The Naughtiest Boy in School

I was certainly in the Top Two Naughtiest Boys in my class and the other boy, Paul, went to prison.

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

My first year at Chis and Sid (age 11-12) passed without incident apart from an impressive number of detentions. Detentions at Chis and Sid were a serious business where you had your name read out in morning assembly and you went to the front of the assembly hall to get your little lecture from the headmaster. The list of detention names was always some permutation of “Monroe, Harding, Winch and Lawrence”.

Three detentions in a single term (there were three terms per year) and you got the cane. My record was six detentions in a term. In that first year, my detentions were never for properly naughty stuff though. They were mostly for not doing my homework or for talking in class. The naughty stuff came later.

Detentions today: Monroe, Harding and Lawrence Please come up to the lectern.

At the end of every school year, we had a few weeks of exams — usually 2 x 3-hour exams for each subject. They were a kind of warm-up for the O Level exams that come at the end of the fifth year and the first-year exams put us into “streams” according to our results. My position in class in the first year should’ve earned me a place in the top stream but I was put in the middle stream — perhaps it was all those detentions dragging me down.

I was very happy with the middle stream because my classmates were the best a teenage boy could wish for. I fell in love with a girl in my class in the first week (more about that later!) and we were all best friends and hung out together all the time. Parties on Saturday night with a bottle of cider and a Party Six of Heineken. Ice Skating in London on Sundays. We even took the train for a day trip to Margate.

We’re off to Margate!

Most of the boys went to the Good News Summer Camp at Winchester School together where we spent a week singing Jesus songs and getting up to mischief. I’m still friends with about half a dozen of my classmates 40 years later and we still meet up for a beer occasionally.

We were a lovely bunch on the whole but we often found a way to push our teachers to the edge and beyond. For the good teachers, we were well-behaved. On the first day with Mr Carlisle, we were our usual, unruly selves as we entered the room but Mr Carlisle made us all go out and come back one by one in silence. We were never unruly again. Mr Carlisle was definitely good.

At the other extreme was Mrs Timm. Mrs Timm would drone on about the English Reformation or the Industrial Revolution and no one paid even a smidgeon of attention to her. We took a cassette recorder to her class one time to record the lesson. The whole period was just mayhem with everyone talking and walking around the room while Mrs Timm droned on. I wonder if all her classes were like ours or if we were just especially unkind to her. I wonder what her memories of teaching are like.

During this period, I still did some of the assigned homework. I’ve always loved history but Mrs Timm managed to make everything grey and tedious. We had an essay for history homework every week but I never scored more than 20%. Except that one time when we had an essay on Lord Nelson and I got 95%. And 95% on Captain Cook the week after. Then back to 20% for the rest of the year. Why did I do this? I don’t know really. Perhaps I wanted to be myself from the beginning and I wanted to demonstrate that I could get any grade I wanted. I just didn’t want to most of the time.

Several teachers had a way of getting our attention. More than a few had perfect aim with a blackboard eraser thrown at the head of any student not paying attention. Mr Williams would slam his metre-long ruler down across your desk and if you didn’t move your fingers fast enough your fingers would suffer. “Basher” Lewis slammed Martin’s face into the bench in biology and he beat me and Paul around the face over and over and over until half the class were in tears. The Terrible Mr Gooden deserves his own story.

Basher’s bashing was too violent even for ChatGPT

Poor Miss Furey was the only teacher that we broke entirely. Miss Furey was quite young, probably new to teaching and our class wasn’t the easiest class to learn the teacher’s trade in. I confess that I was often the culprit and spent much of her class writing “Le silence aide le travail” 200 times in the corridor outside her classroom. But that day it wasn’t me. It wasn’t even Paul.

I don’t remember exactly what happened but I remember the usual mayhem — similar to the mayhem that Mrs Timm enjoyed so much — until Martin looked out of the window and shouted. “Look at that!” The whole class ran over to look out window and poor Miss Furey could do nothing to regain control. She just lost it. She burst into tears, ran out of the classroom and didn’t come back for several days. I like to think we were kinder to her after that and after several of us got to experience Mr Gooden’s Size 13 Dunlop Green Flash plimsolls swung with full force across our buttocks. Though not, as I recall, the people responsible.

Le silence aide le travail

Although I was innocent on this occasion, I usually wasn’t. I was certainly in the Top Two Naughtiest Boys in the class and the other one, Paul, was sent to prison. But Paul did some really bad stuff while I was merely naughty. To this day, people I meet from my school days remember us as the naughty pair but I never hurt anyone, I didn’t break anything and I never broke any laws. I just didn’t like being told what to do, especially by teachers. I’ll tell you what Paul did another day.

I liked to make people laugh too. In the first few years of school, each class had to put on a play for the drama festival. My class chose a comedy about two football hooligans who were always in trouble with the law. Guess who played the hooligans!

It was about this time that my refusal to do homework became a problem. Julie, Stuart and I were put on Homework Report which meant our teachers had to record every homework assignment on a card and sign it. Then our parents had to sign it. Then we had to come to school 30 minutes early to show our completed homework to Mr Durbin, Head of the Second and Third Year, so he could sign it too. The homework was easy so I didn’t stay on Homework Report for long and I was soon back to my old ways.

At the end of every term, we were given a report card and Julie and I took it in turns to come last in our class of 30 students. But when the end-of-year exams came around, I came first in almost every subject and won the prize for Most Improved Student. I bought a book on computer programming with the prize. I didn’t have a computer yet though so I wrote BASIC programs on paper and ran them in my head.

Julie came bottom in the first half. I came bottom in the second.

My third-year history exam became something of a legend because I answered every question as a joke. In the essay question about the Suffragettes, for example, I wrote how the Suffragettes were a bunch of silly women who didn’t do as their husbands told them. The teacher marking my essay wrote STUPID BOY! in huge, red letters diagonally across the page and gave me a zero. In the question about religion during the Reformation, I said that Queen Elizabeth was a Sikh and Raquel Welch was a Buddhist. Why did I do this? Who knows? Like I said, I was very naughty and probably thought it was funny at the time. I think Martin still has my essay. But even with a zero in history, I came first in my class overall.

Practices passionately pursued become habits.

After the end-of-year exams, we had two or three weeks where we did no work. We brought games to school or went outside to play football. Except, at the end of the third year (age 14), I didn’t.

Our physics teacher was Ms McDonnell and she was also new and inexperienced and a terrible teacher. In the end-of-year exam, no one in the class scored more than 34% — except John who got 57%. I got an A and more than triple the class average. Ms McDonnell accused me of cheating and reported me to Mr Gooden who asked to see my workbooks. I had done almost zero homework for the whole year. Mr Gooden knew I had not cheated because I came first in all my other subjects too but he was angry that I had done no work. As a punishment, he made me spend those fun last three weeks catching up on physics instead of playing outside with my friends.

During my punishment, Mr Gooden made me sit at the back of his Sixth Form chemistry class to do the work I had skipped. One time, Mr Gooden was quizzing his class to prepare his Sixth Formers for their A-Levels (A-levels are the exams that determine which university you can go to).

Gooden: “What’s the by-product of fermentation?

Silence. No one knows.

Gooden: Kevin?
Me: Carbon Dioxide, sir.
Gooden: Well done.

Gooden: What is the carbon dioxide used for?

Silence.

Gooden: Kevin?
Me: To pressurise the kegs.
Gooden: Good.

This went on for several days. I knew all the answers and they didn’t know any. My Dad had bought me an American College textbook — Principles of Organic Chemistry — for Christmas that year. I could’ve easily done A-level chemistry when I was 14 but that wasn’t an option. The only option was four more years of boredom and getting the cane.

What is the byproduct of fermentation?

Lucky for me, we were allowed to drop all the subjects we didn’t want to continue after the third year and I dropped history, geography, music and art. For the last two years of school, I did practically zero work and never even took a book home. Still, when the final exams came around — mock O-levels and O-levels — I came first or thereabouts in most subjects and won more prizes. I shared the top spots with three other students. Alison, Corrine and Roger all went to Oxford and Cambridge and got their names in gold lettering on the wood panelling in the school lobby while I quit school and joined the Navy where I thought I’d get more of a challenge.

Ha! What a joke that was.

The academic work in the Navy was so easy that I felt my brain was rotting. After three years, I took A-level maths just to check my brain was still working. I spent a couple of months studying from a borrowed textbook and I got an A. At about the same time, I got drafted to submarines against my protest and that’s the day I decided to leave the Navy — but it took me another three years to escape and that’s a story for another day.

“I’m sailing away, my own true love” — Bob Dylan

Epilogue
I am finally doing that bachelor’s degree that I should have done forty years ago. Philosophy and history. Mrs Timm would be proud! But now my brain is rotting for real and I wonder if I will finish in time.

☕️ Buy me a coffee? ☕️
It won’t make me rich but it’ll make me happy.
(I promise I won’t spend it on beer!)