This, my third year at Trinity, was not a happy one. This year’s form master, who taught us French, was a martinet called Mr. Kurt. He would shout, threaten, stride among the desks banging on them and hit us on the head with the board rubber. Far from frightening or subduing us, we became the worst-behaved class in the school and there was virtual anarchy in the classroom. I can remember throwing a chair across the room. Somehow, in the three years since I had left primary school, I had changed from being extremely introverted into an unruly, undisciplined lout in the making. Many of the others in the class were similarly badly behaved but not many had experienced the roller-coaster ride that my life had become with my mother’s illness and the desertion of two fathers.
We had a new English teacher called Janet Hase, whose life we made a misery. She must have confided in Mrs. Naish, one of the senior teachers, for one day Mrs. Naish came in and, quietly told us exactly what she thought of us and asked us if we were proud of our treatment of the new, inexperienced, teacher. I wonder if she ever told Mr. Kurt that he should be held responsible for our behaviour for he was, undoubtedly, partly to blame. I think some of us apologised to Mrs. Hase and she and I became quite close for the remainder of the year and she was very encouraging to me.
I was by now anticipating taking my GCE ‘O’ Levels. I had continued absenting myself from the lessons that I did not like when I could, presuming, therefore, that I would not have to do exams in these subjects. I was taking English Language, English Literature, History, French and Art and passed them all, but five was not a very good total. Before this, to my horror, I found out that we had to take mock exams in other key subjects like Maths. Dreading this, I thought of a way of avoiding being exposed as innumerate. The mock Maths exam was to take place at the beginning of December. The weather in the preceding week was atrocious; it had been snowing and it was very foggy. I thought that I could get out of taking the Maths exam if I was ill, so, one morning I took the tube to Cockfosters and went into Hadley Woods, where I took off all my clothes.
I can’t remember how long I cavorted in the fog, snow, and ice but when I got on the tube to go back to Wood Green, I received funny looks from other passengers. Seeing my reflection, I realised that I had slowly thawing icicles suspended from my eyebrows. Back in Wood Green, I went into The Jolly Butchers and bought my first alcoholic drink in a pub, a ginger wine, hoping it would warm me up, which it did. I waited to have a cold, flu, pneumonia …. something, anything, but I remained as fit as a fiddle and had to take the exam, an experience I have managed to erase from my memory.
I was still tall and thin and tended to spend most of my time in my school uniform. Apart from the Teddy Boy look, I don’t remember there being many interesting clothes from which to choose and most clothes were too big for me anyway. School uniform rules were quite strict and I got in trouble for wearing an orange jumper and was told that jumpers had to be grey. Mum quite liked knitting and I designed a jumper for her to make me for school. It was grey where it would show under my blazer but had a band of mauve and one of yellow around the chest which would not show unless I deliberately exposed it. I continued to make jokes in class, often at the teachers’ expense and from being a solitary child I had developed into a slightly subversive teenager.
I had continued to do well enough in school in the subjects I liked and at the end of my fifth year had the five ‘O’ Levels to prove it. Many of my contemporaries were leaving and I contemplated doing the same. Although it was grammar school it was not taken as a matter of course that pupils would go into the sixth form and then into further education. I had a story published in the school magazine. We had been given some essay titles and I had chosen Washing Day. Trying to avoid the mundane, mine had been set in Italy where passionate women did their washing in the stream and fought over men. I gave the characters the names of lesser-known Italian film stars for authenticity. My English teacher, Mr. Johnson, had the story put into the magazine and cajoled me into going into Lower VI Arts. Having spent four years among the ‘don’t knows’, this was indeed a compliment. ‘Staying on’, as it was usually referred to, was often dependent on a family’s financial circumstances. Many could not afford to let bright children remain at school when they could be contributing to the family coffers. so I ended the fifth year regretful that I wouldn’t see certain people again, but looking forward to concentrating on the subjects in which I was interested.
When September arrived, I was a sixth-former, in Lower VI Arts. We shared a classroom with Upper VI Arts. The same arrangement was in place for VI Science but there were more of them.
The time had come - a year before we were due to leave school - for us to think about a career as it was necessary to apply to colleges and universities almost a year before an anticipated start. Many of my classmates were applying to Teachers’ Training Colleges and, as usual, not wanting to do the same as any group, I decided that was not for me. Instead, I would apply to The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). I had organised a play-reading competition in which I played the dustman, Alfred
Doolittle and Freddy Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion, two nicely contrasting roles……...more to follow… WHAT HAPPENED NEXT ?
