Illtyd Harrington: Recall – bid time return and it’s back to school

Published: 1 September, 2011
ILLTYD HARRINGTON: AS I PLEASE

JAQUES’ speech in As You Like It sets out in the second stage my vision of all boys going to a new school.

“Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school."

Now back to school is a commercial slogan for cheap clothes. Almost 60 years ago I went with a spring in my step down the Brixton High Road and presented myself a fresh-faced, newly qualified, teacher to the headmaster of the Hackford Road Boys Secondary School.

My employers, the London County Council had recruited me and a dozen other Welshmen only after we were scrutinised by two visiting inspectors: to be an LCC teacher was a privilege.

The school was staffed by men who had served in war. They wore suits and ties, cardigans in the winter.

Most of the boys respected them and their authority although a handful of them enforced it by savage use of the cane. These generally came from the religious education department.

They were the best beaters, although I did reenact Nicholas Nickleby one day by tearing the cane off one of them who was setting about a boy’s face. To them school was a treadmill.

No one bothered to explain to me the history or the background of the pupils or indeed the school’s hinterland.

I gradually found out that Brixton was the last area that variety artists lived as the music hall gave way to the television.

Many of the boys in their parents’ absence were looked after by their nans. Few noticed that the fading plaque on the house opposite said that Van Gogh had lived there.

Ken Livingstone’s mother was a variety dancer and one day I introduced her to Kenneth Williams. They immediately spoke a grammar and a language that was esoteric to me.

But at 23 I was Jack the Lad ready for anything and I quickly discovered that the 50-year-olds had outlived their shelf-life and were anxious to pass on some of their extramural commitments.

Saturdays I took out the football team and began to like the game.

In summer we always took our well stocked cricket bag around south London. On Monday I filled in a form to claim a few pennies for bus fare. I soon learnt their were limits to my energy.

Like most new teachers I’d get home and fall into a deep sleep.

Still it threw down a challenge that no college prompting prepared me for.

My first success was the story Isis and Osiris and how the river Nile began. My crude map of the eastern Mediterranean encouraged me into the Odyssey and the Iliad.

This was before the working classes had cheap air travel.

Occasionally authority came in different shapes. One was Patrick Keegan the sports inspector.

As my 12-year-olds were leaping over vaulting horses or staring down like stray chimpanzees from the top of rope ladders, Keegan, that unique being – a humourless Irishman – made me blush with high praise. Then looking over my bulk, he said: “I’ll arrange a trial for you with the London Irish Rugby Club.”

I felt faint with terror. I had seen them play and saw some of the consequences on their enemies.

Fortunately forewarned of a forthcoming visit by Keegan, I arranged with the boys to foul up the lesson.
Keegan went ballistic and cursed me as a disgrace to my Irish ancestry.

Then there was the inspector for swimming, Tug Wilson, who insisted on feeding me with a dossier of notes while I was swimming with the boys in Southwark baths. One of my fledglings – an odious boy – slipped away and got into difficulties.

The aggressive attendant leapt in and retrieved him, returning him to us and exploding with rage. Only the boys seemed to understand him and cheered him on.

Wilson, who had swum for England, fled into the back streets of Southwark.

My class regarded me as the capo and followed strict lines of Mafia loyalty.

They agreed when an unpleasant Welsh vixen of a mother confronted me and challenged me to a fist fight. I accepted there and then but she fled in a torrent of words, only one of which I hadn’t heard.

My bête noire was Eric Heath the science master. He had won the prize year after year as the Wackford Squeers of south London.

He demanded that I join the National Association of Schoolmasters whose main plank was no equal pay for women.

He became incandescent when I showed him an inscribed NUT pen I had been awarded for recruiting 80 members into their ranks. He screamed that I was abnormal and obviously a dangerous red.

The London School plan was framed to cover the years 1947 to 1977.

Later I moved the Regent’s Park, Hackney and Bethnal Green.

I taught Tony Meehan the Shadows’ drummer and John H Stracey the world welterweight boxing champion.

I had reached that inner sanctum of a recognised London teacher backed up by the nans of Bethnal Green.

They were as majestic as the last empress of China and just as cruel.

I took 40 of the boys to France, a rare thing in those days. Most East End kids bragged about their adventures up west but had never gone past the Aldgate Pump.

In Boulogne I established us a in a dockyard bar. I was joined by a really ancient lady who reprimanded the patron for selling us “piss”.

Then a magical event occurred. One of the boys returned.

They got on well with Madame, who was 104, and yet they did not speak the same language. It is the old conspiracy of the old and the young.

Then I made a sad career move and went on to the Greater London Council.

At 23 you were very near to 15 years olds. I was not to be Mr Chips.

Back to Shakespeare, I still say, like the Earl of Salisbury, in Richard II : “O, call back yesterday, bid time return…”