Edmondscote Road part 5
BUSTER
Buster was my second dog. He was a big, black, lumbering mongrel who enjoyed sleeping more than moving. The only time he came to life was if we had snow. For some strange and deeply hidden reason he became frantic as soon as the first snowflakes fell. This canine dinosaur transformed back into a puppy, leaping and snapping to try and catch the flakes before they hit the ground. It was an amazing sight to see because the more the snow fell the more frantic he became. It was as though he had a mission to prevent each flake from reaching the ground. His head would turn and twist. His solid body leapt into the air returning to earth with bone shaking thuds. His teeth would be bared as he dashed from one flake to the next in the vain attempt to keep the earth free from snow. The first time I saw him do this I thought it was hilarious. I dragged the family out to see his performance. What I hadn’t counted on was his total obsession. He just would not stop. I left him to it after I had become bored with his antics and on my return I found him lying completely exhausted on an old bit of carpet in the back yard. He was so fatigued he was unable to move and this sudden burst of exercise must have put a terrible strain on his heart.
It took both Dad and me to carry him into the kitchen where we rested him on a blanket by the paraffin stove. He was shaking with exhaustion and cold. Mum warmed some milk for him but he was too tired to even sniff it and he fell straight to sleep. There were dark whispers between my parents that suggested his death was imminent and I crept up to my room to sob myself to sleep. By around ten o’clock that evening strange howls of anguish emanated from the kitchen. Buster had recovered slightly but in his state of collapse had rolled over towards the fire and gone off to sleep again. His proximity to the fire caused his fur to scorch and he had burnt his bum as well. It was quite a night. The kitchen was full of the sickly smelly of burnt hair. Buster, still very tired, was licking his wound as Dad and I packed snow onto his tender flesh to reduce the pain.
The next morning saw one very sad dog, burnt, bothered and bewildered. He hobbled around the house like an old man stiff from excessive exercise. It took him two days to fully recover but when the next snows fell he was out there again leaping and snapping. I took it upon myself to let him has his fun for a maximum of ten minutes and as I dragged him, by his collar, still snapping at the flakes, he looked knowingly at me as if to say 'You’re probably right for that was one hell of a night wasn’t it?'
Buster, like all dogs on the estate, ran free and rarely went more than calling distance from the house. Most of the time he would slob around on the front lawn watching the world go by. What possessed him to wander over to Princes Drive one summer’s morning I will never know but he was killed by a lorry as he shuffled across the road. Most of the kids in the street loved Buster. He was always there to pat and wrestle with. I was devastated and even my Mum cried. I don’t know whether it was her affection for the dog or sympathy for me that prompted her tears but we consoled each other for a brief moment. It was a pretty one sided arrangement. Mum had done all the work cleaning up after the animal, buying the food, sorting out the problems whilst I had all the enjoyment. Maybe there were one or two tears of relief!
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
In the summer of my last year at Milverton I was fast approaching a rite of passage, although in my confused and irrational way I let the world go on around me making its decisions with me following in the wake. Murmurs were heard in hallways. I ignored them and carried on lacing my soccer boots. Whispers were passed in classrooms. I ignored them and carried on flicking paper pellets at Trevor Rothwell. Speeches were made in lessons by concerned teachers. I blotted them out and pulled Elizabeth Townsend’s plats. Threats were issued in assemblies but I let them pass by whilst pushing a broken pencil stub down the neck of an unknown third year who sat stock still in front of me scared of the wrath of the Headmaster or terrified of the bully of a fourth year who would thump him if he squealed. The focus of this adult concern had really not penetrated my consciousness and I continued in my merry way until the day of the first practice tests. What the hell was this?
The eleven plus examination meant nothing to me. It was a load of old nonsense that involved calculating the time it took four men to dig a hole or working out the length of a shadow of a church steeple. The significance of failure had eluded me but my peers seemed to understand the nature of the beast and attacked the problem with concerned vigour. I was a fast thinker but very lazy and my priorities lay on the soccer field, in the tree house or on the river bank. I was not going to let some stupid test get in the way of my routines.
My parents were confident that I would tackle the test with ease as my sister had done two years earlier. The outcome would decide my fate for the next five years. I would either stroll into Leamington Boys Grammar School with the rest of the class or be condemned to the living hell of Oken High School for Boys. This was the establishment where fifth year pupils eat first years for a break time snack. Eddie Wadkins from next door went to Oken and he had tales of torture and destruction that made the back of my neck prickle in horror. I did not want to end up with cannibals or Eddie Wadkins. The college sounded an easier option.
It was a warm spring and it was closed season for fishing. The soccer season was drawing to a close at school and I had attained the mighty position of captain. I was not particularly skilled but I was tall and Mr Harrison probably thought I might frighten the opposition. Geoffrey Innocent had taught me to play chess and I was a regular member of the club. We even met some Saturday mornings in Leamington Library to have a quiet game using a pocket set that he always carried with him. I made weekly visits to my Nan to earn ten shillings by running errands. Life was busy. I was at the top end of the juniors and had fought hard to attain credibility amongst my classmates. I thought it bloody unfair that I was going to have to start all over again. Bottom of the heap once more.
We had had little experience of sitting silently for over an hour focusing on one task. I was much more the experiential learner. I needed to ask questions, walk about, explore theories with hands on practicals, read out loud, write in a flowing and uncontrolled style. My stories would often start in the middle of a situation and I would then spend a lot of time back tracking to explain how I had arrived at this point in the first place. By the time I had justified the start of the story I had run out of time to finish it and so often presented my work as a circular argument being no further forward at the end of the tale than I had been at the start. The second practice test arrived and I treated it much the same as the first!
I seemed to be struggling with these infernal test questions but no one seemed concerned. I struggled all right but as I didn’t appear concerned either, life went on. Talk in class and in the playground seemed to focus more and more of the move to big school. I didn’t want to get involved. I desperately wanted to continue as I was, enjoying being top of the school where I knew the teachers and felt comfortable with them. I enjoyed the company of boys and girls and whichever way the eleven plus went I was doomed to be in an all boys institution. Injustices seemed all around me. Why couldn’t things stay as they were?
A third practice test arrived and the fourth. I waited for the fifth but it never came. Somewhere along the line I had miscalculated. The two most recent tests weren’t practice tests at all. That was it. I had sat the eleven plus and barely noticed. The school had done such a good job at simulating the atmosphere in rehearsal I didn’t spot the difference between the warm ups and the real thing. Not to worry. I didn’t.
There was a large gap between taking the test and the publication of results. In those days success depended entirely on the test results. There were no teacher recommendations, interviews or coursework elements. The papers were marked, correlated, double checked and sorted. There wasn’t, and I believe there still isn’t, a pass mark in this examination. Fate deals the final blow. If you happen to be in a poor year group then a mark of seventy per cent could get you a place in the grammar school. If the year happened to be a good one then seventy per cent would commit you to the rubbish heap as a failure because there were only so many grammar school places to be allocated.
The long gap between sitting the exam and the results being issued gave me the opportunity to make the most of my final months in the Junior School. I had started to take a keen interest in cricket and along with marbles, cigarette cards, football, tick and other playground games the smack of cork on willow grew large in my affections. I was never brilliant but found my niche as a wicket keeper. I had fast reactions and was so stupid I did not fear the hard ball as it flew down the wicket. We played on the field behind my parent’s house on the soccer pitch. Its irregular surface caused the ball to fly off in all directions. As wicket keeper it was my job to retrieve the ball from the nettles if it escaped my strenuous efforts to grab it. This happened often as none of the kids in our street owned a set of keeper’s gloves. The nearest I got to protection for my hands was an old pair of leather motorcycle gauntlets that my Dad had stashed away in one of his bedroom drawers. They offered better protection from the stinging nettles than they did from the speeding bullet that left Robert Frost’s hands as he hurled himself down the pitch at full speed. My palms would glow red after a fierce delivery but I soon became adept at killing the speed of the ball by receiving it early and pulling my hands into my chest or dragging them to my side.
The worst moment for me that summer was by the back of the toilet wall that faced onto the school playground. There were three sets of cricket stumps painted in parking line yellow on this wall which were used for practice and were grabbed quickly at the beginning of each break and lunch time by the keener cricketers amongst us. Judging someone out was always difficult as we played with tennis balls and as both stumps and bails were fixed forever into position it required a good eye and an honest umpire to declare a hit on target. Batsmen would deny being out, bowlers would claim a clipped bail and the fielder who was in next would always support the bowler so that they could get their turn before the end of break. One fateful lunch hour I proposed that I could wicket keep and would then be able to adjudge if the batsman was out or not. Obviously with a ten foot high wall directly behind the batter this made my task a little difficult but I pointed out that if I stood beside the batsman, in front of the wall, I could act as a very close slip fielder and umpire as well. All felt that this was an idea worth trying.
I tried it. The first delivery was sent down. It was a slow, arcing ball that hung temptingly in the air. Any batsman would have done the same. David Marshall threw his bat back to connect with the missile. The back of a cricket back is shaped at an angle and even now I am convinced I have a wedge shaped indentation in my forehead. My head and the bat connected with a thud that shook every bone and tooth in my body. I felt warm instantly and my head appeared to fill with water. It began in my throat and by the time the sensation had reached the base of my eyes my legs had buckled and I crashed to the ground. I awoke in the school staff room with concerned faces looking down upon me. I felt sick, tired and weak and had no immediate recollection of what had happened. Cold, damp cloths were being applied to my forehead as I drifted in and out of consciousness. What I remember most about the incident was the squalid quarters that was the staff room. Dirty wallpaper, a meagre ight from a small wooden window strived to lighten the dim cell. It was a tiny room that smelt of stale pipe tobacco. The settee I was lying on had springs that could be felt through its worn green material. The place felt tired and cold and I wondered why anyone would want to spend their spare time in such a sad place.
Miraculously the skin on my forehead had not been broken but an obscene lump had grown there. It looked as though I had had a large potato inserted under the skin as part of some diabolical scientific experiment. My ears whistled and my eyes lost and regained focus with disturbing frequency. I felt sick and scared and all I wanted to do was sleep. An echoing voice in the distance kept insisting I stay awake and further cold water was applied to my head, face and neck to keep me conscious. My mother, the dinner lady, appeared as if by magic. I had no idea how long I had been out and, soon after, Doctor Dale arrived and checked me over. I was not taken to the hospital but driven home in his car. It took a day or two for me to recover and soon I was back at school. My head has since suffered many collisions with hard objects during my life as a result of being six foot four inches tall but none matched the day I headed a cricket bat. I never played wicket keeper again.
It was quite a blow when the result of the examinations were publicised. Only Steven Walsgrave and I had failed to make the grade in our class. What a bummer. Steven was a bit of a swat. He wore wire rimmed national health spectacles and spoke nicely but this gave him no advantage. He, like me, must have made a real pig’s ear of the tests. We were both fated to go to Oken and be torn limb from limb by the savages who frequented those dismal corridors. Lord help us. It didn’t take long for our friends to start discriminating against us. We were quickly excluded from party invitations and evening gatherings at each others' houses. Apartheid exists everywhere in one form or another and none so blatantly as the discrimination of successful people towards failures. We weren’t exactly sent to Coventry but there existed a definite air of condescension that I can still taste in the back of my throat to this day. The boys were far worse than the girls, in fact many of the girls were supportive and sympathetic to my plight and I never forgot the kind words of some who were sensitive enough to realise that neither they nor I had changed, only circumstances.
Hurt as I was by the action of some of my classmates the final ignominy did not come until the following Christmas. I had already survived a term at my new school and things had not turned out as badly as I thought they would. However, earlier in the year, prior to the results being published, I had discovered an electric car racing game wrapped up in brown paper beneath my parents’ bed. I often snooped about the house looking for smutty books or open bags of toffees. It could see through the paper it was a VIP race track, figure of eight. On the wrapping a message read ,'To our son on passing his eleven plus.' What confidence they must have had in me and how I must have let them down. The gift was not delivered until that Christmas and by then I had forgotten its existence but I felt sick to my stomach as I tore the wrapping paper away on that December morning and realised that this was my intended graduation gift. I could barely bring myself to thank them and they appeared puzzled by my lack of enthusiasm to start playing with it. I resented that gift so much I could have cheerfully destroyed it that night in the privacy of my own bedroom.
It would be years after my father died that my Mum discovered, how I felt about the incident. It burnt a deep scar in me but taught me a salutary lesson. Praise not punishment is the greatest motivator. I had two severe shocks to the system that year but the bump on my head disappeared without a trace and yet the hurt of that re-assigned gift stung for a long time. With hindsight I realised that Mum and Dad were not well off and had little choice in the matter. Their generosity was limited by their incomes and I was too young and selfish to appreciate all the things that they had done and were going to do for me. It was another test for an eleven year old that I managed to fail.