Chapter 6

The animals went in two-by-two, some with scales, some with fur, and some in school uniform

Spurred, I think, by the pupils’ obvious enthusiasm for all forms of animal life, and in particular by the enthusiasm shown by Thumper and his mates who came religiously to Lab 6 in their lunch hours to assist me in cleaning up the Barbary sheep’s head that he’d brought in, I spent several early evenings and Saturdays over the next few weeks endeavouring to transform the lab from science wasteland to science wonderland.

I sanded away the various obscenities carved into the windowsills and bench tops, and I overhauled the contents of the under-bench cupboards, clearing out the accumulated sweet wrappers, crayons, and broken biros, and relegating to the caretaker’s glory hole a whole load of physics equipment that looked like it was last used by the young Isaac Newton.

I slapped brilliant white emulsion on the walls, constructed white glossed chipboard wall cupboards, and mounted colourful A0 Public Health Department posters that educated on the dangers of cigarette smoking, the habits and treatment of head lice, the life cycle of the house fly, and ringworm. (I was also offered a poster about gonorrhoea and one on syphilis but, given the lurid nature of their illustrations, and in the interests of my continued employment, I elected to give those a miss.)

From home, I brought in my four-foot aquarium replete with guppies, gouramies, angel fish and convict cichlids, and I treated myself to two smaller tanks and bought a start-up shoal of two piranhas, and a Siamese fighting fish. As a gift from my head of department, I installed locusts and stick insects (which were alive when I got them, I think), an axolotl, that the girls in 3P christened Geoffrey (because of his eyes, apparently), a newt, that the girls christened, Simon (on account of his spots), and a pair of sex-mad gerbils, that they named Slap and Tickle. In the half-term week, when my parents invested in a new fitted kitchen, I completed the menagerie, converting our old under-sink unit into a two-storey bird cage, and kitting it out with a pair of zebra finches.

With my allocation of the school’s book budget, I purchased half-sets of general and human biology texts, and from the science equipment budget, I got the basic lab necessities of test tubes, conical flasks, beakers, and Bunsen burners, together with class sets of colour blindness test cards, blood grouping kits, and dissection equipment.

*

When the male contingent of 5X and I had completed our lunchtime labours in cleaning the rotting flesh and coagulated blood from the Barbary sheep’s head, we put the finished skull – which was then impressively white and looked like a prop for a Vincent Price movie – in pride of place on the window-side corner of my front demonstration bench. I periodically flicked a duster over it because the woman who cleaned my lab wouldn’t go within six foot of it.

Melanie Hancock, who was Thumper’s girl-friend – as distinct from his girlfriend, as she always made clear – wrote out a label for the new exhibit. I was obliged to call on her rather than Thumper to do this because she had the neater handwriting, plus she could spell.

Michael appreciated his limitations and was perfectly happy with this arrangement. He provided the content and Melanie did the writing. She practised first on the back page of her exercise book so as to get the spacing right.

The finished label read ‘Skull of a male Barbary sheep. These sheep live in the mountains in North Africa. A fully grown sheep is about 2-foot tall and 4-foot long. Their horns curl backwards and can grow to thirty-inches. They mostly eat grass. In the wild they are eaten by Barbary leopards and lions. Skull donated by Michael Lafferty, 5X, September 1975’.

I let Thumper use the laminating machine to save the label from getting dirty and wet. He was delighted with the skull, and delighted too to have it exhibited, and he was positively ecstatic when I let him do the lamination. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he remembers me in his will.

*

Suffice to say then that by the time we got into the second half-term, what with the lab looking better and my pupils – well, some of them, at any rate – more engaged with my biology and general science lessons, I flattered myself that I was starting to get on top of things. I can’t honestly say that I was truly happy in teaching nor that I was any good at it, but I no longer dreaded going to work in the morning, and I was starting to sleep better at night.

One of the things though that I didn’t bargain on was the sheer body-draining nature of the job that came as a consequence of spending each and every day in a constant state of high alert.

At the end of almost every lesson, certainly in my first term, and certainly following a first- or second-year class, I really could have done with a good stiff drink and a lie-down. There was no opportunity provided for such recuperation, of course, because as soon as you’d bade a fond farewell and good riddance to one satanic horde, you were contractually obliged to welcome in another. The individual classes had their own unique set of miscreants and misfits, each exhibiting subtly different bad behaviours and malpractices, but all of them seemed to share the common intent to test my patience and sanity.

The first-year classes were by far the worst.

In 1975, I was charged with providing a General Science education to 1P. They came to me last two periods on a Tuesday, having just suffered a soul-destroying hour in RE with the headmaster. They fairly ran up the stairs to my laboratory, all of them desperately wanting to be at the front of the queue outside my door. And when I opened the door to let them in, the ensuing crush was reminiscent of the Boxing Day sales at Harrods.

Even when they’d spilled through the doorway and into the lab, the little darlings scurried here, there, and everywhere, exercising a frenetic and mischievous curiosity that was exhausting just to watch. They took interesting-looking texts down from the bookshelves and flicked through to find the pictures of human naughty bits, they dismantled the various anatomical models of the heart, and eye and ear that I had displayed, and they jostled in front of the wire netting and glass panels of the cages and aquaria where I kept the zebra finches and locusts, Polly and Percy piranhas, and Simon the spotted newt. It generally took me a good five minutes just to get them all sat down and ready for the lesson.

Being new and enthusiastic, I always arranged that they carried out some form of simple experiment and they clearly loved this opportunity. They were especially animated when the experiment involved use of a Bunsen burner. Nowadays, of course, it’s considered much too dangerous to have hyperactive eleven-year-olds let loose in a room full of naked flames but back in the day it was all part and parcel of teaching science.

In a lesson when all they had to do was heat some water and measure its boiling point in the presence and absence of table salt, I spent much of the lesson darting from one group to another trying to stop them from setting pencils and rulers alight, collecting up mercury and glass from broken thermometers, and dealing with exercise books made soggy by boiling water.

Little Jimmy Finnegan and his mate Tommy Riley were the biggest pains in the class, and I still hold to the view that their mothers should have strangled the pair of them at birth. Tommy was the quieter of the two but weird beyond belief. He had a habit of collecting dead flies from windowsills and keeping them in a Swan Vesta match box in his pocket. Over the course of each day, he would then retrieve them from the box and present them as a surprise to one of his classmates, sometimes stuffing the deceased insects down some poor girl’s blouse, sometimes lobbing one into the mouth of someone yawning, sometimes casually tossing a few onto someone’s dinner plate at lunchtime. It was only by virtue of him being joined at the hip to Jimmy Finnegan that Tommy avoided violent retribution.

Jimmy was a sadistic little sod and borderline psychotic. He was forever on the move, rarely in the same spot for more than thirty seconds, and he had a total disregard for the health and well-being of others. In the boiling salt-water lesson, he sought to sneak up behind Mary Collinson and set her pigtails alight.

Fortunately for Mary, I caught sight of Jimmy soon enough and was quick to realise his intentions. I was thus able to execute a timely intervention so that she suffered only a minor singeing of the splayed ends of hair at the end of her plaits.

In other surroundings and other circumstances, I would cheerfully then have knocked young Jimmy into the middle of the next week but given that the little shit was only half my size and the fact that I was supposed to be the responsible adult in the room, I contented myself just with giving him an after-school detention and a clip round the ear to be going on with.

*

Maintaining discipline was by far and away my biggest problem when I started, and the various ways that I initially employed to deal with disruptive individuals proved singularly unsuccessful. Standing a naughty child in a corner might prove a workable solution when dealing with primary school kids, but it sure as hell doesn’t work when they hit puberty. And you immediately come to difficulties, of course, if there’s a group of them misbehaving because you’re necessarily limited by the number of corners available.

And getting a miscreant to stand outside the classroom or sending them across to see their year head, simply meant that the offending individuals collected their belongings from one of their friends later in the day and went AWOL undetected.

‘There’s absolutely no point in deferring punishment till later or in referring the problem to someone else to deal with,’ I was told. ‘You have to deal with troublemakers there and then. And school rules or no school rules, how you punish them is entirely up to you. What goes down in the classroom generally stays in the classroom, providing you don’t take things to excess.’

These were the words of wisdom imparted to me by my unofficial mentor, Vera Sinclair.