Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 10 - Diamond socks, rubbish songs, Steve's spits and pissing up the wall)

It felt like a rite of passage, moving from infants into juniors, the other side of the school, with all the big kids, scary.  And for the first time we had a male teacher.  Which felt more grown up.  Mr C_____ managed to fit my Dad's contemptuous view of male primary school teachers, insofar as he WAS "wetter than a pair of pissed-in pants".  The evidence was plain on first sight.  The corduroy trousers, the yellow diamond-patterned socks, the soft shoes that looked like they were made of macaroons dipped in tea.  And he played guitar and piano, as in those days before portable stereos it was a prerequisite for primary schools to have at least one competent musician.  His most ubiquitously played song was something so sickly sweet and mawkishly sentimental that even at the age of 7 you'd cringe every time you were made to sing it.  The words were:

    Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you,

    When another day is through, I'll still be friends with you.

And Mr C____ claimed that he wrote it.  It took me about 30 years to find out that John Denver did.

Singing was something we did LOADS of in school, especially hymns, most of which were dirges, as the Catholic Church preferred something more solemn than the Church of England's frivolous melodic nonsense.  But I hated singing and mimed every time.  It was even worse if you had to stand next to Steve A____ who had a speech impediment (just one of many afflictions) in which he SSHHHed his S's.  I had the misfortune to be next to him once when we sang Boney M's 'When a Child is Born'.  Imagine the saliva-soaking from this verse:

    A shilent wisshh shails the sheven sheas

    The windsh of schange whishper in the treesh

    And the wallsh of doubt tumble tosshed and torn

    Thish comesh to passh when a child ish born

I'm not sure a song exists with such frequent use of the letter S and if he wasn't as limp as a Willow Tree (another of my Dad's analogies) I would have suspected Mr C____ of choosing that song with Shteve in mind.  Not that Steve had the slightest self-consciousness about his lisp.  If he did, he wouldn't have constantly run around the playground pretending to be his heroes - the Shix Million Dollar Man or Kenny Dalglisshh.  Poor old Steve.  He was quite smelly too.  And fat.  And in the remedial group.  And a motor bike once went right into him as he crossed Bowes Road without looking and bounced straight off, sending the rider to the ground, while Steve merely rubbed his leg and said, "Ouch".

Back to the whole excitement thing about joining the juniors...  We got to play in the big playground, or rather we didn't because Junior 4 and Junior 3 dominated it with football, so we just ran around the fringes or stayed in the grassy area where girls skipped and sang songs (Mr C____ was probably dying to join in).  We also got to use the big boys' toilet, the novelty being that it had a urinal.  Not individual ones.  One of those shared metal ones, where if you stood too close you'd get splash back all over your light grey jumper and not much darker grey trousers.  There was a clip halfway up the water pipe above the urinal where it was fixed to the wall and we had competitions to see who could piss high enough to hit it.  You had to get your distance from the urinal right, not just the angle, otherwise you'd end up pissing in your own face in an effort to point your willy too far upwards.  It might be that Steve did this quite often.  It would explain a lot about the smell coming off his jumper.

I don't remember much more about Junior 1 with Mr C____, except that me and my best mates John and Darren were in top group for Times Tables and the following year we skipped Junior 2 and went into Junior 3.  Our parents probably had us ear-marked for Oxbridge from that moment onwards.  But having recently seen a class photo of Junior 3 with less than 20 kids in it, we worked out that they only stuck us in it, because it had too few kids and our class had too many.  We had to stay in Junior 3 for 2 years anyway, in the end, while our original class joined us.  Pointless.  But at least we got to go on an extra school trip to Devon which only Juniors 3 and 4 went on.  But that's another story....