Chapter 5

Thumper, a dead sheep, and Mickey Flint

I spent the weekend contemplating whether or not I should quit and eventually decided it was too soon to make that decision.

As I drove into the school on the Monday morning though I felt no more at ease and no better equipped to deal with things than I had on my first Friday. Admittedly, the day started well enough, with my O-level fourth-years studiously copying my labelled diagram of the human heart from the board, and then taking turns to use the stethoscope and sphygmomanometer to measure each other’s pulse and blood pressure. The class were wondrously attentive and clearly enjoyed the practical exercise, albeit that their efforts seemed to indicate that Andrew Carr’s heart would soon explode, and that Patsy Harding was already dead.

In the mid-morning break, I excitedly shared news of my brief success with Patrick Duncan, my head of department. After enjoying a refreshing cup of sweetened sludge that masqueraded as coffee, I returned to Lab 6 for my first encounter with 5X.

In present times such a class would be branded as ‘special needs’, with each child given a four- or five-letter label to make clear their particular disability. Back in 1975, however, 5X were labelled simply as ‘the remedials’.

They were a half-sized class of fifteen-year-olds who were deemed too illiterate, too slow-witted, and too frequently absent from school even to be considered for entry to CSE. They were housed in a single-storey prefabricated building tucked behind the music room, and for every year that they’d been in the school, this served not only as their form room but also as their classroom for all lessons save for handicrafts, sports, and science.

Only a handful of them ever wore a full complement of school uniform and there were fewer still who came to lessons with a pen. ‘Don’t waste your time trying to teach them, darling,’ Clara Bishop, the History woman, told me. ‘Just do your best to keep the little sods entertained.’

For the most part though I found that the little sods proved not to be little sods at all, although they did have the attention span of two-year-olds, and their skills in numeracy barely extended beyond counting on their fingers (and, in some cases, toes). There were five of them that had a below-average but serviceable reading age and the remaining ten would have struggled with the Beano. They hated writing and were none too keen on mental activity, but they were very friendly, loved to chatter, and had curiosities that put our cat to shame.

As Clara Bishop also informed me, however, they had a well-founded reputation for causing serious mischief when they were outside the classroom. On one famous occasion in the previous academic year, she said, the boys in the class had apparently sneaked away after a Monday morning assembly and had secreted themselves inside the enormous refuse bins that were kept at the back of the refectory. And when the refuse collectors came later that morning to collect the refuse, the boys sprang up from their hiding places and for a full ten minutes pelted the bin men with empty catering tins, wet cardboard boxes, and rotting vegetables. The bin men had initially been foolhardy enough to attempt retaliation but under 5X’s superior firepower they became so badly bruised, and so seriously soiled that they were eventually forced to a humiliating retreat.

‘I was a bit late in that day because I’d had a hospital appointment,’ Clara said, ‘and I arrived just as it all kicked off. There was no way I was going to try and intercede, of course: I’m not that stupid. I kept well out of sight and just watched from the bottom of Oak Road. It was absolutely hilarious to watch and utterly disgusting at the same time. I saw one poor chap stopped in his tracks when he got what looked like a carrot in the eye, and it honestly crossed my mind later to immortalize the conflict by sewing a tapestry. In the end though, I couldn’t be arsed.’

Officials from the council were sent to investigate, Clara concluded, and the school was presented with a hefty dry-cleaning bill and threatened with special measures in the event of a repeat.

The mouthpiece and primary mischief-maker in the class was a chirpy wild-haired individual who was just shy of six foot and built like the proverbial outside toilet. For reasons I deemed it wise not to determine, his classmates called him Thumper, but his given name was Michael Lafferty. He was as Irish as they come.

In my first lesson with the class, I gave out a pictorial safety-in-the-home handout provided by my head of department and got them to identify the many (glaringly obvious) health and safety issues depicted. That served only to occupy them for the first twenty minutes or so, however, and I had nothing in reserve to give them by way of supplement. In a part of this otherwise fallow period, one of the girls regaled us with a safety-themed anecdote about her baby brother who’d swallowed and nearly choked to death on a marble, and another girl followed up with a story about her sister who’d yanked the wires from a table-lamp and subsequently proceeded to electrocute the budgie.

Michael Lafferty then took up the reins and occupied the remaining time delivering an entirely irrelevant but impressively instructional talk on the habits of lions kept in captivity.

On Saturdays, he told me, he worked as an assistant to one of the keepers at the local zoo, spending most of his time shovelling various shapes and shades of shit into buckets but occasionally being allowed to lend a hand with the feeding.

Without giving proper thought to the matter, the lesson ended with me agreeing for Michael to bring in the half-eaten head of a Barbary sheep that he’d removed after their resident lion, Samson, had had his fill. The plan was for me to work with the class, to strip the head of its remaining flesh, to clean up the skull, and thereby gain an impressive exhibit to display in the lab.

*

At the end of the day, after a disastrous afternoon spent first with a sullen set of CSE fourth-years doing the digestive system, and then with 2C doing elements, compounds, and mixtures, I was summoned to see the Headmaster, Bill Turnbull.

When his secretary escorted me through to his office, he was just finishing on the telephone. He agreed to see whoever he was speaking to at 4.30 pm, returned the handset to its cradle, and switched his attention to me. ‘Take a seat, Wilde, take a seat,’ he said, and he gestured for me to take the rather rickety straight-backed chair that was positioned across the desk from his plush, black leather wingback affair.

‘Mickey Flint,’ he said, and when I simply smiled and made no comment, he tapped his biro on the desk and continued. ‘He’s the boy whose annual habit has been to set the fire alarm on our first day back, and he’s the one we suspect of setting the alarm last Friday.’

He paused and I nodded, and he smiled again and carried on.

‘At the moment, however, it would appear that the lad has an alibi in the shape of Miss Fraser, who – at around about the time the alarm went off – caught him with a red felt tip pen providing some obscene additions to the Madonna and child outside the chapel.’

I began to wonder where our conversation was heading.

‘Anyway,’ the headmaster continued, ‘I’m digressing,’ and he made rapid staccato taps of his biro on the desk to signal the move to business. ‘The point is that it was young Master Flint that you crossed swords with on the No. 42 last week.’

‘Ah,’ I said – favouring a neutral and non-committal brevity.

‘Yes,’ the head continued, ‘and unfortunately your little contretemps did not end as well as you perhaps thought it did at the time.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ he said, and then, pretty much as an afterthought added, ‘But there’s no need for you to worry at all,’ and I immediately began to worry. He proceeded to elaborate.

‘It transpires that our Mickey was involved in some sort of accident riding his pushbike early last week, as the result of which he suffered a serious head injury and had seven stitches put in.’

‘Oh,’ I said again.

‘His head wound was apparently knitting quite nicely, so his mother told me, but then it was rudely re-opened as a result of you yanking him by the hair off poor Sally Milton. All seven stitches were ripped apart and he and his mother spent the best part of Friday night in A&E. Understandably, she wasn’t best pleased, and she was in here first thing this morning to complain’.

I stared and struggled to think what to say. At the very least, I expected to be told to collect my P45 from the office on my way out, and it also seemed possible that I might face a charge of assaulting a minor. But then I remembered the head’s earlier assurance that I had no need to worry.’

‘So … what will happen now then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, not a lot,’ he replied. ‘I think Mrs. Flint was just chancing her arm. Probably hoping that I might be daft enough to offer a back-hander to keep her quiet. Anyway, I had no such inclination and I made it very clear that I held her son largely responsible for his own fate. She knows full well that I’ve had enough complaints about him from the bus company over the years - and from the fire brigade too, come to that - and I reminded her that when last we spoke about her son, I told her that, if his bad behaviour persisted, I’d have no option but to expel him. That put her completely on the back foot and she left with a promise that she’d ensure Mickey would be good as gold in the future. She says that every time, of course, so I’m not holding my breath.’

*

In the car driving home, I reflected on the head’s final words.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just remember that discipline comes from gaining their respect and that their childish arguments and altercations are best quelled by verbal and not physical intervention.’

And as I stood to leave, he added: ‘But if words don’t work, of course …’ and he smiled and shrugged his shoulders, left the sentence unfinished, and lifted the telephone.