I’m not having my son turn into some little public school ponce, said Dad
He didn’t even want to be milk monitor at primary school. But then, as he reveals in his magical memoirs, Littlejohn came top in the 11-plus. Flashman, fagging and abject misery beckoned . . .
THE Mail’s incomparable Richard Littlejohn was born in 1954. As he says himself, it wasn’t just a different century — it was a different world. Now he’s written his childhood memoirs, evoking that lost Britain with warmth, poignancy and laughter. This is our second exclusive extract . . .
AT THE end of the Fifties, my dad was promoted by British Railways, which entailed a move north to Peterborough, on the East Coast mainline. My new school, West Town Juniors and Mixed Infants, was about a mile away from our new home. We’d walk there and back, with my younger sister Viv in her pram. It took a good 20 minutes there and back. No yummy mummy 4x4 school runs in those days. The school was housed in a purpose-built Edwardian brick building, established in 1909, with separate ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ entrances. West Town had a strict uniform policy. Grey shirts and green striped ties; bottle green or grey jumpers; grey socks and navyblue blazers. Grey shorts for boys, grey pleated skirts for the girls. Shoes had to be black.
It was much like thousands of other schools built around the turn of the century. They could be quite intimidating institutions, with long corridors and tall ceilings, obviously designed to i nstill the serious purpose of education i n our impressionable young minds. The pl ace c arri ed a permanent, pungent aroma of floor polish and disinfectant.
The classrooms had changed little since the school was built. The walls were half-tiled, like public toilets. The only windows which opened were at least 10ft from the ground and had to be operated with a hook on a long pole. They provided little ventilation.
At some stage, central heating had been installed in the shape of enormous cast-iron radiators which looked as if they may have been manufactured at the Cammell Laird shipbuilders’ yards. While they were i mpressive i n scale, they were useless i n practice, giving out about as much heat as an electric light bulb.
In summer, the classrooms were sweltering. In winter, they were so cold we often took lessons wearing our gaberdine macs and school scarves. Maybe that’s why our headmaster, Eric Sutton, was so keen on physical exercise. It kept our circulation flowing and stopped us freezing.
Thinking back, I can’t remember a time the school was ever closed, even in the coldest winters when snow and ice were thick on the ground.
I have memories of trudging through thick snow in a balaclava, wellies and short trousers, with wringing wet woollen gloves hanging from a piece of string knotted at t he neck of my gaberdine mac.
My knees were red raw, my nose was running and my heart was pounding with the thrill of snowball fights and sliding on treacherous sheets of ice created by tipping cold water onto the pavement and waiting for it to freeze.
During lessons, we’d peer through f rosty windows at the winter wonderland outside, willing the bell to ring so the festivities could be resumed.
Maybe there was the odd day when the rackety radiator pipes froze or the ancient boiler gave up the ghost. But frankly, I can’t remember any school I attended ever being padlocked because of a light dusting of snow.
Of course, global warming hadn’t been invented then. Today schools close their doors before the first snowflake falls.
For four years, from age seven to 11, Eric Sutton was probably the most important man in my life, after my father. I certainly saw more of him than my dad, who was often away on business.
Mr Sutton — never Eric, heaven forfend — was there five, sometimes six, days a week.
He had the air of a Regimental Sergeant Major and ran the school with military efficiency — not surprising, really, given that he’d served as an NCO in the Army Education Corps during World War II. He had a piercing parade-ground bark which would halt small boys in their tracks up to 100 yards away.
That said, his bark was worse than his bite. He was a disciplinarian with a fearsome cane on the wall of his study. I can’t remember him ever wielding it in anger. Maybe I’ve simply forgotten. But the prospect was deterrent enough.
If he did have to administer corporal punishment, it would have been in the spirit of the old adage: This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you, boy.
I don’t recall him wearing a mortar board, but he didn’t need any props to convey his natural authority. To my young mind, he was the living embodiment of the headmaster played by Jimmy Edwards in the TV series Whack-O!
Our school day kicked off at 9am, with a break at 10.30am, lunch between noon and 1pm and ‘home time’ at 3.30pm.
Since 1946, every pupil under the age of 18 had been entitled to a third of a pint of free school milk a day. The miniature bottles were delivered every morning and were distributed by ‘milk monitors’ five minutes before the bell rang for
The head was like Jimmy Edwards
in Whack-O!
morning break. Like prison ‘trusties’ who ingratiate themselves with the screws and the prison governor, milk monitors were drawn from the ranks of teachers’ pets and were widely resented and despised by their fellow pupils, since they routinely became teachers’ pets by grassing up their classmates for a variety of misdemeanours.
The main di s advantage of becoming a milk monitor was being on the receiving end of regular roughings- up behind the bike sheds. You won’t be surprised to learn that I was never asked to become a milk monitor.
The idea of handing out free milk was intended to combat calcium deficiency, which had become common among children because of dietary deficiencies caused by wartime rationing.
Had they actually bothered to inspect the scheme in action, they may have concluded i t was a monumental waste of money.
At West Town — and I’ve no reason to think it was any different at other schools — the milk was stacked in crates in the playground. This meant that in winter, it froze, and in summer, it curdled.
Milk t echnology was in its infancy and skimmed and semiskimmed had yet to be invented. Full-fat was flavour of the month, every month. While the thick layer of yellow cream was a treat in the right circumstances — and much prized as a topping on everything from cornflakes to tinned pears — it could quickly turn into toxic waste.
In the winter, it would expand alarmingly, like a stripper’s nipple, popping the silver cap and resisting all attempts to access the milk beneath. In summer, it f ormed a slimy, nauseous bung, which was enough to put even those with a strong constitution off milk for life.
Although Mr Sutt o n was determined to pursue academic excellence, he also held the view that all work and no play made Jack a dull boy. We were herded outside at break-times in all weathers, encouraged to play football and cricket against goalposts and stumps chalked onto a wall.
Eric Sutton would regularly referee these scratch games, occasionally joining in himself to make up the numbers, like the PE master played by Brian Glover in the film Kes.
Cuts and bruises were commonplace on the concrete surface, but we were discouraged from making a fuss. Mr Sutton saw a few battlescars as character-building. Half the time, the first-aid room looked like Emergency Ward 10. Twisted ankles, sprained wrists, scuffed knees, split lips, black eyes, scraped
elbows, the odd fracture. These were all occupational hazards.
Once the nurse had carried out some rudimentary running repairs, it was straight back outside to continue whichever hazardous activity had caused the damage in the first place. Barely a week went by without me limping home from school with a blood- spattered handkerchief wrapped round my leg or a sticking plaster on my forehead. You try slide-tackling on concrete without getting hurt.
According to my mum, I was always in the wars. She should have taken out shares in Elastoplast. But she didn’t blame the school. Boys will be boys. My mother would never have dreamed of s uing t he l ocal education authority for negligence. A few scrapes and the occasional visit to casualty were part of the currency of childhood. I still bear the scar of a conker-related penknife incident on my left knuckle. Whenever Mr Sutton caught anyone fighting in the playground, he would haul the combatants into the gym, make them wear boxing gloves and then slug it out over three two-minute rounds in the ring, in full accordance with the Queensbury Rules. Goodness knows what modern elf ’n’safety would make of primary schoolboys being forced to punch each other’s lights out under the supervision of a teacher.
These days, my old headmaster would probably have found himself up in court on child cruelty charges.
Mr Sutton was a great believer in the virtues of sport and physical education. Our school didn’t have a playing field, so for organised games he’d march us crocodile-style to the local ‘rec’, rain or shine.
In winter, we played football, in summer cricket. Eleven-a-side, too, even at age eight. And with hard cricket balls, not the sponge jobs used today.
After school and on Saturdays, he’d take teams to compete in tournaments. And he expected us to win. Eric Sutton would never settle for second best. Consequently West Town had the best 11-plus pass rate in town. WhEn our 11-plus results were announced, I hadn’t only passed, I’d achieved the second highest marks in the whole city. heaven knows how that happened.
My parents were thrilled, but I was horrified.
The top two 11-plus passes each year were entitled automatically to a scholarship at one of two minor public schools: Oundle and Bishops Stortford. The l ast place on Earth I wanted to be sent was to public school. And a boarding school, to boot. I’d assumed that in the event of my passing the 11-plus, I’d go to my first-choice grammar school, Deacon’s, along with most of my mates.
Everything I knew about public school came from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the 1948 movie The Guinea Pig, starring Richard Attenborough. This was one of those black-and-white films that turned up regularly on TV, on those wet Sundays when The Dam Busters or the Cruel Sea wasn’t being shown for the umpteenth time.
Attenborough plays a tobacconist’s son from Walthamstow who, as part of a social experiment, is given a scholarship to public school where he is subjected to a life of sadistic bullying, fagging and abject misery. Gradually, i n order to survive, he is forced to adapt to this new world of privilege, but when he goes home for the holidays he discovers he no longer has anything in common with his old friends.
I wasn’t exactly a tobacconist’s son from Walthamstow — I was a railwayman’s son from Peterborough — and I’d won my place on merit rather than been handed it as part of some ghastly ‘enlightened’ experiment. But Walthamstow was close enough to Ilford, which I still considered my spiritual home, and I could identify with the Attenborough character.
I had absolutely no intention of suffering the same fate, or being thrashed by some public schoolboy like Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
There ensued an awkward standoff. I was well aware that my parents were hugely proud of their son’s achievement. They’d both l eft school at 15. no one in our family had ever dreamed of going to public school, let alone gone to university, which was the glittering prize that awaited me if I caved i n and accepted a place at Oundle.
All I could see were the petrified faces of Richard Attenborough, in The Guinea Pig, and John howard Davies in the 1951 version of Tom Brown. I tried moral blackmail: if they loved me so much, why the hell did they want to send me away?
Mum and Dad cajoled, bribed, and enlisted the help of Eric Sutton. I was persuaded to look round Oundle and Bishops Stortford schools. Once I’d absorbed the tradition, the