Читать книгу Seeing Things - Oliver Postgate - Страница 18

Academically, Woodstock School had turned out to be something of a disappointment so, late in 1936, it was decided that if I was to have a chance of passing the Entrance Examination to a secondary school I should attend a small school a couple of miles away in Friern Barnet which specialized in preparing pupils for that exam.

The school, which I shall call Crumlin House, was run by a North Country family, the Springbottoms, all of whom did their stint of teaching. They may not have been highly qualified but the curriculum was devoted solely to stocking up the minds of the Entrants, as they were called, with the facts and figures required for passing the Secondary Entrance Examination. Mr Springbottom, the headmaster, did occasionally allow himself to take a broader view and tell us that fixed-wheel bicycles were better than free-wheel ones if you were, as he was, a proper cyclist and that it’s the damp muggy weather that gives you colds, not proper cold weather, wise saws that we duly wrote down and committed to memory. He also taught us the arcane language of Business Letters, which included passages like:

Dear Sirs,

Yours of the 12th ult. to hand in re of which we acknowledge safe receipt of same and …

Assuring you of our best attention at all times,

Beg to remain,

Yours faithfully

… which I found quite baffling. This was mainly because Mr Springbottom never explained anything. He and the school saw their task as being to impart information and instruction, not to encourage understanding. So to the question: ‘Why …?’ he would answer: ‘Because that’s what you write.’

The school was also pretentious in a half-hearted way, with rather elaborate uniforms, a school song and long-winded speechdays which dwelt on the Spirit of the School. All this was a bit incongruous in a ‘sausage-machine’ crammer. I suspect it irritated my parents a bit and this may have caused them not to treat the Springbottoms with quite the respect they thought was their due. Mrs Springbottom in particular would make scathing remarks about the stuck-up children of clever-clever parents, which she made sure everybody knew were directed at me – though I hadn’t the slightest idea why.

Things like that weren’t important. Life was real and earnest. We had to be ready, fully primed, for the momentous Examination, at which the Entrants from Crumlin House School would sweep the board and honour their Alma Mater by excelling in all ways. As the day came closer the tension rose to fever pitch. Time after time we sat mock exams using previous years’ papers. I was very frightened and convinced that I would fail but, when at last we were taken to another school to sit the exam and the paper was laid before me, it had written on it:

I had no idea what this had to do with the kings and queens and British Empire geography I had stuffed into my head but, as all the questions were as straightforward as that one, I nipped through the paper and waited for the exam proper to start.

It didn’t start. That was it. We went home. The rest of the week was free, perhaps for us to recover from the rigours of the Exam. On the following Monday Mrs Springbottom addressed Assembly. She told us that the exam had been a great success and thanks to the valiant efforts of the school nearly all the pupils had passed. She told us that she had had letters of thanks from the parents of all the pupils, except one.

‘Except one!’ she repeated, glaring at me … ‘Postgate!’

I went forward and stood before her and the school.

‘Well?’ she demanded … ‘Well?’

‘Er, er … thankyouverymuch.’

‘I should think so too!’

I crept back to my place and that afternoon when I returned home I told Daisy that Mrs Springbottom had been a bit cross because she hadn’t written to thank her for getting me through the exam and that I had had to say a public thankyou on her behalf.

Daisy seemed a bit cross about this too, but the next morning she did give me a letter to take to Mrs Springbottom. I gave it to her at Assembly and directly it was over she ordered me to collect up my belongings and go home. There wasn’t room in my satchel for all my things so she grudgingly gave me a paper bag. Although it split as soon as I was out of the school I didn’t feel like going back to ask for another. I found a piece of string in the gutter and tied the things together with that.

I can see, now, that the change from a formal academic examination to a simple IQ test must have come as a terrible blow to the school, but even so I don’t see why they had to take it out on me – but then I don’t know what was in Daisy’s letter.

I had passed the exam and was offered a place at Woodhouse County Secondary School in North Finchley.

Woodhouse School was, I think, a quite ordinary middle-ofthe-road school, typical of England in the 1930s. It had a House system comprising four houses, Gordon, Livingstone, Nightingale and Scott, and its school motto was ‘Cheerfulness with Industry’. I was a lowly member of Scott House, which was of course the best.

In general we behaved respectfully to the teachers, held up a hand when we wished to speak, attended to what was being said and did our work. In due course I found that teachers could be cheeked and would usually take it in good part, providing one was careful to preserve respect, calling them ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’, and didn’t go on too long. All of them would, if approached courteously at an appropriate moment, be willing to give a careful answer to a seriously asked question, and be quite companionable about it, particularly if the question had to do with their subject.

Essentially there were two social orders in the school. The main one was the formal hierarchy, with the headmaster at the top, then the teachers and house-captains. Below them came the prefects, the school and finally us, the newcomers. There were recognized heroes in the hierarchy, mostly distinguished achievers in sport or music, whom we were expected to look up to. The other was the social life of the pupils, lived during unsupervised moments in the classrooms, in the playground, the cycle sheds and on the playing fields during the dinner-hour. As a school, Woodhouse was thought to be a bit ‘rough’, by which I mean that the coinage of our lives together seemed to be a sort of formalized thuggery, in which the most important thing was to be seen to be ‘tough’. Very occasionally there would be real fights between potential top persons in the class but for the rest of us it was a ritual by which we confirmed our position in the pack with small arm-twistings and shoves. Girls, as always, were different. They had a social hierarchy of their own from which boys were excluded, not that we would have wanted to have anything to do with girls anyway.

Of course with a complex institution like a school there were occasional failures of communication. It was as a result of one of these that I could be said to have dived for the House. One of the house-prefects came up to us in the field and said: ‘Any of you rabbits dive?’ So I, foolish but, as always, anxious to help, admitted that when I was on holiday I had once dived off some rocks.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re diving for the House,’ and went away.

I was proud, but only for a minute. When I read the list of awesome types of dives that I had been entered for I went, cap in hand, to the Head of House to tell him I couldn’t dive and that it was all a mistake. He told me not to be modest and that it was my duty to the House to do my best. I went to the Sports master but he was too busy to talk and directed me back to the Head of House. He again refused to hear that I couldn’t dive, told me not to be a ninny and said that they were all depending on me to put up a good show.

The Swimming Sports Day came. The diving was announced and duly took place. Six times I was called and six times I managed to find the courage to drop myself off the end of the board into the water, gaining for my House a total of nine points out of a possible sixty and for myself a red patch all down my front where my body had slapped the water. I was an object of ridicule and for most of my life I have been deeply ashamed of that disgrace. Only very recently have I been able to revise that view and look on the incident with something like pride. I had been ordered to dive for the House and I bloody did it. The fact that it was a complete fiasco was not my fault. I had told them it was going to be – and it was!