such we named Big John.

He was not that big but he was tremendously strong.  We engaged in several trials of strength in which I always came second.  He was a Heathcliffian character, dark and brooding.  He had different sized hands which gave him a hunched posture.  One hand was normal, the other like a bulldozer.

One weekend we went on a Mountain leadership course.  We both wanted this qualification; he to further enhance his bid to become a Youth Leader in his own right.  The course was a disaster from start to finish.  We were supposed to sleep outside for one night after orienteering our way in the dark to a shelter using compasses and torches.  One of the group lost a contact lens on the side of a mountain which made us miss our rendezvous.  We curled up in polythene bags among the sheep droppings and awaited dawn.

As soon as it was light we discovered that we were a mere quarter of a mile from shelter; warmth and bacon butties.  I explained politely to the leader in charge that as we were all suffering variously from hypothermia, exhaustion, wet sleeping bags, hunger and ill-temper that we should abandon the trek for safety and comfort’s sake.  He obstinately refused, insisting we continue on this suicidal venture.  Well I’d tried the polite civilized approach, it was time to unleash John.  Using his big hand he raised the leader till they were eye to eye and told him the expedition was over and further, our trials during the previous night amply qualified us for leadership badge that we had given up our weekend for.  ‘Well when you put it like that, I agree.’

Another source of joy was Clanger.  I’m not sure how he got his nickname – I think it was something to do with dropping them, clangers that is.  He was a gangly youth, all elbows and knees.  If there was any bother he always used to find it or instigate it.  We once took a party for a weekend in Amsterdam.  The group consisted of twenty mainly Sixth form girls from Haslingden High School and twenty mainly boys from Ramsbottom Youth club; what could possibly go wrong?

The plan was we would leave Friday evening on a coach to Hull.  An ocean going liner was to be our floating hotel for the next two nights.  The first night Clanger got paralytic.  Duty free and parent free, he had over-indulged.  I managed to get him back to his cabin.  As he was vomiting fairly frequently, I stayed till he had passed the worst of it; then I left him and sought a toilet myself!

Afterwards I settled to watch the interaction of our party; alcohol and disco music.  My reverie was interrupted by a steward who told me Clanger was on the loose below decks, naked!  A posse was sent out to re-capture him.  It was like one of those cartoon chases where there are numerous sightings but below decks was a warren of corridors and Clanger’s white naked buttocks kept disappearing before we could get to him.

On another occasion we took him hiking in the Lake District.  On one of the few days it didn’t rain we were on a high plateau.  For some reason Clanger displayed uncharacteristic nervousness.  He began questioning me about the likelihood of meeting a poisonous snake.  My answers were not designed to reassure him; they went like this, ‘Yes we have venomous snakes, adders or vipers.  Yes, there are cases of bites but only a few per year.  There are the occasional deaths.  Well mainly when the victim is miles away from medical facilities.  Yes we are miles away from medical facilities.  No, adders don’t attack they are shy and prefer to slip quietly away when they can.  Yes I expect a group of humans spread out across a field like we are makes it difficult for the snake to avoid us.’  His gangly legs were being raised and put down with increasing care.  Then a grouse or pheasant flew up from under his feet!  Like a cartoon character he took off, his legs pedalling; I swear he hovered; he wouldn’t come down until his brain had processed and identified the danger as a bird.

Our Youth Club successes outnumbered our failures but when they did fail they were personal catastrophes.  Taking in a homeless boy for a few days; giving him old clothes and a shower was rewarded with him giving the whole family nits.

My biggest misjudgment almost brought me to my knees.  The local secondary school was judged to be a special case, served as it was by a poor council estate.  One boy who I deemed savable showed academic prowess.  His best buddy had just been sent to jail for heaving a concrete block off a motorway bridge and killing a passing motorist.  I decided his friend’s prison sentence might be a blessing in disguise and took the would-be student under my wing.

He had a case pending at the Crown Court in Manchester.  Buoyed by my success at getting a speeding fine (in a Reliant!), I decided to reprise my QC role and try to mitigate the youth’s probable jail sentence.  Thus I appeared in all my arrogance and a new suit before a judge.  I had hitherto considered myself an intelligent man but could not compete with this judge.  He listened sympathetically to my prepared speech explaining how the boy’s background had conspired against him; how given a chance it was possible to save him from a life of crime.

‘Would you consider yourself to be a liberal do-gooder, Mr. Bell?’  His first question set the tone and for what seemed an age the judge carefully peeled layers of skin from my bones.  When excused, I sat down shakily, feeling like I’d been hit by a truck which had then reversed and run me over again.

His summing up was equally masterful and went something like this; ‘I have listened to the evidence and your lengthy past record of misdemeanours.  You have repeatedly failed society and leave me little alternative but a prison sentence.’  By this time the youth was streaming tears and my head had sunk to my chest; there was more gloom in the same vein for some minutes.  ‘However,’ with that one word my head came up; the tears dried up; hope streamed in through the windows.  ‘Mr. Bell has spoken up for you.  He has offered you temporary accommodation and assistance with your academic progress.  I have decided to deliver you over to Mr. Bell …. (There were more complimentary words than modesty allows) and the boy was freed into my custody.

He lived in my house, till liaising with Social Services I found him a flat; I assisted with his application to College where he secured a place studying accountancy.  I dragged him drunk out of pubs.  I ensured his money was well handled.  My kindness was repaid by his arrest for receiving stolen property.  My self esteem at that point in my life hit rock bottom; I went into a depression that only an African doctor could cure.  It turned me into the heartless cynic I am today.

Chapter 25

Of course the last line of the previous chapter was a lie.  The Educational Gods still had more classrooms for me to grace in yet another country.  I had visited my son whilst I was teaching in Brunei, he was now in Bangkok having moved up from Rat Yai via Chang Mai and ultimately to the capital.  Having served a stint in a secondary school he realized his true level was teaching adults.  I think he was responsible for the quip, ‘Education in Thailand?  I think it would be a good idea.’

The country is riven by more class-consciousness than Britain during the Victorian era.  There are the Hi-sos and the rest.  The former group contains politicians, the police, armed services and teachers.  Fearing prosecution if this tome should ever reach a wider (International) audience (fat chance) I will dwell solely on the teachers.  Despite claims to the contrary, corporal punishment is still widely practiced revealed only by secretive videos taken by students and posted on You-tube.  A student was recently disfigured by a teacher hurling a glass at her; during break time!

When I first visited my son, I was struck by the queues of young people outside barbers’ shops.  The reason was simple; Term time began the following day and if a teacher considered your hair had grown too long during the holiday,  he was empowered to trim it with whatever implement he could lay his hands on; scissors, shears, lawnmower, machete!

Schools are seen merely as printing presses for the principals without principles.  All sorts of scams abound.  Because it is a job for life; because the benefits are many including Health care for you and your family; interest free loans for cars; no Inspections; no failures at exams and no discernible student progress, it is a much prized/highly priced job.  Teaching Colleges, acting on the afore-mentioned money-grubbing ideas, churn out thousands of surplus would-be teachers annually.  If there was a fair system of interviewing or even an official site listing jobs then the best candidates would end up in the classroom.  Instead it’s only the well-connected or wealthy who make it. 

[My step-daughter went for an interview.  The Head was more interested in me – white native English speakers especially with accredited Educational qualifications are much prized though insufficiently rewarded.  I agreed to do some part-time teaching (free) to secure my step-daughter the job.  The following week another candidate offered a brown envelope full of readies so that was the end of that particular come-back.]

Being a teacher made you a Hi-so.  A local Head teacher invited me and my Thai wife to his daughter’s wedding.  The reception was held on the school field (another perk of the job.)  There were lots of tables on each of which was a bottle of whisky and mixers.  Food kept arriving at regular intervals.  I looked round for my in-laws and was informed, to my horror, that they had not been invited as they were only farmers.

I was duly invited to the Head’s Secondary school to compare English and Thai schools.  You know all those criticisms of UK schools I made earlier, I take them back unreservedly.  When I arrived I was shown with great ceremony to the Head’s study.  His command of English was far worse than my rudimentary Thai.  We sat smiling at each other whilst we waited for the Head of English who would interpret.  After fifteen minutes of smiling and being forced to drink bottled water till my face hurt, he arrived.

He strode confidently in and shook hands; a very Western thing to do and I had high hopes until he opened his mouth.  ‘Me number one Angrit teach in sacoon.’  He proudly announced.  My son had told me of complete conversations he had had with Thai English teachers where he knew they were speaking English of sorts but had no idea what they were saying.  This was easy – Thais turn all final ell sounds into enns; (they say footborn when talking of the English Premier league.)  They cannot do consonant clusters so insert a vowel (Sprite becomes Saparite) so school became sacoon.   He took me to his classroom where forty five fifteen year olds sat.

It was a school for Lo-sos so there was no air con.  (In some schools you can pay extra to be in the top classroom which did have A/C.)  There was a blackboard and some pieces of chalk.  Teach introduced me to the class alternating between Thai and pigeon English.  (I followed the Thai better than the English.)  Then he buggered off!  The class sat back expectantly.  I was probably the first white person they had got so close to.  They’d certainly never heard English spoken by a native speaker before.

I had no idea what level they were at but judging by their teacher it wasn’t very high.  I wrote ‘The cat sat on the mat.’  I burbled on about the ‘at’ sound; miming ‘bat’, ‘hat’ ‘cat’.  ‘Rat’ was problematic as they were a source of protein to my students. ‘Sat’ was beyond them as there are no tenses in Thai; nor spaces between words!  Whilst my students in England grappled with 26 letters in our English alphabet, these poor sods had 42 to learn in Thai (and that was just the consonants!)  There were sixteen vowels plus five tones!  In Thai the sound ‘mah’ could mean horse, dog, come, or a sort of wood depending on how it was said.  It was a very long twenty minutes before Teach returned.

I was determined to do better next time.

Chapter 26

Since retiring to my place in the sun, I’ve had numerous tempting offers to return to the classroom; well one that was tempting, the others were just offers.  I belonged to a Quiz team and it was quickly found out that I had only one area of expertise: Shakespeare but I was a good reader, unphased by an audience of old men so I was unanimously elected Quizmaster.  After one such evening I was approached by a guy who knew a guy whose friend was a head teacher and looking to recruit.  I protested in vain that I had no plans to return.

Several emails later, I found myself inside the prestigious walls of The Regents School (which are, incidentally, octagonal.)  It felt just like the International school in Brunei; opulent with all mod-cons, plus alcohol was freely available without any border crossings.  I was tempted.  I’d just blown the equity from the sale of my house in UK on a 3-bedroomed, two bath roomed bungalow plus all furniture; fittings; fixtures; pool table inside, table tennis table outside, oh and a brand new car!  The house was on an estate which boasted a free gym and swimming pool forty metres from my front door.  (For just over 300 pounds a year Council tax, my bin was emptied three times a week; I had twenty four hour security; streets cleaned on the same days as refuse collection.)  Unfortunately it was some distance from the school and even with petrol half the price as I paid when commuting in England I declined the job.  Did I mention my house was four minutes from an idyllic beach?

My neighbours (sixty two houses divided into eleven cul-de-sacs) were mainly foreign men with Thai partners.  One approached me with an offer of voluntary work a few kilometers down the road teaching English conversation to a class of pretty Thai ladies.  I thought about it for a nano-second before agreeing.  I did have one stipulation; the organization had to provide me with a work permit.

Thailand is xenophobic to ridiculous extremes.  Foreigners were precluded from protected occupations which were reserved for Thais.  Despite the country having the worst record for English usage in Asia, the Thai government places many obstacles in the way of foreigners wishing to help out. 

Similarly if you wished to open a business, ridiculous restrictions were imposed on the foreign owner.  Jerome, opened a French Bistro in the quiet fishing village where I lived.  It was brilliant food (crocodile was on the menu) at a cheap price.  He was forced to employ three Thais despite there being only enough work for one.  Eventually he was forced to close as he could not afford the unnecessary wages bill.

As the day of my comeback drew nearer, I asked to see my classroom.  It was a roof and one wall.  The other three sides opened onto a vast car park.  I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was for two hours a day, three times a week and there was enough space to house thirty pretty ladies.  I inquired about my work permit.  It was non-existent.  I resigned immediately without a single screech of my chalk.  Thai jails were notorious for the treatment handed out to foreigners by the forty other inmates sharing your cell.  The nearest prison was nick-named The Bangkok Hilton.  There were few survivors of a lengthy stay.

Chapter 27

I was disappointed with what might have been my final appearance in a classroom.  The cat-sat-on-the-mat lesson paled in comparison to those preparing would-be Oxbridge candidates in the rudiments of Mediaeval Mystery plays.  I was determined to have one last swan-song.  This time I was prepared.  My friendly head master readily agreed to a one-off, let’s-not-involve-the police lesson.  I thought one of the most useful aids to Thai pupils would be to learn to tell the time.  Thais are the most unpunctual people I know, but some of it was down to Thai time.

The Thai way of telling the time takes a little getting used to, as it's very different from English and other European languages. Thais do use the familiar 24 hour military time system to some extent, for example for official announcements, but in everyday life a different and uniquely Thai system is used instead. The easiest way to approach it is to recognise that the Thai clock is divided up into roughly 4 blocks of 6 hours each, rather than 2 of 12, and that each of these blocks of time is referred to in a different way.  It sounds easy as it trips airily from my finger tips, but in fourteen years I have never mastered it.

So I made a clock face and two fingers (I thought hours and minutes would suffice.)  Teach led me into the room in his usual self-important way and introduced me.  He couldn’t wait to get out of the room.  I like to think I was freeing up some time for him to do his marking but I have seen firsthand what that consists of:  My wife’s niece’s homework - ‘Assignment – Using the Internet, irrespective if that means paying for it by the hour which will result in your family having nothing to eat the next day; cut and paste loads of pages on French Impressionist painters none of whose names I know; print in colour and deliver it to me tomorrow.’  I will slave away by writing a one word comment on the final page without reading any of it of course.'

My guess is Teach was off to play Pokémon Go on his mobile, whilst smoking multiple cigarettes which are so cheap as to ensure most Thai teachers don’t draw their pension for very long.

So I began.  Great interest was shown in my home made clock but it was how I’d constructed it that was the interesting side.  (They’d never seen an empty packet of All Bran used for this purpose.)  Using the board I drew the two halves and labeled them ‘past’ and ‘to’.  With me so far?  They weren’t.  I lost half on the ‘past’ side’ and the others on the ‘to’ side.  Some of the boys took to vibrating rulers or turning their backs to my person.  I had learned how to ask ‘What time is it?’ in Thai.  It sounded like ‘waila tow (rhymes with ‘how’) rye kap?’  By moving the cardboard fingers and chanting the above Thai I managed to keep most of them in their seats till Teach ran out of cigarettes and released me from the classroom, forever?  Unless I returned in a virtual classroom.  ‘Them as can, teach.  Them as can’t become heads or inspectors, or, in my case, writers.

Below are a couple of chapters from books I have published on Amazon; some about teaching.

 Chapter 28

Calling Time

He watched the second finger of the white-faced wall clock count down the few remaining moments of sanity.  All about him was the subdued sing-song murmur of the other teachers waiting, like him, to go to their first lessons: only they weren’t like him, he was a farang. (foreigner) 

He reviewed the decline in his fortunes that had brought him to this.  When he took early retirement, he told himself the 25% cut in his pension mattered little if he was living somewhere as cheap as Thailand.  The rise of the mighty baht cut his income by another quarter and then he had married.  Peter shuddered to think how much he spent on Noy and her family each month.  Eventually they had moved out of Pattaya and back to the village in Surin.  At first the locals had been courteous but as they discovered how eager to please he was, this turned to contempt.  And the money ran out even faster as he tried to buy their friendship.  So he had returned to teaching; for a pittance; for beer money for Noy’s father Somsak.

Last night’s latest humiliation curdled Peter’s breakfast and the gripes made him gasp with the pain of it.  Somsak was a builder, a bully and self-important.  Excuses for parties multiplied where the farang always paid.  Seemingly he had only five words of English which he used frequently: ‘Hey you get more beer.’  Living in his father-in-law’s house Peter felt duty bound despite paying more rent per month for a single room than he had for a house in Pattaya.  And in one minute he was to teach Somsak’s son.

He gathered his teaching aid from the table: a crude clock with movable cardboard fingers.  He was going to teach English time to Thai students; if he was let.  Somsak’s son, Bai, was already as big a bully as his father.  He witnessed Peter’s daily humiliation on a nightly basis and had already taken the measure of the farang and was a constant disruptive influence.

With faltering tread Peter walked towards his classroom.  A trickle of sweat ran down his nose and he could smell the stench of his own fear.  His classroom assistant had already called the register to avoid the sniggers at the farang’s Thai pronunciation.  She was as timid as Peter when dealing with Bai who was already showing deliberate disinterest by ostentatiously reading a comic and ignoring Peter’s arrival.  Other boys, in homage to Bai were hitting each other with rulers or texting.  The air was hot and sticky the fans barely making a stir.

The class hubbub died a little as Peter held up his makeshift clock but rose again as the assistant explained the object of the lesson.  There were about forty five students aged between fourteen and sixteen, split roughly in half males and females.  The girls were fine and showed deference even appreciation of Peter’s efforts; the boys took their lead from Bai.

The teacher began to explain the concept of ‘to’ and ‘past’ the hour.  He had learned, from Noy, how to ask the time in Thai, and began to walk among them, moving the clock’s fingers and asking the students in Thai to give the time in English.  As Peter moved among them even some of the boys answered correctly and blushed at Peter’s compliments.  It was a half decent lesson until Bai decided the farang had ignored him too much.  He put away his comic slowly and deliberately.

Raising his head and pointing a finger, in an exact imitation of his father, he said very clearly, ‘Hey you, bring more beer.’  There was laughter and he repeated it.  The third time a few other boys joined in.  It became a chant; a gangsta rap.  Peter’s head began to spin and he felt tears prick his eyes. A gale of noise beat about his ears and he went dizzy. It wasn’t fair: he didn’t deserve this.  He gazed fixedly out of the door and took some deep breaths.  How could it have come to this?  At his school in England he’d been respected; charismatic some said.  Sixth form students confided they were thinking of a teaching career inspired by his example.  Suddenly he knew what he had to do.

He placed the clock carefully on his desk; he glanced round at the chanting boys; the horrified girls; the beaten assistant.  Then he began to walk purposefully across the room, through the door, along the corridor, out on to the drive into the hot sunshine, between the school gates in the direction of the bus station.  The first bus out was to Bangkok.

Four years later Peter remembered every horrible second of that lesson as he sat now on the upper floor of Starbucks, sipping a latte.  That day he’d left more than a wife and a wardrobe of clothes behind; he’d left his shame.  He’d regained his self-esteem.  He was a new man in charge of a Pool Hall with a good salary.  He wore a smart shirt and polished black leather shoes.  A lap-top lay open in front of him.  He sipped his coffee and sighed contentedly.  The assistant approached him smiling a plump gap-toothed smile.  ‘Ehcuse me sir are you teacher?’

Peter smiled, ‘I used to be, why you ask?’

‘I ‘member you in Surin.’  She glanced at her watch and in a crystal clear Lancashire accent, she said, ‘It’s quarter past two.’

The above is a fictionalized account of my final (?) lesson.  If you enjoyed it you can download another 70 like it at -

http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Tales-ebook/dp/B0064I1T5W/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332479101&sr=1-9

If you were amused by any of the above chapters, I also wrote a companion book to ‘Thai Tales’ entitled ‘Amusing Thailand’. 

http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Thailand-Survivors-Pattaya-ebook/dp/B0064OO1Y2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332478925&sr=1-1

Here is a sample – my only area of expertise on the Quiz Team is Shakespeare.  Here he is given a Thai Twist.

 Chapter 29

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Without being racist, it is generally accepted that there are national characteristics: the British are not famous for their love-making or their cricket teams; the French are not renowned for their courage when facing Germans.   So it could be said that the Thais are not famed for their originality.  They make great imitations but are rarely first with an idea.  It came as no surprise, therefore, to find a web-site devoted to the Bard of Pattaya-on-Avon, a Mr Som Tham Zuhn. (Some jokes need explanation/translation; his name sounds like Some Time Soon in a Thai accent.)

 Here were to be found all the plays by England’s Man of the Millennium cunningly copied but given a Pattaya twist.  They were grouped into the appropriate categories of Tragedies, Comedies, Histories, even Roman plays though none contained any recognisable Latin characters unless you count Biggus Dickus - itself a copy from Monty Python.

The first play listed was ‘Ham Lek’ *, a tragedy of small proportions.  Set in Soi Denmark, it concerns our hero’s ruminations about a cruel fate that has cursed him with an undersized member.  The curse of three follows him through-out his journey: three thousand baht, three minutes, and three centimetres.  (At one stage the hero was to have been Japanese but the playwright stuck with Danish.)  Even when he finds true love, tragedy strikes.  Ham Lek meets a ladyboy called Ofeelya whose surgeon might have had Ham Lek in mind at the time of her operation.  Unfortunately she drowns during a tropical storm during which Soi Denmark habitually floods.  Our last view of her is as she floats down the soi towards Beach road, garlanded with flowers.  Pattaya police suspect suicide, but then they always do.

#Ham is Thai for penis; Lek in Thai means small - so the opposite of Biggus Dickus.

Som Tham attempts to politicize the tragedy of ‘Mac Beef’ by setting the play in the North, probably Chiang Mai.  Originally he called his tragic hero Thak **Beth but

this proved unpopular with yellow-shirted theatre goers.

** a Thai PM was called Thaksin; his wife Potjamin.

 He and his ambitious wife, Potted Beef, seek to overthrow the King so they can inherit the throne themselves. 

They are defeated finally by Mac Buff, a celebrated nudist and vegetarian who resists Mac Beef’s attempts to force burgers on the people of Thailand by selling franchises tied to 7-11 stores.  Big Mac is eventually beheaded and his wife goes mad, sleepwalking, washing her hands whilst wearing a gauze face-mask.

Other plays labeled as tragedies are:  ‘Curry-your-anus’, a Roman play; ‘O’fellow’, set in Boy’s Town and finally ‘King Beer’ a play unusually co-written with Leo Chang,(* two brands of Thai beer) a long-time Pattaya resident who is often to be spotted doing research in ‘Misty’s’. (* a famed Go-Go bar.)

I found the tragedies rather heavy reading for a day on a beach.  Additionally when attempting to stimulate some conversation with girls in a bar, I found they identified far more with the lighter side of life than with those plays mentioned above.

As you would expect in Thailand there are many broad comedies such as ‘As You Lick It’, ‘Measure for Pleasure’ and my own favorite, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Wet Dream’.  These feature many low-life characters such as Bottom who has a donkey’s appendage grafted on to him by the Gods and is destined to wander Soi Six (* an infamous street of 100 bars and a 1000 girls) looking for a girl who can accommodate him.  Leonato has the opposite problem in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’.

By far the most popular comedy with the girls was ‘Twelfth Night’.  They were quick to recognize the humour in the cross-dressing practiced by Orsino, Sebastian and Olivia.  Their tender sympathies, however, were reserved for Sir Toby Belch, an English aristocrat on a fortnight’s holiday in Pattaya.  All goes well for him on his first eleven nights but he experiences a problem common to many older men in a hot climate.  Just when all seems lost he meets a gel called Kamagra (*a cheaper alternative to Viagra) and ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’

On re-reading the above, my only excuse is, 'You had to have been there.'

 Chapter 30

The final chapter. I am 83 next week. Perhaps my son will write The Epitaph.