Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 12 - Another School trip, ghosts, Adam and the Ants and Harringtons)

Junior 4 was all about trying to be cool.

My best friends (both now and in the years before Junior 4), John and Darren, were abandoned by me in favour of Robert Hutchinson and Gerard Lynch, who I considered to be the coolest kids in the class.  The girls all loved Hutch, he had that air of confidence and looked like a ten year old baby-faced David Soul, only, he was a bit of a short-arse and, if I'm honest, consequently chubby in the way that a baby is before it starts walking.  Puppy fat, maybe.  Or short-arsed kid chubbiness, stored up energy ready for when he grows tall, which he never did.  Robert knew about proper pop music and so did Gerard.  And they both understood fashion.  No one in our class even thought about fashion before that.  Maybe the girls did, but I wouldn't have known that and I doubt it, looking back.  But Robert and Gerard both declared themselves to be 'Rude Boys' and each owned a Harrington.  Gerard also had a Crombie and was tall enough to carry off the much longer coat.  Robert would have looked like something from Michael Bentine's Potty Time in a Crombie.  Anyway, I wanted to fit in and persuaded my parents to buy me a Harrington.  (Incidentally, my Dad bought me another one for my 50th birthday last month, knowing that I am both nostalgic and a creature of habit).  We were the Harrington gang and sometimes Robert suggested we turn our jackets inside out so that the iconic red tartan lining was fully on show on the outside.  At this point, my effort to fit in failed somewhat.  Robert and Gerard had plain white lining on the inside of their sleeves.  I had bright green.  That was embarrassing.  I looked like a Scottish racing jockey.

Despite the green sleeves, they agreed that I could be in a room with them on the school trip that summer.  That was where my temporary abandonment of Darren and John was most treacherously realised, having been in a room with them in Combe Martin the previous two years.  This year the holiday location switched to Lympsham in Somerset and there were 6 of us in that room, 6 of us self-styled coolest kids in the class, with our Harringtons and with Robert as our leader.  The holiday was brilliant, especially as somehow I had got over my chronic travel sickness and didn't puke once on the coach the whole time,  which was fortunate given how much my jacket meant to me.  I'd have been mortified if the outside ended up as bright green as the inner sleeves.

The hotel in which we stayed was reputedly haunted.  And we believed this, after all, we were all Catholics, so we were open to all sorts of superstitious nonsense.  Originally the building had been a farmhouse and our room was built on an annex where the dairy had once been.  This became significant once the spooky story gathered some meat and we were told that the ghost was a milk maid.  Someone then claimed to have looked through the frosted glass of our bedroom door to see the silhouette of a woman bending over as if milking a cow (I imagine if we were older and more worldly, we would have interpreted this rather more crudely).  If that wasn't scary enough, I then imagined - as I twisted the handle of the door leading to our corridor - that someone on the other side of the door was turning it back forcefully and yet, as that door also had glass in it, I could see no one there.  I totally pooed myself and ran back to the main building armed with this addition to the story of the haunting.

This holiday proved a rite of passage for me, though.  It was when I got into PROPER MUSIC thanks to Robert bringing with him two 45" singles to play at the party.  The first was Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier.  The second - and more in keeping with the Harringtons - was Madness, The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  I was blown away by both and became a fan for life of Madness and an obsessive Adam Ant fan for at least a year afterwards, much to my Dad's discomfort and concern over my sexuality, once the posters of this obvious 'poofter' in make-up went up on my wall.

On the last evening, each room had to perform an act for all the other kids.  John and Darren's room mimed along to a Beatles song, while we did the same for Kings of the Wild Frontier, just to highlight the chasm in coolness.  However, in a moment of self-conscious awkwardness reminiscent of my green sleeves, I was instructed by Robert to be 'on piano'.  There is of course no bloody piano on that song, so I felt like a bit of a prick.  We Ants weren't even allowed to put the famous white stripe across our noses, as only Adam had this, the Ants didn't, as Robert pointed out.  And Robert was Adam Ant.  Gerard was guitarist, Marco Pirroni.  And I was just the prick on piano that wasn't in the song.  Robert might have looked the coolest, but at least he suffered for his art.  As I discovered later, when I tried it myself, applying a thick white line of toothpaste over your cheeks and nose sends a wave of stinging mintiness into your eyes that hurts like buggery.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 11 - School trip to Combe Martin, the double bed, Dutch ovens and a nuclear waste vomit)

Combe Martin is a coastal village in North Devon and it provided the destination for our primary school's summer trips in 1979 and 1980.  The experience has ingrained itself on our collective memory, like seeing a Granny's bloomers on the bus, with that same mixture of comedy and horror.

The key source for the horror was the sleeping situation.  Four ten year old boys.  Three beds.  I know it sounds like a priest's midnight party, but fortunately our Catholic school had not invited any along to supervise.  It required a practical solution.  Three of us - me, John and Darren (still my best mates today, in spite of Combe Martin, or maybe because of it!) -  were joined by another John (there were 7 of them in the class).  The deal was that everyone had to have a spell with one other boy in the double bed and the other nights in a single; and that you kept your pyjamas on in the double (as if you wouldn't); and put pillows down the middle.  As for farting, well, there were no boundaries there and John was eager to perform a 'Dutch Oven' on anyone sharing the double with him.

Anyone sharing a double bed with a brutally malevolent farter like John discovered that it was almost as bad as sharing a seat on the coach with me.  My inclination towards vomiting on account of debilitating car (and coach) sickness in the 70s was as inevitable and as unavoidable as Ollie Reed being drunk on a TV chat show.  My stomach started to stir after about an hour, no matter where on the coach I'd sit or if I'd been sucking on enough of those boiled sweets that came in a round tin full of icing sugar to look like a hamster.  Given that we travelled from North London to Devon and back, and was on and off the coach for excursions every day of the week, my throat ended up with more hot bodily fluid flowing through it than a Port-a-loo at a spicy food festival.  I threw up on EVERY single journey.  I have to lay some of the blame on your average 1970s coach, with no air-con and rubbish suspension, but the packed lunches provided for us really didn't help.  SPAM, I worked out, is HAM which makes you SPEW, hence the portmanteau.  And that other invidious culinary invention, sandwich spread, just looks like pig sick, so naturally made you think of puking up as soon as you looked at it.  But I was my own worse enemy the time we had a day out to Exeter Cathedral (the other side of Devon from Combe Martin).  I washed a Mint Choc Chip Cornetto down with a can of lime-flavoured fizzy drink just before boarding the coach and the very moment I stepped off it back at the hotel, I unleashed a bright green torrent that looked like it would require a clean up from people in radiation suits.  You didn't want to ever tell a teacher when you were feeling sick, because they would give you a sick bag, which as we all know, was so-called not so much for what it was meant to catch, but more for what it already smelt like.  

The final night of each trip was celebrated with a disco.  Some boys plucked up the courage to dance with the girls, which was always a strange sight, as at that age girls tend to be taller.  Were we among those brave, confident boys?  The four of us, who shared a double bed, with one of us a serial puker?  Of course not, we hid under the table the whole time.

The hotel we stayed at in Combe Martin has long gone, but the spirit of those trips SHALL live on, because my 50th birthday present from my wife was to book me, John and Darren into another hotel in Combe Martin for a nostalgic re-enactment.  And she booked the 3 of us into a room with just one single bed and one double.  Oh dear.

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....