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Chapter Three

An Education (of Sorts)

My first memory of my education is a Freudian one. I was standing next to a little boy on my first day at what was grandly called ‘nursery school’ but was a corner of the dining room in a neighbour’s house. There was a toy cash register, some Meccano, a doll’s pram accommodating a doll and a dog-eared teddy bear with a tea towel as a coverlet, and a sandpit in the garden, covered by a tarpaulin which was rolled back in the summer to allow ‘messy play’ with buckets and spades and child-sized watering cans. Perhaps there was a roll of blue sugar paper and wax crayons or poster paints to make pictures with, and blunt scissors and squares of coloured sticky paper too, but I don’t remember.

What I do remember was the willy this little boy fished out of his shorts and directed at the lavatory (or toilet as I was instructed to call it) as a stream of wee arced precisely where it was intended to go. I felt sheer, gut-wrenching penis envy – the functionality, the utility, a body part with the same straightforward application as a garden hose, no more lifting up skirts, pulling down knickers, balancing precariously on cold porcelain rims. I wanted what he had and carefully checked and rechecked my anatomy to see if somewhere I too had such a tap. I had no idea if this was a usual male adjunct, or if this particular child had been singularly blessed – or maybe adapted? And as far as I remember, I never asked, just coveted.

I One Potato, Two Potatoes . . .

The postwar government had other educational priorities so, largely for financial reasons but also in the belief that very young children were best at home with their mothers, it discouraged local authorities from investing in pre-school education when so many resources were needed for the provision of secondary schooling following the 1944 Education Act. Indeed, as late as the 1960s, the percentage of children attending nursery schools had barely increased since the 1930s, and where this was provided it was usually as a result of local authority subsidies for underprivileged areas. My nursery was a private one, paid for weekly, I imagine, with a charge that included a mid-morning beaker of milk and a biscuit. It would be pressure from married women wanting to go back to work in the 1960s and 70s that finally led the government to develop systematic pre-school provision for the children of any parent who wanted to make use of it.

Since I was an only child with no cohabiting playmates, I was fortunate to be able to spend time with a handful of other children of my age, learning to share, make friends, play with bricks, sing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ and ‘Ten Green Bottles’, and to write my name in higgledy-piggledy capitals.

After a year or so at nursery it was time to go to ‘proper school’, so I was sent to George Street primary, a former board school, just down the hill from where we lived. It was a grim place with high windows so children could not be distracted by what was going on outside. The lavatories were in the far corner of the yard. They were fitted with doors that didn’t close properly so you somehow had to stretch one leg from where you were sitting to keep the door shut while naughty boys tried to get in. There was an asphalt playground back and front with an inevitable tendency to graze knees, yet with no play equipment; games at playtime consisted of chalking hopscotch squares on the ground or playing fives with pebbles. The girls walked round and round the playground, arms intertwined, or skipped, tucking their dresses into their knickers and chanting ‘One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four’ as they jumped over the turning rope held by two friends.

As I grew older I considered the home counties a dull and unenviable place to grow up. It had no distinctive regional culture, traditions or dialect. It was neither urban nor rural, but a commuter land full of dormitory towns where people came home and tended their gardens or did a little light woodwork in their refuge shed after the train had dropped them off from London at about six o’clock. My father worked locally and so walked home for dinner (lunch) and then came home to high tea, which I remember as a meal of ham, hard-boiled eggs, lettuce and a lot of beetroot, though the repast must have varied sometimes.

You could plot the days of the week by the meals we ate: roast meat on Sunday, the remains of the joint on Monday, shepherd’s pie on Tuesday, with the last stringy remains of Sunday’s meal minced, macaroni cheese on Wednesday, liver and onions (ugh) on Thursday, fish on Friday. Puddings were things like plum pies, treacle tart, suet pudding and Bird’s Instant Whip, which my mother claimed was ‘home made’ as she added milk to the strawberry, banana or caramel packet powder.

Hemel Hempstead, where I grew up, was a smallish Hertfordshire market town and did not become suburbanised in the first wave of suburb-building. Mostly the town was not part of the 1930s growth of home ownership away from the crowded and fetid capital. No ring roads emanated from its core, though it was obviously ripe for change, given the postwar planning movement to settle families around the circumference of London and other overcrowded industrial towns and cities, but it would always lack any distinction as far as I was concerned.

This perception was confirmed when I read Iona and Peter Opie’s collection of the rhymes children chanted as they skipped, published in 1959 when my skipping days were not long past, and noted fascinating topical, regional and local references. In Lancashire the Opies heard girls chime, to the tune of ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, a rhyme about a GP in Lancaster who had been hanged in 1936 for the murder of his wife and the girl who looked after the children:

Red stains on the carpet, red stains on your knife

Oh Dr Buck Ruxton, you murdered your wife,

The nursemaid she saw you, and threatened to tell,

Oh Dr Ruxton, you killed her as well,

as they skipped. In 1952 in Hackney, the Opies reported hearing children chanting in a primary school playground:

We are three spivs of Trafalgar Square,

Flogging nylons, tuppence a pair

All fully fashioned, all off the ration,

Sold in Trafalgar Square,

as they jumped. But for us it was: ‘One potato, two potatoes, three …’

George Street primary school served a socially mixed, though all-white, British-born population. It closely mimicked the social composition of the road where my parents and I lived, round the corner from the school. At the top of the hill lived a bank manager and his family (my mother always maintained that all bank employees, not just managers, were paid a handsome wage so that they would not be tempted to put their hands in the till), a doctor, a couple of solicitors, a vet and a local entrepreneur who made a comfortable living out of growing watercress, if judged by the car he drove and the holidays the family took. Our house, 33 Adeyfield Road (modified by my father, who was a local authority sanitary inspector with aspirations to train as an architect), was about halfway down the hill. Next door to us lived a shop manager and next door again was the owner of a sports shop which sold mainly golf clubs and tennis racquets. On the other side were fields.

Rows of crimson standard roses flanked the crazy-paving path to our front door, which sported a porthole window depicting a galleon in full sail in green and amber stained glass. The low brick wall separating the garden from the road was castellated, but its heavy chains had been requisitioned for war service and were never demobbed. This loss aggrieved my mother when she heard rumours that such chains had not been used to aid the war effort at all, but rather dumped in the North Sea since no one was sure what to do with them. The rest of the garden was enclosed by a rather scrubby hedge of laurel, which gave the house its name. The leaves were a source of some interest to me, since if I scratched my name on the reverse side of a leaf and shoved it up my jumper sleeve, the warmth would cause the writing to be clearly inscribed on the other side.

The bottom of the hill was distinctly working-class – ‘common’, or ‘rough’, as my mother called it. There was a field that was used for the twice-annual fair and circus, and where children played (I was forbidden to). There was a corner shop from which you could buy penny ice lollies, or in my case I was sent to buy a ‘family-sized’ brick of Wall’s Neapolitan ice cream – innocent of a single non-synthetic ingredient – wrapped in newspaper for ‘dessert’ on Sunday.

The children from the ‘nether regions’ included eight from an Irish family, the oldest of whom, Maureen, had plaits so long she could sit on them. Then there was Raymond, a pale, thin (‘weedy’) boy who always wore plimsolls and pink National Health spectacles mended with Elastoplast and whose nose continually ran. There was spiteful, mean-faced Yvonne, who used to torment me by recruiting her friends to bar my way home, and Clive, a red-headed adenoidal butcher’s son and something of a ten-year-old Lothario, keen to chase girls into the bushes for a bit of a fumble. These were my classmates: Susan, the watercress grower’s daughter; Sandra, whose father went up to ‘town’ on the train from Boxmoor station every morning with a briefcase, presumably to work in an office; Jennifer, whose father worked at the Dickinson paper mills – a substantial local employer in nearby Apsley, manufacturer of Basildon Bond writing paper (azure was the colour of choice in our house); Carol, whose father was a fireman and who lived above the shop, as it were; Michelle, a dentist’s daughter; and Patsy, whose mother worked in a smart dress shop in Watford and who wore gilt earrings, heady perfume and dark red nail-varnish. ‘Fast’, my mother – who made do with a puff of Coty powder, a splash of 4711 cologne and a dash of Miners coral lipstick – pronounced, though I thought her the height of glamorous sophistication and envied freckled Patsy.

The grown-ups at George Street school who made the greatest impression on me were the headmistress, stern Miss Parkin, with her iron-grey hair in tight curls clinging to her skull, and the voluptuously lovely and kind teacher, Miss East, who had blonde hair and pink cheeks and who praised me excessively when, aged five, I demonstrated that I could spell yellow – a skill that has never left me.

The classrooms were hardly hives of creativity. The notion that the pictures children painted themselves should adorn the walls had not been considered, so we spent our days gazing at Ministry of Education-issue colour prints of farmyards, a seaside harbour, a train station or an airport. We chanted what we could identify – tractor, pigsty, suitcase, trawler – and then wrote the words down with laborious pot-hooks using a wooden-handled pen with a nib which we dipped in ink. We did ‘gym’ in the playground a couple of times a week when it wasn’t raining. The only other diversion I recall was ‘nature study’, when a large wireless was carried into the classroom by the only male teacher in the school, so we could listen to a BBC educational broadcast. Mr Robertson sat by his teaching aid throughout the lesson like a security guard, flexing a ruler, ready to rap a knuckle sharply if, say, a boy was to giggle, pinch his neighbour, flick paper pellets or pull the plaits of the girl sitting at the desk in front.