I managed to avoid school until I was nearly six years old. Oh there had been talk, but in the move between houses it had somehow slipped by. This, and that fact that I was already well versed in the three Rs at my mothers kitchen table. Still the day eventually arrived when I could no longer escape. The nearest school to my house was in the next village, Upton Cheyney. Set above a small village, cupped in the Y where three lanes met. A mile from my home and a world away from planet me. Nervous to start with, I was aghast when I finally realized what was about to happen. my mother was going to abandon me to an unfamiliar world. She handed me over to Mrs Exonn and left without me. No amount of reassurance and kind words were ever going to be enough and, seeing a gap I fled. Back down the path. Down the ramp along the lane through the village and over the fields to Swineford. My pace outwitting that of my mother who, although in the car, had called in to the shops on the way home.
My second escape attempt was not so fruitful. Faced with a locked door and no second exit I was captured. Through the tears they showed me my coat hook, the one with my name on it. I was also promised that I could ring the bell at break time. A treat that I was completely unable to understand as I had no concept of such a structured day or the ritual punctuation.
Still, Mrs Exonn showed me the bell. Not electric but the traditional hand ring bell that could have been in the school for a hundred years except it couldn’t be much older than Andrew Rippons grandfather. It was Andrew who pointed out that it was embellished with the letters ARP and had been donated to the school. A lie I continued to believe for a long time until watching Dads Army some years in the future.
Still there was no way out. I cried a lot but eventually stopped.
Having received me in to the company, Mrs Exonn, who was the head teacher, left me in Mrs Coopers class with the juniors. I was given a box of crayons. A book to colour and copy a seat next to Pamela Hacker and a tissue.
I really couldn't understand quite why Mrs Cooper wanted me to copy out my name by tracing her letters, but I did. I wrote my address underneath it as well just for good measure. Then she gave me a book to read and a picture to colour in and some sums.
After that I had to write a daily diary. My uncle Hugh rescued some of these and gave them back to me a couple of years ago.
Upton Cheyney was a type of school that even in the sixties must have had its days numbered. With two classes, two teachers and twenty four students it is a wonder that the economics of scale had not caught up with its anachronism earlier. I am grateful that they didn’t.
Kids gathered there every day from a couple of small villages and the scattered farms of the Cotswold escarpment. We learned and listened to stories and songs on the radio. We played games of war and football. Made ice slides in the winter. Dug escape tunnels on the tump and accompanied Mr Cook and Miss Lapinierre on nature walks deep into the Cotswolds green mystery. On birthdays Mrs Lacey, the school cook, would make chicken and chips for us all. At three thirty some went home by car, but most of us walked.
Never a genius at football and ignorant of film and television I was unsure of who the playground heroes of the time were. Many of the games figured members of the world cup squad and after humming and hawing I eventually decided that if Gordon Banks was good enough for Peter and Richard Brown then I could probably go along with them. I think now that this must have been due to the fact that their father was also a Scot.
While I wasn’t trying to hoof a ball past Gordon by the underhand tactic of shooting for the bottomless bin that served on its side as the left hand goal post, I did note that if you hit the post just right, the ball was unsaveable as it crossed the line inside the metal tube. Many hours of rule chewing and dispute centered over this tricky position until the bin was taken away and we used coats instead.
James Bond was there as well. Gold and silver Aston Martins supplied by Dinky were rendered undriveable every day along the top of the playground wall. Thank god we had the wit to play with them though. I feel sorry for the pristine boxed versions that now grace internet auction sites for prices close to the original cost of the cars themselves. For all that they are worth, when we drove them through the dirt and gravel round the tump we were secret agents.
As we queued to have our books mark the coke stove was on our right hand side. I think coke was generated as a hard carbon by product of coal gas production .Along with the bell, one of the prime jobs was to take the scoop up to the coke shed in the winter. A job reserved for the older boys as the responsibility involved a key and a certain amount of lifting. The stove was surrounded by a mesh guard to prevent us burning ourselves but the top was open. In an age where compensation was a distant spectre we were expected to know that it was hot and if we were indeed foolish enough lean over and touch it we could expect cold water and little sympathy.
It was from this small village school that some time in the September of 1966 I first registered an awareness of the country that has been my home for the greater part of my life. Even then, at the tender age of seven, I sensed somehow that it would be important to me.
Earlier that year Upton Cheyney school had raised the grand sum of £12 10s 6d at the summer fair to acquire the latest in cutting edge technology. The schools first ever television. A 405 line VHF special. Music movement and mime on the radio was never going to be quite as good.
In the early September the whole school was gathered round the box and we watched the Queen and Prince Phillip cross the Severn bridge. Cutting the journey time from Bristol to Wales from hours to minutes. Of course at the time the motorway stopped dead at the far side of the bridge, but by the time another 15 years had passed that was sorted out. The Severn bridge was one of the wonders of our world.
A bold student teacher, who to my shame has lost his name in the swamp of my memory, built half a terms work around that bridge.
Soon, on a grey and windy morning, the dozen students in my class took a trip. Mr Cooper, the head teachers husband, had an old ambulance that served as a school minibus. We all piled in to the back, four each side on a bench and four down the middle on an old physical education plank. Niceties like seatbelts and health and safety were a thing of the distant future.
Crossing Bristol from east to west without incident we arrived at the car park and viewing platform at Aust service station. A service station! There was another exotic beast. I am not sure we actually went in but can you imagine, a huge restaurant dedicated to the needs of the hungry thirsty road user. This was so far removed from our simple village experience that it was like another planet. There were still houses in Upton Cheyney using a communal pump for water back then. I don’t know if we felt like African villagers dumped in New York but it was definitely in that area of experience.
From the viewing area, we walked down to the footbridge over the toll booths, marvelling at the half a crown (what an anarchic sum!) that cars were paying to cross the river. On to the path beside the main bridge deck itself and we formed a straggle tailed crocodile that waddled and huffed against the wind until we had passed the first huge tower, and were at last were standing 90m or so above the river Severn in the middle.
From here among the other wonders of geology, geography and engineering a line of distant shapes could be seen.
The rain swept dragon mountains of Wales emerged from the obscurity of a childs imagination, and started to become real.
The interactions between the school and the local villages were usually based around jumble sales. In times more innocent we were expected to go round the neighbors after school. Proffering purple tickets fresh from the banda machine, reeking of alcohol. Seeing if they had any junk or old clothes that we could stack on planks between trestles. When Saturday came we would find ourselves accompanied by parents, in a familiar yet foreign land. Our work tables stacked aside and others pressed in to laden service we were first measured against second hand clothes and shoes, then treated to paper cups of orange squash. Butterfly cakes and cornflakes moulded in chocolate for a penny. Our parents drank cups of tea and talked of Vietnam, the musical Hair and the passing of steam locomotives.
My last term in this school was in the summer of nineteensixty eight. A summer when I learned that God did indeed listen to the prayers of children in distress. Several things stand out from that summer for me, but in relation to school I have one clear recollection of nightmare.
The village was going to have a barndance. What jubilee or birthday the event was meant to mark the passing of is now long lost in the mist of my memory, though Mrs Cooper may be able to recall it for me. What traumatized me has lived with me ever since, giving me a nervous feeling of dread whenever a certain type of crowded room assembles.
Village committees had met, deliberated, voted and agreed that it would indeed be splendid if the children of the school could take part in the festivity by taking part in a couple of country dances. One involved lines of us standing opposite, boy girl, boy girl and head to tailing in a simple arrangement set to music. Along with a couple of verse variations where shapes were made with arms and pat a cake clapping as a couple by couple passed down the middle. The whole concluded after a couple of reprises of the main theme. The other comprised a rather more circular affair. Now couples wove in and out of counter rotating rings in a path that would have generated a fine spirograph pattern had they been allowed to pull baler twine in their wake. We were all to take part.
To begin with I was just a bit clumsy. If there ever was a person who proclaimed that ‘white men ain’t got no rhythm’ I suspect that they could have held my ineptitude at skipping to a beat up as a definitive example. The trouble was that Mrs Jasper, the self chosen choreographer of the spectacle was a perfectionist. The sort of woman who saw my feet of clay as an insult not to be entertained. I was caught then, between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there was no way that I was going to allowed to drop out. If one rat was allowed to jump ship, however much the ship would benefit, it was clear that there were a number of others that would rather not be part of it. In a school of under thirty students there really wasn’t a lot of slack as far as the required number at the dance was concerned. On the other hand there was Mrs Jaspers reaction to my overqualification in the left foot department. Over a period of a fortnight she went from being a patient maternal perfectionist to a screaming banshee every time I put a foot out of place. Rather that curb my wayward rhythms this really only served to aggravate them and produce secondary anomalies. Soon I was unable to tell clockwise from anti clockwise, invariably made lunges for a male partner, and, when trying to follow other pat a cakers, nearly had Wayne Bests eye out on the end of my thumb. Students with whom I had shared tears and laughter began to discuss openly the best methods for my dispatch and the disposal of the body. I was totally crap at country dancing and not even my sister had a comforting word.
Add all this to the fact that I was having a frighteningly early puberty. I reached the point where I prayed in earnest for some of the tragic deaths of children that we learned of in the Bible and Dickens could befall me, thus enabling friends and family to remember me as a wonderful boy. To spare them the need to speak my name in the hushed tones that would undoubtedly be reserved for the tales of the great barn dance debacle.
God answered my prayers, thoughtfully avoiding my untimely death, he instead sent a great flood to help me out.
Overnight the Bristol Avon catchment area was inundated with nearly seven inches of rain. The river rose, sweeping away old stone bridges. A dam burst and washed away the centre of Bitton. In our house the water rose to a depth of nearly four feet. In the early hours of Saturday July the thirteenth, the very day of the Upton Cheyney barndance, my sisters and I were evacuated by the fire service to a family on higher ground, and subsequently to my grandparents house in Kent. And as the circumstances of our family life moved on it turned out that we were to change school by the time the new term started. It wasn’t until the year two thousand and one that I felt able to dance as if no one was looking.
Now then dear friend. If you have read this far, thank you for your kind indulgence. If you know me or the school and find this note inaccurate in its detail then I apologise. It is what it is, a memory filtered by fifty years of make believe.
I think I got the sense of it somewhere though.
