IN LOCKDOWN Children are best at school and having fun with friends
Anton Rippon looks back to his schooldays and reflects on the experience of children in the pandemic
IWAS enjoying a quick burst of George Formby when there was a knock on the front door. We have a doorbell but not every courier has grasped the technology. This one did possess a mobile phone that takes photographs – I suppose, these days, they all do? – and he wanted to take a picture of the parcel on our doorstep. How the lockdown has altered our lives. I mean, delivery people photographing parcels from a distance of two metres. Who could have imagined that a year ago? Not me, anyway.
Today marks a few anniversaries. It’s exactly a year since I last had a haircut, not that anyone has noticed, and 365 days since anyone – save for a plumber – outside those who live here entered our house.
It’s also exactly 12 months since I last shopped in the city centre. I have ventured in a couple of times since then, but only for an eye test and then to pick up my new specs. I’m now beginning to wonder if I’ll ever bother to visit “town” again.
The other morning, I ventured to the pillar box around the corner to post a birthday card to my old pal from Gerard Street days, Colin
Shaw. There is another sad anniversary: it’s a year today since I last saw him. He’s a card in his own right, is Colin. We were once coming out of a pub, and he leapt upon a pile of builder’s sand and began singing: “I joined the Legion to see the world.” And then there was the Christmas Eve when he alarmed passers-by by looking up and shouting: “I don’t care what your name is. Get those reindeers off my roof!”
But I digress. I was going to say that when I went to post Colin’s card, I was struck by how the street had suddenly come alive again. It was all down to parents taking their children to school for the first time in ages.
That has been one of the saddest aspects of the pandemic: schools closed and kids missing their lessons and, as importantly, their friends. It is surely impossible for every parent to home-school their offspring to any useful standard. The lack of social interaction between the young generation is as damaging. I still see – well, I did until the lockdowns – many of the friends that I made, both at primary school and at grammar school.
I have to say that, overall, I didn’t particularly enjoy my first faltering steps in the grim Victorian building that was Becket School in Gerard Street, with its cavernous classrooms, mostly severe teachers, outside lavatories that froze in winter, and a playground that flooded so regularly that playtime often meant wearing your wellingtons. Kids could have drowned in a foot of water, but no one seemed to care, although, to be fair, no one ever did succumb.
On my first day at Becket School – in January 1950 – a boy called Terry Tattershaw was assigned to look after me (he’d already been there a term). When circumstances allow, we still go for a pint, along with Stuart and Rosey of that same class. Good, kind people that 70 years have not parted. Rick Hawkridge joined us, too, before he passed away.
Bemrose School also gave me friendships that have lasted for decades. I am aware that not everyone enjoyed their time there. But our intake of 1956 appears to have been fortunate in gathering together boys who would get on so well that we would still be pals well into the 21st century.
Friendships are so important, especially today when we need all the support we can get. Even if, for the time being, it’s delivered over the telephone and not over a pint in the four-ale bar. The friends that children make today will stand them in good stead, whatever is thrown at them in years to come. They need school.