Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Page 9

  An Encounter

  Now that I have got my bus pass, and wish to be a bit more environmentally friendly, I have decided to make greater use of public transport. The bus from the village where I live into Doncaster is comfortable, smoke free and regular, and, after nine o’clock, I can travel free of charge.

  Last market day, I took the bus into town and was wandering around Market Place when a loud voice stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘Hey up, Mester Phinn!’

  It was a young man behind a large fruit and vegetable stall.

  He saw the look of incomprehension on my face, so reminded me. ‘It’s me – Jason. Tha’ use’ to teach me.’

  ‘Ah yes, Jason,’ I said, recognising in the large bearded face the boy I used to try to teach English.

  ‘I were no scholar, were I Mester Phinn? Left school wi’out a certificate in owt.’

  ‘You were a good lad, Jason,’ I said, remembering the good-humoured and friendly ex-pupil who caused me no bother.

  ‘Come over ’ere, Mester Phinn, and I’ll sort you out wi’ some fruit.’ He then proceeded to fill brown paper bags with apples and oranges, pears and plums. Then he held up a banana and laughed. ‘Does tha remember t’incident wi’ t’banana?’

  I smiled at the memory. Jason’s French teacher had a bowl of plastic fruit on her desk. She would hold up an apple and ask, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’, and students were supposed to shout back, ‘C’est une pomme’. Then she’d pick up a pear and ask, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’, and they would shout back, ‘C’est une poire’. Once, she had a plastic banana in her hand. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ she asked, but caught sight of Jason talking at the back of the classroom and let fly with the visual aid. The banana arced through the air like a missile and hit the boy straight between the eyes. It then ricocheted off his forehead and flew back to her like a boomerang. The teacher put up her hand and caught it. All the class jumped to its feet and gave her a standing ovation. Jason was, of course, sent to me, but, having related the story of the banana, must have seen by my expression and the stifling of a smile how amused I was.

  ‘So you’re a greengrocer then, Jason?’ I asked now.

  ‘Aye, in a manner o’ speakin’. I’ve six market stalls. “High Class Fruit and Vegetables”. Started wi’ one stall in t’outdoor market and built up ovver t’last few years. I ’ave twenty folk workin’ for me now.’

  ‘You’ve done really well.’ I said. ‘I’m really pleased for you.’

  At this point, drops of rain began to fall.

  ‘It’s goin’ to chuck it down in a minute, by t’looks on it,’ Jason said, staring at the grey sky. ‘Are you in yer car, Mester Phinn, or can I give you a lift?’

  ‘I came into town by bus,’ I told him, ‘It’s very kind of you to offer me a lift but . . .’

  ‘Nay, not a bit of it, Mester Phinn,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m knockin’ off for t’day any road. I can go that way ’ome.’

  I made my way to a small white van with his name printed in bold letters on the side, but Jason called me back. ‘Nay, nay, Mester Phinn, I’m not in t’van.’ He opened the door of a brilliant white, shining sports car with tinted windows. My astonishment must have shown. ‘I can see that tha’ thinking, “What’s a gret big bloke like ’im doin’ driving a piddling little car like that?” Well, I’ll tell thee. Wife’s got t’Merc today, so I’ve got ’ers. Come on, Mester Phinn, before tha’ gets soakin’ wet.’

  The Man in the Box

  When I was a lad (I can hear my children wincing), my school seemed to be populated by eccentrics. There was ‘Snotty’ Wilson, the teacher who used to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his gown, having taken a generous pinch of snuff, and one nicknamed Dr Death, whose white skin stretched across his bony face to give it the appearance of a skull, a deeply frightening teacher who talked in whispers. There was ‘Cliff’ Davis, the chain-smoking head of PE, who put the fear of God into everyone, and ‘Smiler’ Simcox, who leered at you over steel-framed spectacles with a grin as wide as a frog’s.

  The great eccentric seems to have disappeared from education. None of these weird and wonderful teachers would survive OFSTED, which, of course, has ensured a conformity and uniformity in everything. And yet these colourful characters made for an interesting, if not entirely unchallenging, life in school.

  There are still one or two about, however. Perhaps the most memorable was the primary teacher with the wild, woolly hair and permanently startled expression, who employed a most original way of encouraging children to read. At the end of a ‘sound’ lesson, with ‘satisfactory planning’ and ‘clear objectives’, the teacher asked his Year 6 charges to join him on the carpet in the corner of the classroom for Story Time. He then proceeded to place a large cardboard box, which had been adapted to resemble a television set, on his head.

  There was a cut-away square (the screen) and various felt blobs (the knobs).

  ‘Turn me on,’ he said pleasantly.

  A large, amiable-looking boy came to the front and made a clicking sound as he ‘turned him on’.

  ‘Hello children,’ began the teacher, in the voice of the Jackanory storyteller. ‘Welcome to the world of story. My story today is about the child who could not cry.

  ‘Once, many many years ago . . .’

  We all sat completely transfixed. When the story ended, the large, amiable-looking boy headed for the front and ‘turned him off’.

  ‘You see, Mr Phinn,’ explained the teacher later, with a wide, innocent expression, ‘children these days live in a television culture. The average eleven-year-old watches thirty hours of television a week. I find that if I pretend to be a television set, children listen better.’

  I smiled, wondering just what to say. ‘Before I give you the feedback on the lesson, Mr Smith,’ I began, ‘perhaps you might remove the box.’

  Risky Business

  ‘Why are you all wearing goggles?’ I asked a boy, during playtime at a primary school.

  ‘We have to wear them,’ he replied. ‘If we don’t, we might get a bit of conker in our eye.’

  ‘We’ve scrapped the sack race this year,’ explained the head teacher in another school. ‘A child fell over last year and hurt himself.’

  ‘We decided not to go to the castle,’ a teacher told me. ‘We did a risk assessment and we felt there were too many potential dangers.’

  ‘I never let my child cycle to school,’ said a parent to me. ‘It’s far too dangerous on the roads.’

  ‘I drop my daughter off at school on my way to work and collect her every day,’ another parent informed me. ‘You have to be so careful these days with all these strange people about.’

  Over-anxious adults who wrap children in cotton wool are doing the young no favours. I know the world is a very different place to the one in which I grew up but, if children are to develop a degree of independence and confidence and become equipped to cope effectively in an adult world, then they must be given some freedom and allowed to take a few risks.

  As a child, I had a freedom denied to many children these days. I used to climb trees, walk on walls, paddle in streams, make dams and dens, sledge, play cricket and cycle without a helmet, get crushed in a rugby scrum, light fires, drink water from a garden hose, suck a sweet which had been in my pocket for a week, swing from the arms of lampposts, play marbles in the dust, jump off the top block at the swimming baths, play leapfrog, propel my home-made bogie (a trolley made from two planks and four pram wheels, with a bit of rope to steer it) down the hill – and all without adult supervision. I guess many people of my generation did the same and we managed to survive. Perhaps also, when we fell out of a tree or off the wall, scraping a knee or breaking a bone, by experiencing danger and seeing what happens to people who don’t take sufficient care, we came to appreciate our own limitations. By suffering the consequences of our actions, we felt more in control of our lives and developed a sense of judgement.

  In Paranoid Parenting, the sociol
ogist Frank Furedi describes a culture of fear that has led parents to severely restrict their children’s independent outdoor activities. In 1971, he states, 80 per cent of eight-year-olds were allowed to walk to school alone. Now it is fewer than 1 per cent.

  Children should be allowed to take a few measured risks. Of course, we need to warn them of the dangers and not encourage them to be reckless or irresponsible, but let us not mollycoddle the young and erect fences between them and the world. My revered father-in-law, the celebrated ‘Legs’ Bentley who played rugby union for Yorkshire, once told me that he played the game for sheer physical exhilaration. He has been knocked out a few times and come off the pitch sore and bruised and bloodied but, as he told me, ‘if you confront risk and go in with your eyes open, you are very often safer in the long run’.

  Life is full of risks. If you laugh, you risk being thought silly; if you weep, you risk appearing mawkish; if you ask a question, you risk sounding foolish; if you show your feelings, you risk revealing your true self; if you try, you risk failure; if you tell someone you love them, you risk not being loved back. But the risk is worth taking, because the person who risks nothing has a pretty tedious life.

  Playing Around

  Young people should have the experience of performing in plays. It is a great disappointment that, in some schools, drama has been marginalised in the curriculum in favour of more ‘useful subjects’. Those of us who have taken part in school plays and directed them know only too well the value of drama, through which young people can gain in confidence, develop their spoken English and work together. School plays are also great fun.

  My interest in the theatre flourished when I joined the South Yorkshire Theatre for Youth at the age of fourteen. This was an amateur dramatic society for young people, formed by the Head of the English Department at Wath Grammar School. Bill Hammond was a charismatic, larger-than-life figure – one of the world’s enthusiasts, a brilliant teacher with a passion for theatre. Over the summer holidays, for two intensive weeks, he would give up a fortnight of his holiday to rehearse young actors from all over the south of the county for a production which would be staged the following September, in Rotherham and Doncaster.

  I loved the rehearsals, the camaraderie backstage, the sharing of jokes and anecdotes, the assignations and the attention-seeking exhibitionism which surrounded me. I loved watching my fellow actors going through their paces, listening to the producer shouting out directions, the smell of the theatre, the bright lights, the mugs of hot sweet tea and the bacon sandwiches and fizzy lemonade in the dressing rooms. I have never before in my life felt so much a part of such a group of like-minded, entertaining people.

  The single most enjoyable experience in appearing in that first play was the sense of elation before and after the performance. Every night, my heart would race with expectation and be high with happiness. There is something very special and exhilarating about being a part of a company of actors backstage, listening to their exaggerated stories and the accents they put on, how they try to outdo each other with anecdotes and jokes and, above all, feeling the warmth of their companionship.

  I remember seeing a brilliant production of Anne of Green Gables in a secondary school I was inspecting. The lead part of Anne, played by a plump, red-faced girl with protuberant blue eyes, was undertaken with great enthusiasm and confidence. Dressed in a bright blue and yellow gingham smock, she dominated the stage. After the performance, I was taken by the head of the drama department and the play’s director to meet members of the cast.

  ‘You were very confident,’ I told the girl who had played the lead, ‘and you did very well to remember all those words. It was a really impressive performance.’

  ‘I do a lot of drama, actually,’ she informed me loftily. ‘I go to a Saturday stage school and I have a main part in Annie next week at the local theatre.’ She was already well on her way to becoming a drama queen, I thought.

  Then I caught sight of the pale, slight girl who had delivered the opening lines of the play.

  ‘You were excellent,’ I told her.

  ‘I only had a few lines,’ replied the child, smiling coyly.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but you were the first person to speak and it was you who set the scene. We heard every word clearly and if I had an Oscar to award – you know, the prizes that very famous actors sometimes get – well, I would give it to you.’

  ‘That was kind of you, Mr Phinn,’ said the head of the drama department later, ‘and if you only knew what that will do for that young lady’s confidence. She is such a shy little thing and it took some persuading to get her to take part.’

  ‘She deserved an Oscar,’ I said. ‘Anyone who could go on to the stage, before all the other actors, beneath all the bright lights, in front of a hundred people and deliver such lines without making one mistake, deserves an Oscar.’

  The teacher looked at me quizzically. ‘In what way?’ she asked.

  I consulted my programme. ‘I wrote down the words she had to say,’ I replied, ‘and I guess many of us would have had some difficulty declaiming them with such clarity.’ I read the lines: ‘“Is Farmer Hart’s farm far from here?” ’

  I was told some years ago by Graham Allen, the distinguished former drama adviser for Wakefield, about a school production of Macbeth. The sixth former playing the lead was another massively confident and rather self-satisfied young actor. Seyton, an officer attending Macbeth, was played by a small eleven-year-old who only had a very few lines to deliver. In Act V, he was to come on stage to inform Macbeth, ‘The queen, my lord, is dead,’ whereupon the devastated king would declaim his famous monologue. On the Thursday night, the little boy’s relations took up the entire front row and, when he made his appearance, there was an audible noise from his fans. ‘Look, it’s our Darren,’ came a voice from the audience. Seyton, aware that his family was there, developed his part somewhat and began rubbing his eyes, wailing piteously and beating his breast. ‘The queen, my lord, oh, oh, the poor queen is dead. She’s dead! Dead! Dead!’ Then, to applause, he exited stage right.

  Macbeth was far from happy after the performance.

  ‘Say your line and get off,’ he shouted at the boy, ‘and cut out all that other stuff, because if you start that tomorrow night I’ll kick you off the stage!’

  It was the last night. Macbeth, alone on the battlements, sees his world crumbling about him.

  ‘Wherefore was that cry?’ he asks plaintively.

  Enter Seyton.

  ‘The queen, my lord,’ he announces, ‘is making a remarkable recovery.’

  I guess it is not true but it makes a wonderful story.

  Seeing Red

  I recently shared a literary platform with Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, the great, great, great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, who spoke about her latest book, Lizzie Siddal, The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. This wonderfully entertaining and informative speaker gave a fascinating insight into the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and how they changed the public perception of those with red hair by their depiction of beautiful, Titian-haired women like Lizzie Siddal. Sadly, public perception has not changed very much and those with red or auburn hair still suffer mockery.

  The mother who complained to Tesco about the offensive Christmas card for sale in their stores – showing a ginger-headed little boy sitting on Santa’s knee, with the caption: ‘Santa loves all kids. Even GINGER ones.’ – had every right, and I too complained when visiting my local store. Anyone with red hair knows only too well how hurtful are such taunts as ‘ginger nut’, ‘carrot top’, ‘ginger ninja’ and ‘copper knob’. I recall once visiting a school and commenting on the beautiful auburn hair of a child. ‘I hate the colour,’ she told me. ‘People call me names.’

  There has always been this ingrained prejudice against those with ginger hair. It was thought that Judas had red hair and, in Victorian times, there were many superstitions surrounding people with hair of this colour. Some peop
le would not board a ship if there was a red-headed person on board, because he or she was thought be a jinx, and many mistresses would not employ servants with red hair, believing them to be deeply unlucky.

  Following an article I wrote about bullying for the Yorkshire Post, I received a number of letters. One, an immensely sad letter, spoke of the reader’s unmerciful bullying at school because of his red hair and freckles. When he approached his teacher about it, he was told to ignore the name-callers and that they would soon get tired, and anyway, coping with this sort of thing was part of growing up and learning to take the rough with the smooth. Clearly, the teacher had never been subject to such cruelty from his peers when he was at school.

  Schools are places where children acquire much more than the principles, ideas and processes of a subject. They are formative little worlds, where children develop their social skills, learn to get along with others, make friendships and sometimes enemies. They are places where rules circumscribe their every move, where they discover, are hurt, feel lonely and experience success and failure, and where teachers loom large. In the good schools, they learn about love, beauty, compassion, goodness, co-operation, care and other positive human emotions and feelings. Children, however, even in the good schools, also learn the hard lessons of life; lessons about injustice, humiliation and cruelty, and sometimes, if they are unlucky, they come across the bully.

  A measure of rough and tumble in a school builds a degree of immunity, and teaches us to stand up for ourselves. One can’t expect children to be permanently pleasant with each other. We have all been name-called and called others names ourselves, but systematic cruelty in the form of constant bullying is a very different matter.

  Bullies seek out their victims – those who are likely to be in some way different. It might be skin colour, physical appearance, a disability, the colour of one’s hair or the way one speaks. For me, it was my name that set me apart.