This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, each writer shares some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.
The craziest day?
I would choose the one that began with an assembly during which the chemistry master waved what he claimed was a loaded pistol. Lessons were suspended and fifth formers smoked cannabis and snogged in their hide-out overlooking the playground. The afternoon before had seen a concerted attack on a female biology teacher with Bunsen burners attached to taps and used as water cannon. I had not witnessed it because I had been suspended from the subject for suggesting insolently, in a mock O level, that the alimentary canal went from London to Liverpool and had recently been upgraded by the London to Liverpool Alimentary Canal Society.
Mr Hope, with his pistol, restored some order but Sidcot School in the summer of 1976 was not a place for the faint-hearted or the academically ambitious.
Idiots online sometimes discover that I went to a fee-paying boarding school and write triumphant messages suggesting that I have no ability to question Tory Privilege or American Imperialism and so on, because I had such a privileged upbringing myself. The better-read of them genuinely imagine the earlier chapters of A Dance To the Music of Time: tuck boxes and wall games and fags fixing your toast.
We didn’t even have hot water. There were cockroaches in the showers that we’d douse with lighter fluid and set alight. The latrines were unheated. At meals older, stronger children took the best food. Best being a relative term: I became a vegetarian to avoid the poisonous semi-cooked sausages on which most of the school lived. When I try now to make my kids eat food marginally beyond the sell-by date they raise their eyes to the sky and mouth ‘Daddy went to boarding school’.
And yes, I did yearn for privilege: for a home that hadn’t been poisoned by mental illness, for tea and telly with Mum and Dad and a bed that wasn’t metal in a dormitory with dozens of other boys. For a life in a nice comprehensive like my wife’s former school, where all the children of the teachers at the local university formed their own cosy group and holidayed in a camper van before gliding effortlessly off to top universities. But it wasn’t to be.
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