I went to a catholic, all-boys school in North London. We often had fun, but it meant no regular contact with females for me, from the age of 11 until I left at 17. What a disaster! Right through puberty. As if that wasn’t weird enough, I’ve only seen two or three of my old school friends since I left. But I didn’t make any effort to meet up with anybody and neither did they. On the other hand, we had no telephone while I lived at home. My parents installed one only after I had moved out, so no easy way to keep in touch. The kids at school were also spread all over North London as it was the only school of its kind. We mostly didn’t live close to each other and rarely met outside school.
The head teacher was a large priest and several of the regular teachers were also priests. A couple of them were even pretty good. One of them was rumoured to be a pedofile, but he was old and thankfully I had no personal experience of him. I have fond memories of being beaten by the head teacher with a thick leather strap on the backside on a few occasions for minor offences. I may not have been St. Philip but was not a bad kid either. I was also threatened with the police by him one time when I was caught with a golf ball that I had found in the street. I was only 11 or 12 at the time and I was scared to death. Apparently, balls were regularly stolen from the local driving-range. But not by me!
Some of the other teachers were quite extreme in the violence department too. Names like Levy, O’Shea, Wilkins and Linnane spring to mind and they all had their “specialities”. Linnane liked lifting us by the short hair on the side of our heads, Levy used the edge of a ruler to hit boys’ fingers and Wilkins favoured a gym shoe on the backside. All of it painful. O’Shea was big, angry and frightening. It makes me chuckle now to think about it and it was comical in a way. 15 years after I left school I told my father about those punishments and he couldn’t believe it. If I’d told him at the time, he said he would have gone to the school and punched their lights out! He might have been able to sort the short Wilkins’ out, but O’Shea or Linnane? Probably not.
Why did I go to that school? Well, it was a “grammar” school, with focus only on academic subjects. In which I frankly had little interest. My focus was on guitars from the age of 10 and I cared little for physics, chemistry and mathematics. The alternative “comprehensive” school was closer to home, more vocational, and mixed (boys and girls!). I’ve often thought that would have been better for me personally, but the grammar school was what was expected of me. And what’s more important than making your parents happy? Doh! On the other hand, I may have been even more bored going to the comprehensive.
In my final year at school I would arrive at 9:00 am, register in class, then often leave to do something else. Once I even climbed out of the toilet window by the chemistry lab to escape. I ran up the hill to the street with my school bag hiding my face from the teacher. But the consequence of not doing any work during the school year was that I was not permitted to sit the exams in most subjects. And if you don’t sit the exam, or fail in every subject, you can end up leaving school with nothing. As if you’d had no schooling at all. After repeating my final year, I had passes in English Literature, English Language and Art. That was it. All other subjects, it was as if I’d done nothing for seven years. But I really didn’t care, and I suppose I was a bad boy that final year. Strangely enough, though I left with almost no qualifications, a lot of what I was forced to learn stayed with me. Both math and chemistry have been useful. And French!
“My Old School” is from the Steely Dan album Countdown to Ecstacy. Killer guitar work from Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and this is one I often go back to.