Old School Days. Part 2.

When asked by the magazine to write about the years I'd spent in Penwortham, my first response was to agree, but with the condition that I give an absolutely honest account. One assumes that when a 'local' publication looks for such contributions they do so with the hope that it will reflect a positive image of the place it represents. Not that I had a bad word to say about the area itself, but still, I doubted if it would be seen as appropriate to have the inclusion of, what would be for me, an act of catharsis, albeit an extremely considered one.

I got the 'thumbs-up', which pleasantly surprised me, but I hadn't quite finished with the caveats just yet. I felt that I would have to be very specific when it came to certain events that I'd witnessed at Penwortham County Secondary school. I knew fully, for example, that I couldn't start calling specific members of the teaching staff 'sadists', even though in my view there would be few other discriptions more accurate, and there are obvious issues of 'defamation of character' to be considered.

However, in my view it would be perfectly justified to name these people who felt as though they had, not just the authority, but also the justification to beat - and abuse - younger, smaller individuals that were defenceless when it came to any kind of recourse.

Again, I know that for a good few, perhaps a great many, much of this was like water off a duck's back, but for others, like myself, it was far from it. To have the threat of canes, rulers, gym shoes, and even rounders and - can you believe it - sawn-off cricket bats, as a means of physical (not forgetting the emotional) punishment hanging over you from one day to the next, made, what was for me a thoroughly dire - so called - secondary education.  

And it wasn't as though these implements were only used in exceptional instances; corporal punishment was administered arbitrarily, for reasons I still find shocking; acts that would, these days, leave those who administered the beatings without jobs, and justifiably answering to the law.  

Old School Days Pt 2:

Such was my initial introduction to secondary education, the beginning of an experience sometimes unpleasant, occasionally enjoyable, but more than anything else one riddled with anxiety. I guess it had everything to do with the generation, the geometry of the time, the tail end of an institutionalised Victorian era that seemed to carry a belief that children needed to have goodness beaten into them. 

It wasn’t long before I had goodness beaten into me during that first year, courtesy of the PE (physical education) teacher, Mr Bray - and he used a rounders bat to do it. My crime? - to belong to a team during one of his lessons (the game I can’t recall) that left their team-ribbons in a disorganised state. One-by-one we were instructed to bend over, after which, systematically we were each struck with this wooden object - an object I’m sure that was originally designed for sporting enjoyment, not the infliction of pain on 11 year olds. 

Mr Bray was, quite frankly, terrifying. If you forgot to take your gym kit to school, you were in trouble; if you didn’t have your name sewn on your gym kit, you were in trouble; if another pupil stole an article of your gym kit, you were … well, yes - you guessed it. And what was “trouble”? - trouble was being screamed at, put down, belittled, and more-often-than-not being beaten by–what Bray himself described as – a “sawn-off cricket bat” - an implement of punishment that had ended up looking more like a paddle than anything else, having had its lower two-thirds removed. And don’t let the word “paddle” imply anything of a benign nature, believe me, he applied it with force, and although I was lucky enough never to be on the receiving end, the depth of injustice I felt witnessing the pain and humiliation of those less fortunate was profound.

In general, all teachers addressed the boys by their last names. The girls were all, “Ann”, “Sandra”, “Margaret” and the like; the boys: “Nicol”, “Blackledge”, “Webster”, or just, “Boy!”; in my young mind all this somehow expressed the implications of “positive and negative”, “right and wrong”, superior and inferior”. 

During those first three years at Penwortham County Secondary School my focus soon became consolidated; it was plainly obvious that you were more-or-less safe once you’d reached the fourth year. Up until that time it was–as a male–next to impossible to avoid being found guilty of something at any given unsuspecting moment that would result in both psychological and physical punishment. The psychological impact of just observing others being beaten, for me, was significant, and although I would often raise the subject with my own parents, and teachers alike, the attempts to justify - what was nothing less than child abuse - was the order of the day. From one side came the argument of teaching right from wrong, from the other it was, “you must have deserved it”, “the teacher is always right”. 

“Learning” was fast becoming my last priority, “anonymity” the first. It was more about survival than anything else, and there was only one place to go, and that was inward. Becoming increasingly withdrawn, my objective, was to get older as fast as I could.                    

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