Chapter 8

Upfront and personal

 Caroline Taylor never did return and take up her duties as 5V’s form tutor, and so I got lumbered with doing the job for the entire year. And if that had necessitated only that I sit and suffer their company in the morning and afternoon registration periods, I could easily have inured to the imposition. Unfortunately, however, the job also demanded that I lead this motley crew of adolescents in sessions that were laughingly timetabled as “Personal Development”, wherein, for seventy long minutes each and every Friday morning, I was required to lead them in discussions on topics ranging from “the multicultural society” and “further education”, through “healthy living” and “personal relationships” to “money management” and careers.

I was sufficiently mature enough to recognise that it was eminently sensible, of course, to include such discussions in their timetable, but I did question the wisdom of having untrained idiots like me running the sessions.

I and all the other fifth-form tutors were given a bullet-pointed list of the various sub-topics that we needed to cover in our discussions but we were provided with absolutely no guidance as to how to actually run the sessions. So, for better or worse, I just made it up as I went along.

This approach worked tolerably well for our discussions around further education because I was competent enough to give a broad brush picture of the landscape spanning sixth form ‘A’-level studies and BTEC qualifications, and felt equally comfortable in answering questions on apprenticeships, universities and polytechnics. The same free-wheeling approach, however, was altogether less successful for the sessions covering personal relationships. In these sessions I was acutely aware that as a non-Catholic teaching in a Catholic comprehensive, I needed to tread very carefully, not just when dealing with the matters of sex, marriage, and contraception, but also when navigating the minefields of divorce and abortion. On top of which, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that our  “discussions” might stray to oral sex, homosexuality, and prostitution.

Helen Fielding, Head of Chemistry, reckoned that I ought to feel flattered that they felt comfortable in talking and asking questions about such things with me, but I was none too convinced. It seemed to me that they – and in particular the girls – were minded more to my discomfort than comfort, and especially so in the case of Sandra Connelly, who, at various times, fielded queries of “have you ever ’ad it with a prozzy, sir?”, “what’s cunnilingus?”, and “is it okay if you swallow it?”.

I suffered similar embarrassing questions, of course, in my human biology lessons when dealing with the human reproductive system, and I very quickly learned to have my diagrams of the relevant male and female anatomies already drawn-up on the blackboard before the classes came into the lab. That way, I didn’t have to have my back turned to the class while describing the functions of the various parts, and there was no worry over getting giggles and smart-arse comments as the result of them seeing me draw things too big, too small, or a funny shape.

And at my head of department’s advice, I also managed to avoid a lot of the silliness caused through their deliberately exaggerated renderings and poor artwork by issuing the classes with printed handouts showing diagrams of the male and female anatomies, so that they then only had to label them and stick the sheets into their exercise books. With some classes, however, there was invariably still a good deal of childish behaviour. Sharon Mackenzie thought it hilarious to draw a cartoon face and a top-knot of curly hair on her ovaries, while Ronald  Jones persuaded all boys in his class to turn their diagram of the male genitalia anticlockwise through ninety degrees so that the penis then appeared erect, and they then added a jet of seminal fluid spurting from the end, along with some pubic hair to decorate the testicles.

In the staff room after the class, I bemoaned the boys’ immature behaviour, expressing a wish that they would “just bloody well grow up a bit”, to which Vera Sinclair noted, “Boys don’t ever really grow up, Sheridan. Not in their school years. They just get bigger and hairier and develop an unpleasant body odour.”

Thankfully, when it came to discussing menstruation, conception, pregnancy, and birth (masturbation, thankfully, was not included on the syllabus), I was able to use a 35 mm cine film made freely available for secondary school use by the local area health authority. By this means, I was able to avoid a lot of tricky descriptions, hand waving, and other unseemly gestures, but the film nevertheless did have some elements of the reproductive process that were conspicuous by their absence, most notably, the mechanics of the sex act.

The protagonists in the film – or so we were led to believe by the silken-toned voiceover man – were called Sven and Ingrid. They were in their mid-twenties, quite athletic-looking, blonde-haired, and did a lot of white twinkly smiling.

The film opened with a rather cursory coverage of the couple’s courtship. We saw them in intimate conversation, holding hands, dancing together, and later kissing. There was then some innocent horseplay in and around the sand dunes down at the seaside somewhere, and this culminated in the bikini-clad Ingrid lying down on her beach towel and Sven getting down to lie close up beside her. After a bit more kissing and Sven looking adoringly into Ingrid’s eyes while he stroked her hair, the voice-over man started wittering on about mutual respect and love. As he did so, the camera panned away to show the rolling surf set against an idyllic sunset. There was no mention of precautionary suncream or sand getting into places you wouldn’t want it to, and before we knew it, the film crew were in the maternity ward with Ingrid freshly arrived and now in labour.

We did, in between times, get shown an animated sequence of some sperm that seemed to have spontaneously appeared in a diagrammatic representation of Ingrid’s vagina. This was followed by one of her cartoon eggs subsequently getting fertilised and implanting, and the resulting embryo then growing in her womb. But there was not even a passing mention of Ingrid worrying over her missed period, nor of her throwing up every morning on her way into work, or of Sven getting the rough end of her tongue because he'd laughed when she’d suddenly sneezed and wet her knickers in the frozen foods aisle at Sainsbury’s.

When it came to the birth scene, however, the filmmakers showed no reticence whatsoever, with the cameraman giving us full view of the events unfolding between Ingrid’s splayed legs.

And as they did so, you could honestly have heard a pin drop in the room.

Throughout these final scenes, every one of the girls watched with an intense concentration, their faces ash white and betraying universal consternation, many of them, I suspect, re-assessing their desire to marry and start a family of their own.

The boys in the class, of course, were initially titillated by the close-up view of Ingrid’s nether regions and did a lot of nudging and winking at one another, but their facial expressions morphed smartly in favour of revulsion when Ingrid’s vaginal canal was stretched to four times its normal diameter and her baby’s slimy Vernix-covered head appeared.

And although I never mentioned anything to any of the classes on the numerous occasions when I showed this film, it did always puzzle me as to what drugs they’d pumped into Ingrid, because they’d clearly pumped her full of something. For most of the birth, the worst you might have inferred from her body movements and facial expression was that she was suffering a bit of minor discomfort. She barely seemed to break a sweat, never clawed or clutched the bedsheet and did very little in the way of growling or writhing about as the contractions came and went. It was only at the final push that she let out a blood-curdling scream.

*

Setting aside the personal relationships sessions of my personal development classes, the only other ones that have stayed in my memory – and for quite different reasons – were those that were devoted to careers.

For these sessions, we were provided with glossy little booklets that were illustrated with lots of colour photographs, outlining the qualifications and training that were required to enter the various medical professions, or to become an accountant, teacher or lawyer. The booklets also presented a catalogue of various manual trades ranging from bricklayer to plumber to electrician for the boys, and shorthand typist, secretary, and librarian for the girls.  There were brief details too on the fire service, police, and armed forces.

These teaching aids, such as they were, were provided by the school’s careers officer – a man that the staff had long since christened the Scarlet Pimpernel, on account of the fact that he was so rarely in the school and impossible to track down even when he was.  In the entire time that I worked at St. Wilfrid’s, I don’t think I ever set eyes on the man, and I certainly never discovered his real name.

Through a show of hands prompted by me, I discovered that around a third of 5V wanted to go on to the sixth form and do ‘A’-levels, although quite a few of those that raised their arm admitted that they had no clear idea as to which subjects they wanted to study, and fewer still had any notion of what they might do if and when they’d got them. All of these individuals confessed that it was their parents that had set the ambition of them doing ‘A’-levels. The majority of the form appeared neck-deep in apathy.

“Let’s come at this the other way round then,” I said. “Put your hand up if you know what you’d like to do for a job when you leave here.”

And in response, I got just three waving arms.

“I’m gunna work with my dad an’ do plummin,’” Danny Wright volunteered. “Good money in that. An’ you don’t ’av to pay any tax either. Not when you work for yourself.”

“No, that’s not right,” I informed him. “Everybody who works needs to pay income tax – and National Insurance, as well.”

“No, you don’t. My dad says so. An’ he should know,” he replied, and his angled chin and steely look made clear his opinion that his father’s knowledge of the financial side of plumbing carried a good deal more weight than my own.

“Well, perhaps your father has special circumstances,” I half-conceded; and by unspoken mutual consent we let the matter rest at that. 

I then exchanged a few brief words with the owners of the other two arms that were raised, one of them attached to David Green and the other to Peter Dunn. Their two fathers had seemingly promised their respective mothers to “have a word with Morris” (whoever he was) and thereby “get them sorted” with a job on the track at the Austin Rover works.

“Don’t need no qualifications for that,” David Green informed us. “You just need to know about spanners.”

“Takes one to know one,” Stefan Dziemidowicz said, and the other boys all thought that hilarious.

After I’d quelled the ensuing back-and-forth insults, Sandra Bryne piped up and asked me what ‘A’-levels I’d studied when I was at school. I was happy to answer, and it was my willingness to do so, I suspect, that then prompted Shirley Allyson to follow up with queries about my time spent as a student at university.

When the bell rang to signal the start of the mid-morning break, I dismissed the class and took back the careers booklets as they filed out. Sandra and Shirley, however, hung back until the others had all gone. They helped me then to pack the careers booklets back into the boxes they had been distributed in and, while doing so, Shirley asked if she and Sandra could come and see me some time to talk about them doing nursing.  She delivered the question in a casual and off-hand manner, almost as an aside, but the two girls left the room visibly happy that I agreed to do so.

And later that day, when I was mounting the stairs on my return to the form room for the afternoon registration, I was met on the half-landing by Marek Wyszynski. As he walked alongside me for the last two flights, he told me that he had an after school detention with Mr King and asked if I’d still be around in school after 4 o’clock, and could he have a talk with me then in my lab. I said certainly he could and asked what he wanted to talk about.

“Tell you when I see you,” he said, and then raced ahead.

*

As it got near to four o’clock I started to wonder if my meeting with Marek when alone in my lab was such a smart thing to do – given that he’d been expelled from his previous school for assaulting members of staff. Thankfully though, my worrying proved unwarranted.

He arrived to the lab at ten past four and was nervously smiling.

“Everybody reckons I’m a real hard case – ’cos of what happened where I was before,” he said. “And I already get a load of crap because of that, so there was no way was I going to talk about it in PD and get a load more grief. Fact is though that I really want to be a ladies hairdresser and I’d love one day to be able to open my own salon.”

I was flabbergasted beyond belief (and partly because he’d used the word salon) but also massively flattered that he’d felt comfortable in sharing his hopes and ambitions with me.

I explained that I’d hadn’t got a clue as to how he should go about training as a hairdresser, but I promised that I’d do my best to find out and get back him.

We agreed to meet up again once I had information to share. 

*

On the Monday of the following week, Sandra and Shirley followed up on their request for a chat. They came to the staff room at the start of the lunch hour and asked if they could see me in my lab after they’d had their lunch.

When they came to the lab later, they had two other girls in tow, one of whom was Sharon MacKenzie.

“Okay, so there are two routes into nursing,” I explained. “And in both cases, you ideally need ‘O’-levels. You need three to be a state-registered nurse, and you then do three years training, and you need two and do two years’ training to become a state-enrolled nurse.”

“Yeh, that’s what my auntie told me,” Sharon said. “Problem is though that we’re all doing CSEs.”

“That’s not a problem, as such,” I said. “CSE grade one is the same as a grade C at ‘O’-level, so you just need to work hard and try for grade ones.”

“Well, yeh, that’s what they say, I know, but that’s just crap,” Shirley said. “If there’s me with grade ones and some girl with ‘O’-levels up for a job, they’ll obviously go with her, not me. Stands to reason.”

“So, can we change and do the ‘O’-level Biology exam instead of CSE?” Sandra asked. “We know that’d mean we’d have to do more work, but can you fix it for us have a go, sir?”

“I’m afraid not,” I replied. “You see, the school only runs ‘O’-level exams in general biology, not human biology, so you wouldn’t know any of the stuff you’d need to know about plants and animals.”

And all four girls then put on sad eyes and Sharon gave her sweetest smile.

“Couldn’t you have a word and sort it so we did ‘O’-level Human Biology instead then, sir?” she asked – the added “sir” being quite a novelty for her – and I said that I couldn’t promise anything but agreed to speak to Janet McGinty.