When we moved to Southgate, I was 6 and changed schools to the very lovely little Our Lady of Lourdes RC primary in Arnos Grove. For part of my first year there, I actually got picked up and driven in by my Infants 3 teacher, Mrs Green. But at some point my mum made an arrangement with another school mum called Peggy to take us there by tube. This required a walk to Oakwood station (nearer than Southgate) and a two stop journey on the Piccadilly line. Peggy was Irish, with the strongest of accents (think 'filum' instead of 'film') and two sons, each a year younger than me and my brother. That year seemed a gulf. Those two boys were pretty bloody wet, smack-arse-faced, like real-life versions of the 'Softies' from 'The Beano' (the swots that Dennis the Menace bullied). Not that they would have read 'The Beano'. John - the oldest one - preferred 'TV Comic' which I considered with contempt to be babyish. Not quite as babyish as the fact that his younger brother slept in a cot at the age of 4 or 5 years old. That was Thomas. He had an accent as strong as his mum's, maybe because he didn't talk to anyone else. When a tube train arrived at the station, he'd shout out where it was bound. He'd pronounce Cockfosters as Cockfodders and Arnos Grove as Arnot Gove. That killed me and my brother. I'm not sure what accent John had, because he never spoke. Except when he was crying about his mum not buying him TV Comic. Later in life it dawned on me that together their names made 'John Thomas' as in slang for a willy. They really were a couple of willies, the poor buggers.
My first memory of arriving at Our Lady of Lourdes was being buddied up with some weird kid called Alan. Being called Alan was weird enough at the time. All Alans were bald middle-aged men. I might be wrong about his name, but sod it, most of these memories could be unreliable, so let's still call him Alan. He had the straightest teeth you've ever seen. Like someone had taken an electric grinder to them. And the third respect in which he was weird was that he refused to ever eat snacks at playtime, saying that his mum told him it would spoil his appetite for lunch. I soon negotiated my way out of that situation and Alan left the school soon after. I suspect his mother home-schooled him. You would if you were the sort of fucked up parent who called your kid Alan and denied him snacks at playtime.
In the equivalent of Infants 3 these days, 7 year old kids are made to do SATs; but this is nothing compared to what we had to do as Catholic kids in the 70s. First Confession! Because by 7, you've clearly accumulated enough sins to need to purge your burdened soul of them through verbal exposition to a priest. Unlike normal confession, which happened in those traditional wooden cubicles, our first one was alone with a priest in the vestry. Not something you'd write to Jim'll Fix It to ask to do. There was lots of time spent in class preparing for this moment. Nothing practical like self-defence, but just some old shit about Jesus and families and how we are born with sin and basically fucked if we don't confess everything bad we do. We had to fill in a special book as preparation with pictures and writing. What the book missed out was a list of suggested things to confess. Because at 7 years old, you just aren't sure what counts. Did Knock Down Ginger count? Did laughing at Alan's funny teeth count? What about finding pleasure in seeing a 6 year old kid throw a wobbler because his mum won't buy him TV Comic?
In the end I went for the same unspecific term that everyone else used - I confessed to having 'bad thoughts'. (Luckily the priest didn't reply with, 'Well, funny you should say that...' and I got away with 3 Our Fathers and 5 Hail Mary's)
No comments:
Post a Comment