Education part 3 - Infant School

I started infant school half way through the year I think.  Around Easter anyway.  I had to wear a uniform – grey trousers, black shoes, a white shirt and a red jumper.  I started in Mrs Ryle’s class.  Naturally, I was petrified and took a lot of convincing from my mum and my big sister (who’d been through all this with a far more devil may care attitude) that Mrs Ryle wasn’t going to kill me, hate me, ridicule me or ever get cross.  Even so, my mum walked me through the school halls to my classroom and stayed while I got settled on the carpet for this new thing called the register.  The register was when the teacher called out everybody’s names and you had to say ‘yes’ or ‘here’ and Mrs Ryle marked all these ticks in a beautiful straight line.  She put a circle if you weren’t there.  All through the register I kept looking up to see my mum standing by the classroom door.  And then I looked up and she wasn’t there anymore and I knew I was going to have to go it alone.

           

Mrs Ryle turned out to be a gem.  She was used to nervous, unhappy kids and seemed to make a real effort to make everything as gentle and comfortable as she could.  She played the piano at every school assembly and made up songs.  One of the songs went like this:

Knives and forks and spoons,

It’s time to set the table.

A place for you,

A place for me,

And one for Aunty Mabel.

I asked around.  Nobody had an Aunty Mabel.  I was confused but I still sang along with all the passion and verve I could muster.

In Mrs Ryle’s class, I got my first reading book.  It was entitled Look.  On every page there was a picture and one word: Look.  On the last page, there was a picture of a dog and the words, Look.  A dog.  It was a dull book and I remember a feeling of dissatisfaction.  Not because I was up to reading any more than that, but just that it wasn’t much of a story.
 

When my dad told us bedtime stories, he read and did voices.  Or, he didn’t read at all and made up ingenious plots and characters on the spot.  I remember he read Snow White to us one night from a big book of fairy tales that my grandparents in Ireland had bought me, illustrated with creepy pictures.  One of the pictures in the Snow White story was of the witch offering Snow White a big red apple laced with poison.  My big sister and I had never seen an apple like it and expressed wonderment.
           

We were often in bed by the time my dad got home from work.  The next night, he got in from work and came straight up to our room for story time.  He had bought each of us a big, shiny red delicious.  I couldn’t get over how it looked.  But I also couldn’t get over how much it looked like the poison apple in the book.  It was with some trepidation that I took my first bite.  My sister said she didn’t like it and I took the opportunity to say the same.  I’m sure my dad wasn’t trying to poison me like Snow White but I couldn’t be certain.  And red delicious apples still have something of an acquired taste for me.  I remember my dad looking disappointed and I remember feeling sad about that.

           

I’d started to read in Mrs Ryle’s class and it was there I also started to write.  I still have my first exercise book.  It contains rows and rows of the same letters being copied out.  They were meant to be done in straight lines but looking back, they were done in lines as straight as a heart monitor.  I’m not sure what happened there.  But by the end of the book I had come good.

           
I remember my family urging me to have a go at writing my name.  My dad taught engineering at NESCOT, a local college, and he regularly bought home paper for us to draw on with stuff printed on the other side.  Coloured paper was rare and special but mostly it was plain white.  I was kneeling at the coffee table at home, trying to write my name with a crayon on one such piece of paper and my family were sitting there encouraging me. 

           
A.

           
‘Yeeeeees’ they said. 

           
N, I wrote. 

           
‘Good boy’ they said.

           
D.

           
‘Excellent’ they said.

           
I may have paused for dramatic effect.

           
R, I wrote.

           
‘Very gooood’ they cooed.

           
E.

           
‘Good boy’ they said, a mild tremolo of excitement leaking into the collective voice.

           
I hesitated.  How did this one go?

           
M, I wrote.

           
The sound was the same that greets the loser falling at the finish line.

           
But by the end of my first exercise book, there were Andrews everywhere.  Mrs Ryle had taught me well.

Despite getting used to Mrs Ryle, fear continued to be a big part of my school life.  Miss Boyle was another teacher at the school.  She looked like the evil Zelda from Terrahawks (the scariest kids’ show in TV), was a big smoker and sounded like it.  I noted very early that she was a Miss, not a Mrs; she wasn’t married.  In my head, that meant it was impossible for anyone to love her.

           
I had a run in with her early on in my school career, in the dinner hall at lunch time.  We were being served cheese flan, a vile concoction that I wouldn’t dream of eating now as an adult.  And on this day, I was sat with it on my plate with no intention of eating it either.  But Miss Boyle was on lunch duty and she had no intention of allowing that to happen.  I screamed and cried as she sliced this wobbling crap into bitesize chunks for me.  I’ve no recollection of how the encounter ended, except to say she had a lasting impact on me.

           
Not being in her class, I could normally avoid Miss Boyle.  But on Tuesdays she was on playground duty.  That meant a necessary amount of interaction.  I did my best to behave but could feel her watching me all play time.  I came to dread Tuesdays, purely because of Miss Boyle’s iron fist in the playground.  I believe it was my mother who came up with the solution.  My dad had one or two handkerchiefs embroidered with G, his initial.  Sprinkle one of those with a dash of holy water (we had some in a plastic bottle the shape of mother Mary under the sink) and voila, a talisman for warding off evil teachers.  It worked.  Miss Boyle was still there but my fear wasn’t.

           
Then of course there was the Tuesday I forgot my blessed handkerchief.  I realised almost as soon as I entered the classroom in the morning – a cold shiver and a sinking feeling and a sense that it was too late to turn back.  I managed to stay strong and avoid trouble.  But I never forgot it again.

           

While in Mrs Ryle’s class, I had my first experience of going round to a friend’s house for dinner which wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be.  I went to Daniel Ascough’s house.  I wasn’t too nervous about it.  His big brother Liam was in the same class as my big sister who was in junior school and he was alright.  And their mum, Sue, worked at the new Asda and she was nice.  We watched the video to Michael Jackson’s Thriller and were so terrified that we had to hide behind the couch.

           

After Mrs Ryle’s class, I moved up to Mrs Thompson’s.  Here, I branched out in the friend department a bit.  I was friends with Wayne Lewis, Thomas James, Daniel Dawson, Ned Delaney, Rachel Kemp, Elizabeth Husband, Christopher Creighton, Joseph Hargreaves, Cyrus Fernando, Katy Packwood and of course Daniel Ascough.

           
It was in Mrs Thompson’s class that I was first encouraged to think about future careers.  She went round the room asking us all what we wanted to be when we grew up.  Katy Packwood said she wanted to be a doctor.  It came to me and having thought about it for a while, I said ‘a cowboy’.  Growing up in South London, there weren’t many opportunities for such work and my mum had laughed at me when I asked her to knit me a cowboy hat (I thought she could knit anything).  But I felt a connection with the Wild West.  In any case, it wasn’t the most outrageous suggestion.  Daniel Ascough said he wanted to be a shark.