The Blue Blazer

It is hard to tell when going through old photographs from when you were very young if you can actually remember something from the picture or if seeing the picture creates the memory.

My Dad has been clearing out old albums of photos and bags of family papers from his flat since my Mum died just over a year ago.  In one consignment he gave me was a plastic carrier bag, the type supermarkets are now charging customers five pence for at the tills.  In the bag are some pieces of paper my Mum kept a diary on of the days leading up to our wedding and for a few days after.  Nothing fancy about feelings or emotions; just rough notes on what they did and where they went. There was also a thick album containing photographs from when I was a child in Canada where we lived until 1963.

Pictures of my two brothers and I playing in the snow which was as deep as I was tall.  Swimming in lakes on summer holidays.  Admiring the first family car my Dad could afford.  Having a family get together in the back garden with aunts and uncles.  Pictures of the neighbours and of my brothers with their first bicycles.

One picture did evoke memories and I am sure that I can remember the day not just because of seeing the photograph but because I can remember the day.

The picture is in black and white and is of my two brothers and I arranged in height order.  We were standing in the front garden in our last house in Edmonton.  Three boys all wearing navy blue blazers with white shirts, plaid ties and pocket handkerchiefs.  They were only those fake ones that were made from a strip of white cotton stapled on to a piece of cardboard that fitted neatly into the jacket breast pocket.

I could remember that day or could I remember it because I had seen this photograph a while ago?  I am not sure but I do know that we must have been off to Sunday church as we never even dressed like that for meeting family.  All I probably wanted to do was get the trip to church over and done with, get out of the Sunday best, change into shorts and a T shirt and play outside with my two brothers or help Dad in the vegetable patch in the back yard.

Not only did I loathe that blazer as I associated it with church but I loathed it even more when we immigrated to England in 1963.  My two brothers were accepted into the local grammar school for boys.  School uniforms were compulsory so they went off to school in new blazers, grey flannel trousers and school caps which Mum and Dad bought for them.  As I was under eleven I had to attend Holyport Primary School but I did not get any uniform.  When I had to start school my Mum packed me off in my navy blazer reassuring me that I would be the smartest dressed boy in the school.  I may have looked smart but against all the other boys wearing burgundy jackets with gold piping I blended in about as well as a polar bear crossing the Sahara Desert.  Consequently my life at morning breaks and lunch breaks became hell for the first few weeks.  The school thug, Derek Hall, would chase me around the playground and cornering me and then try to knock six bells out of me.  I am sure if I had been wearing a proper school jacket I would have escaped this unwanted attention.  We eventually became friends when we found out that our birthdays were the same.

It was also while I was at this school that I had to come to grips with the British currency made up of pennies, shillings and pounds.  Twelve pennies make a shilling and twenty shillings make a pound.  It was all very odd to someone coming from a straightforward decimal based currency without an intellectual weakness for numbers.

My Dad did spend some time with my brothers and I introducing us to the British money before we came into the country but this did not seem to help me much at primary school.  My Dad also gave up hours of his evenings to try and get me to learn my multiplication tables off by heart.  The most challenging one at the time for me was the seven times table.  I would master that one then move on to the eight and nine times table, master those and lose all memory of the seven times table.  At the end of these sessions at the kitchen table Dad and I would play cribbage where I could work out the scores in my head.  Fifteen two, fifteen four and a pair is six were no problem but ask me to work out eight times seven and I was a dunce.  My parents even gave a casino set one year with a roulette wheel, gaming chips and fake money.  This was no problem either as I could work out which bets returned thirty five to one, nine to one, two to one and evens but seven times nine made me look like a faller at the first fence in The Grand National.

Every Friday morning the teacher, Mrs Ansell, would set us an English test and a mathematics test.  The English test was not a problem for me but the maths test was.  After lunch the results of the tests were read out. For those who passed both there was the chance to do basket weaving and make a tray to take home.  For those who did not do so well there was extra practise so that hopefully next week they would be able to join the basket makers.  I never got around to making a tray for my Mum at that school.

One of the reasons that I never got on well with the maths tests was that there were always questions about adding up money, doing minus sums, dividing and multiplying as well as mathematics with non currency numbers. That range of money based questions was bad enough but was made worse when the questions included words like ‘crown’, ‘half-crown’, ‘tanner’ and ‘guinea’.  Dad had taught me about pounds, shillings and pence but these questions seemed to be asking about another entirely different type of money from another country.

I have never possessed a blue blazer since and have worked in finance for most of my working life,