The Serial: Georgie Day 36

Suddenly it was OK to lie on my back and roll around on the lobby floor, being a strange slow motion goalkeeper, trying to save slow motion headers

After we’d had tea Dad, Joe and I manhandled the carpet into different rooms, where we tried to spread it out as best we could without moving the furniture. Soon the sweat was lashing from all three of us, so Joe fetched a 12in ruler from his school bag and measured the carpet’s length and width then the dimensions of each room. That approach saved us a lot of labour. We now sat round the dining table while Dad and Joe worked out which rooms could be covered by such a long, rather narrow carpet.

I asked why Dad hadn’t bought one that fitted but Joe just smacked my head and told me to shut up.

Dad raised his eyes to heaven and went back to the maths.

Eventually, we worked out that the carpet could cover Mum and Dad’s bedroom (if they missed out the area below the bed) and most of the lobby, except the bit behind the front door.

Several cuts and joins would be required but Dad was supremely confident he could rise to the occasion.

He did do a terrific job of laying the carpet the next day, despite ruining a pair of Mum’s scissors in the process.

Joe and I spent the whole evening wrestling on the carpet or walking up and down the lobby with no shoes on and great big grins on our faces. Posh At last we were posh.

The arrival of the carpet curtailed the table-tennis tournaments a bit because we now had a perfect putting green in our lobby.

This game quickly became the family pastime of choice.

We spent many a Friday evening imagining the 18th hole at St Andrews as we used a scavenged old putter to aim our ball at a recumbent pint glass.

When the weekend pubs closed at 10, Dad would come home and show us how it was done left-handed.

Even with a few pints on him (it being Friday night), he was still so much better than Mum, Joe or me.

Mum was next best and I soon became her usual opponent as Joe decided he was too busy with other things to risk being beaten at a sport by his mother.

The blue carpet introduced another game into the house, this time mainly for Joe and me. It was balloon football. Suddenly it was OK to lie on my back and roll around on the lobby floor, being a strange slow motion goalkeeper, trying to save slow motion headers from my slow motion brother.

The weirdest part was that we both liked to commentate on our games with slow motion speech, lengthening the vowels of key words like “save” and “goal” to fit the speed of the actions they were describing.

Honestly, it didn’t seem surreal at the time. Fierce I loved my PE lessons at school.

One of the teachers, Mr Devlin, was a bit fierce but I knew if you stayed on the right side of him there was no problem.

The other gym teachers, Chaplain and Pacione, were fine with us, meaning we all looked forward to their lessons. There were three kinds of activity we did. We had outdoor team games and athletics on the playing fields next to the Kingsway, or indoor games and gymnastics in the big gymnasium, or swimming in our brand new pool.

I loved all three sorts but especially looked forward to an organised game of football on the playing field, even on rainy days, if the teachers felt brave enough to take us there.

Sometimes, a good old Dundee downpour would persuade them to change their plans at the last minute and we’d double up with some other class in the gym instead of facing the elements.

The swimming pool was a top attraction, not only because it was ours to use in our own school and required no travelling to get there but also because the water was really warm in comparison to both the Central and Lochee Baths.

As the pool was on the school site, it was also possible to go swimming at lunch time or after school.

Some of us would take advantage of this facility, even though we had to do real swimming of lengths, up and down, as opposed to the horseplay we usually got up to in the public pools.

Diving in or doing a “depth charge” was regarded as a bit too disruptive for school, where we were expected to behave ourselves and get on with becoming competent swimmers.

It was in that school swimming pool that I found myself totally changing my opinion about one of the teachers.

Mr Minto, known to us as “Wullie”, was the Latin teacher for second year and he came very much from the old-fashioned school of teaching.

He wore the black gown of a graduate and talked to us very formally at all times.

He never seemed to smile yet wasn’t particularly grumpy, paraded around the room with his book held out in front of him and, when the bell rang at the end of the lesson, would immediately announce above the rising noise “Right, for homework…”

We would moan loudly because this meant we then had to take out our homework registers and write in whatever he told us to do: no chance of a quick escape there.

As a result of his standoffishness, we all regarded him as a bit of a wimp and treated him with less respect than his lessons deserved, given that he didn’t often use the belt and was never really nasty to anyone.

We 14-year-olds just preferred to be taught by someone with a bit more charisma than Mr Minto, that’s all, and his only fault was that he was from a dying breed. Nice man But he was generally a nice man, despite his formality.

My impression of him started changing at the pool during the after-school session we sometimes attended.

As I came out of the showers I noticed a figure surging powerfully through the water away from me.

I was even more impressed by the swimmer’s perfect somersault turn at the deep end before he came crashing back towards where I’d stopped at the poolside. When he reached my feet, off he went again. He cut through the water like an Olympic swimmer, doing length after length non-stop at the same terrific speed.

I couldn’t make out who he was, as I couldn’t really see his face and I didn’t recognise his muscular frame as he leapt from the water when he’d had enough. (More on Monday)