Chapter 1

First periods

I stood in the doorway of Lab 6 with my red pen and register ready for action. It was 10.25 am on Friday 5th September 1975 and I was nervously waiting to deliver my very first lesson on my first day of teaching.

I’d thankfully been spared the job of form tutor and so in the first two periods when all pupils had had their timetables dictated, I’d spent the one and a half hours up until the end of mid-morning break, pacing the length of my laboratory and checking the clock every few minutes. All my class-lists for the day were set alongside the textbooks and exercise books that I’d arranged in neat little piles spaced six inches apart across my demonstration bench. I had a newly black-painted blackboard, two yet-to-be-blooded board dusters, and a box of coloured chalks. I was twenty-one years old, fresh from university, with long hair, blue-tinted wire-framed glasses, and a snazzy electric-blue sports jacket that my mum got me from Man at C&A.

Even if I’d been tied to a stake and wearing a white woolly jumper, I could not have looked more like a sacrificial lamb waiting for slaughter.

The UK comprehensive school system had for quite some time been floundering for want of maths and science teachers and the Department of Education had lately lowered the bar and decreed that vacant posts in these areas could, if necessary, be filled by individuals qualified only with a relevant B.Sc. And it had thus come to pass that I had been employed to teach biology in a Catholic comprehensive in the West Midlands.

At interview, they didn’t ask me anything about biology, and nothing about science at all in fact, instead just focussing on wishy-washy education stuff that I knew next to nothing about.

As you might imagine, therefore, this was not my finest hour.

They asked me what approach I would take in providing sex education to teenagers, and I stupidly asked why I would be required to do that.

‘Well, as you may recall,’ the Head of Department replied helpfully, ‘it’s on the JMB syllabus for CSE Human Biology.’

I recovered my wits sufficient to give them a half-decent if belated answer, until, that is, it came to the matter of contraception. The Deputy Headmistress, Miss Janet McGinty, a woman in her late thirties who looked to be a bit on the frosty side, asked me, ‘What will you do about contraception?’ And it did briefly cross my mind to come back at her with, ‘Good grief woman, we’ve only just met,’ but instead – and remembering that I was at interview for a job in a Catholic school – I firmly declared that I would obviously make no reference to this subject. Miss McGinty then explained that the Catholic Church was not against all forms of contraception, merely against the use of the cap, the condom, and the pill. The ensuing puzzled look on my face prompted her to go on to say, ‘The Church has no objection to married couples using the rhythm method.’

I gave an amused and derisive little snort but straightened my face smartly when I saw the look on hers.

And despite these cock-ups and the fact that I had no teaching qualification and not one iota of teaching experience, the panel offered me the job. They were clearly in desperate straits and considered it better to have me rather than nobody. By the end of the second week of term though, I think we’d all come to the view that they might well have been better off with nobody.

But this was day one and I was waiting to receive my first class – a class which rather ironically comprised a bunch of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who were riddled with rampant hormones and coming to me for CSE Human Biology.

Sharon Mackenzie and her mate Tracey Watkins were the first to arrive. They clattered through the doorway in their high-heel shoes, with their blouses fit to burst, and their skirts made shorter by folds at the waistband. They smiled at me ever so sweetly and asked if they could sit where they liked. I was stupidly naïve and so said ‘Yes, of course’, and all too predictably the two girls then went straight down to the very back of the lab and sat at the low table behind the last bench.

I waited another five minutes for the rest of the class to arrive but received only a further two. One of the two was a rather stout and round-faced boy with a very severe haircut and chronic acne; the other was a skinny little curly-haired girl who was partially deaf and dyslexic and clearly lived in a world of her own. The boy was Adam Priestley, and the girl was Donna Mackay.

Adam was a smarmy and sycophantic little worm and thus sat himself at the bench nearest to me and nearest the blackboard. Donna, on the other hand, was more of your merge-into-the-background sort, and secreted herself unobtrusively to one side, on the bench that ran along by the window. While Adam then busily set-to to arrange his Parker pen, propelling pencil, rubber, and assorted felt-tips across the bench, Donna just sat and picked her nose and stared blankly out of the window at the cars parked in the staff car park below.

I walked down to the back of the room intending to invite Sharon and Tracey to come and sit alongside Adam at the front. When I was halfway towards them Sharon whispered something to Tracey and moved to sit sideways on. She lifted her bum a little, hitched her skirt further up, and then raised one foot onto the foot bar of the adjacent stool, in the process spreading her legs wide so as to reveal an expanse of her upper thigh and her gusset. The nearer I got, the wider she spread her legs, and the more desperate I became to ensure that my eyes did not stray to look at her crotch.

When I was a yard or so in front of her, I opened my mouth to speak but Tracey beat me to it.

‘Sharon says she fancies you, sir,’ she said. ‘D’you fancy ’er?’

And Sharon looked up at me, twirled a strand of her long auburn hair around her forefinger, and sucked in a very suggestive manner on her mascara pen.

I was at a complete loss as to what to say, and there was such a heat developed in my cheeks that I feared I might spontaneously combust.

‘I know I said you could sit where you liked,’ I managed to say eventually, ‘but there’s only the four of you here so can you just go and sit with Adam at the front, please.’

‘I’m not sitting next to that poxy-faced creep,’ Sharon said. ‘He fiddles with himself all the while!’

‘An’ I don’t wanna go near ’im neither,’ said Tracey. ‘We might bloody catch something,’ she added.

‘Well, okay,’ I said, ‘There’s no need to swear. Just go and sit yourselves at the second bench then.’

And to my utter amazement, they did as I asked, albeit very slowly and with some very unladylike opinions delivered under their breath as they went.

I took up position at the blackboard and the moment my back was turned I heard a plaintive cry from young Master Priestley. ‘Sharon Mackenzie just threw this at me, sir’ he whimpered with disgust.

And when I turned back round to look, I saw that he was holding aloft a Lil-Lets tampon. He was gingerly holding the tab of the retrieval cord between his thumb and forefinger so that the tampon swung to and fro. Thankfully, the tampon had not yet seen service, but from the look on the boy’s face, you’d have thought he had a long-dead, maggot-infested mouse by the tail.

‘Bet you don’t even know what that is,’ challenged Tracey Watkins.

And working on the assumption that her remark had been directed to Adam and not to me, I passed no comment. I stepped down from the front platform, took the tampon from Adam, and tossed it onto the bench in front of Sharon.

‘Put that away again, please, and just settle down,’ I said rather pathetically.

For some reason, I then looked over in Donna’s direction and saw that she was now gazing at the far wall and smiling, kicking her legs out and back like a small child playing on a swing. There was absolutely nothing to look at on the far wall except flaking magnolia paintwork, so it was anybody’s guess what she was seeing and thinking.

‘Right!’ I said emphatically to no one in particular, and then gave a perfectly pointless hand clap and returned to the front platform.

And although teaching a subset of four when there was supposed to be a class of thirty-two seemed a complete waste of everybody’s time, I didn’t have the confidence to improvise and saw no option but to deliver the lesson I’d planned on the workings of the human eye. My intention in this was not met with any great enthusiasm but as I began to chalk a diagram of the eye on the board, we were all mercifully saved further torment and misery by the ringing of the fire alarm bell.

Taking instruction from Sharon, I escorted my little band of four down the staircase and out onto the back playground, and I then promptly lost them in the crowd. I confess, I found the assembled congregation of scruffily uniformed bodies really quite scary, and I shuffled about self-consciously thinking that they were all undoubtedly sizing me up and planning how best to break my spirit – and possibly my legs.

A big chap in a chalk-covered jacket and loose-fitting trousers with turn-ups then came across to introduce himself. ‘Hi, I’m Neville Roberts,’ he said, making a half-hearted attempt to tuck his shirt in properly. ‘I’m head of maths. You must be the new bloke they got to replace windy Wendy.’

Wendy, I later learned, had been a timid little thing fresh from teacher training college and had not survived her first year. I introduced myself and asked why no one seemed to be doing anything about the fire.

‘Oh, there’s no fire,’ Neville explained. ‘This is all down to that little twat, Mickey Flint. He always does it. Every bloody year since he’s been here. Gets himself excused to go to the toilet and then sets off the nearest ruddy fire alarm. There’ll be hell to pay when the fire brigade gets here. There always is.’

And sure enough, five minutes later, the fire brigade did arrive, and the Head and Deputy Heads exchanged words with the senior fire officer; Hades was duly recompensed, just as Neville had foretold, and each of the school managers returned to the playground wearing a face like a smacked arse.

Somebody blew a whistle and we all then trooped back inside again but by that time my CSE human biology lesson was over and in my next period I was timetabled to teach a class of third years.

There was only one of that lot that turned up though, so I saved my lesson on herbivores and carnivores for the following week. The attending third-year girl and I just whiled away the half-hour till lunchtime pleasantly chatting about brain freeze, bed bugs, head lice, and cat fleas.

Why on earth the Head and governors insisted on every school year starting on the first Friday in September when a good sixty to seventy percent of the kids didn’t bother to show up until the following Monday remained a complete mystery to me for the whole time that I worked there.

And an altogether bigger mystery was presented in the shape of Brendan Leahy, the economics teacher who hailed from Donegal and who was kind enough to call to my lab and take me to the canteen that first lunchtime.