The School Concert

©2010 Ian Hobson

'Oh you dirty bugger!' said Atkins, holding his nose. He wasn't from Yorkshire, like the rest of us, and had what I thought was a rather hoity-toity accent.

'He's a mucky... c cunt.' Nash had a stutter but made up for it by having the foulest mouth in the school.

The object of my classmates’ scorn was Smith who was standing on his chair, in the centre of the classroom, and two-handedly wafting a series of farts towards those of us seated behind him. But none of this was unusual, I suppose, in fact it was fairly typical for a Tuesday morning in a Secondary School. Yes, Assembly was over and we'd just arrived in Mr Green's classroom for our first lesson of the day.

Amidst the general outcry, Johnson, sitting to my right, pulled some folded paper pellets from his blazer pocket and began to fire them, with the aid of a thick rubber band, at the source of the foul stink and, fortunately, his third missile hit Smith's left ear, making him yelp before sitting down again, just as the last few stragglers wandered in, followed by Mr Green.

'Good morning, boys!'

We were the only all boy class in the school; all fourteen going on fifteen - apart from Smith, who was fourteen going on three. We were supposedly having classes biased towards technical and practical subjects; technical drawing and metalwork and such. But most of us were just killing time; a few more months and we'd be free. Free of school. Free of teachers. And free of idiots like Smith. Freer than we could have imagined back then in the mid-sixties.

'Mornin', sir.' Some of us managed a half-hearted reply. Greeny, our maths teacher, wasn't so bad really; he knew how to control a class and keep the rowdier elements in line. Plus, if you could get him talking about steam trains, that could easily kill a half-hour.

He grimaced as he reached the front of the classroom and turned to face us. 'What a miserable-looking lot,' he said. 'But not to worry; I'm going to cheer you all up with some algebra.' There were groans and grumbles all round; not one of us liked algebra, or had the vaguest idea of what possible use it could have. Worse still: it was a double maths lesson. 'Right, get your exercise books out, and Smith, stop picking you nose, boy! Before any more of your brain falls out.'

'Thus nowt left to fall out, sir,' said Barnes.

'He's a mucky c c c cunt,' stuttered Nash though, sensibly, not loud enough for Mr Green to hear above the laughter. Swearing was a caning offence.

Smith flashed two fingers at Barnes and then used one of them to have one last poke, before depositing the result of his excavations onto the side of the ink-stained, and long-redundant, inkwell hole in his antiquated desk. As I pulled my exercise book from my bag, I sneaked a quick look at my hand-written timetable. Oh shit! I'd forgotten the next lesson was Music.

***

'But we won't be in it, will we, sir?' Johnson asked. The very same question had sprung to my mind, as our music teacher, Mr Scott, had just dropped the bombshell that every class in the school was to perform in the forthcoming school concert. Surely he couldn't be dumb enough to put us lot, a class of nineteen, musically-inept, lads in the concert? He'd look an even bigger pillock than he already was.

'There are to be no exceptions,' said the pillock. 'Every class in the school will be on stage to sing a least one song.' He got up from his piano stool and gave us all a particularly evil grin. 'And don't worry,' he said, as if he had just read my mind. 'I'll be putting you lot on towards the end of the concert and, by then, it will be perfectly obvious that I can teach.' This produced a chorus of loud groans and other verbal expressions of dismay which, ironically, was about the most musical sound we were capable of making.

'He must be joking,' Atkins whispered to me. 'We can't sing.'

'If we're in it,' Johnson chipped in, 'I'm gonna be away with a cold or somethin.'

'Be quiet!' Mr Scott glared at us. He obviously hated us as much as we hated him and, for a moment, I thought he was going to have one of his bad-tempered tantrums, but he just gave us another evil look and said, 'revenge is sweet,' before handing out a set of dog-eared and faded copies of a songbook titled Songs from HMS Pinafore, by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Apparently HMS Pinafore was an operetta – whatever that meant – and we were to sing the song on page seven, about a young lad who became the ruler of the Queen's Navy by polishing a door handle; which, of course, made no sense to me. But then, little of this thing that adults referred to as education did.

Smith began to pick at something at the top of the page. 'Someone's left snot in mine.'

'Oh, sung it before, have you, Smithie?’ I said.

'HMS means her majesty's ship,' Atkins said, 'but who'd call a ship Pinafore? It's what my sister wears for Cookery.'

'Quiet, Class!' Mr Scott silenced us once again, hit one of the keys on his piano a few times and then, waving his finger at us as though we were an orchestra and he its conductor, he sang the first four lines of the song.

'When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney's firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
Now, Class, on your feet, it's your turn.' We grudgingly got to our feet and, with Scotty doing his best impression of Russ Conway, some of us began to sing - for want of a better description - while the rest of us just mouthed the words. It was dreadful; like a dozen cats, all suffering from laryngitis, being put, simultaneously, through my mother's washing mangle. I wondered again: he's not really going to put us in the concert, is he?

***

Three or four weeks went by, and each Tuesday morning, at some point during the so-called Music lesson, we'd practice our song. But we weren't getting any better, and I felt sure that we'd be dropped from the concert; which, unfortunately, proved to be wishful thinking.

When the fateful day came, we were to be the thirteenth class on stage out of a total of sixteen, and the first in our age group. The stage, of course, was the one at the front end of the hall, where the choir sat during Assembly. Thankfully, the concert was just a school thing, with no parents or other people attending. And as usual, our class, along with the others in our year, sat on the floor near the back of the hall, with those a year younger in front of us and so on, while the teachers, like linesmen at a football match, stood or sat on chairs around the perimeter.

At first, it wasn't so bad; like a very long version of Assembly but without the prayers. And some of the classes could, as far as I could tell, sing okay. Though the songs were predictably boring: soddin' Frere Jacques, knick-knack paddy-bloody-wack, and that dreadful Jacky-boy, sing-e-well, very well, load of crap. But the worst thing was having to sit on that wooden floor for almost two hours. My backside was so numb I was actually glad when our class was called and we all made our way towards the stage.

But I wasn't glad for long.

'Come along, boys, we haven't got all day. Quiet now, children!' The headmaster, Mr Crosby, ushered us onto the stage and then brought the hall to order and, consulting his typed list, announced our class number, the title of the song, and then left us and Mr Scott, who was seated at his piano at the corner of the stage, to get on with it.

By then, our song books had been distributed by two girls, both prefects, one of whom went to stand beside Scotty in order to turn the pages of his music. And so, with a rather disconcerting smile in our direction, he played the intro and then nodded at us at the point where we were supposed to come in; which we did – sort of.

'When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney's firm.'

My mouth was so dry that even if I'd had any kind of a singing voice, still nothing would have come out; and I'm sure I wasn't the only one suffering from stage fright.

'I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.'

Think about it: a class of nineteen lads, minus three away with the kind of ailments normally reserved for PE lessons, up on stage in front of the whole school, and hardly any of us making enough noise to be heard over the sound of the piano.

'I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!'

It was a disaster. Before long, two or three girls in the second row began to giggle.

'Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.'

And their giggles were infectious, fanning out in every direction until every child and teacher in the hall were laughing or desperately trying not to.

'And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen.'

I noticed Mr Green, with one hand over his mouth, trying to stop himself laughing, while Miss Parker, the girls' PE teacher, was having hysterics; and even the Headmaster, though trying to keep a straight face, looked ready to burst.

'But that kind of ship so suited me,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's...'

'BE QUIET!'

Scotty leapt to his feet, slamming the piano case shut with a resounding bang, and turning on his captive audience like a guard dog that had just woken to find intruders on the premises. From where I was standing, I couldn't see the expression on his face, but I didn't need to; the back of his neck was bright red, he was visibly shaking and, as his head turned from left to right, his stare cut through the laughter like a scythe through a hayfield.

‘THIS IS A CONCERT, NOT A CIRCUS!

Everyone looked cowed - even the teachers and the headmaster - and you could have heard a pin drop. I was relieved, thinking that we were about to be ushered off stage, and the next class ushered on. I was wrong again.

‘We will start again from the beginning.’ Scotty, regaining his composure, returned to the piano and reopened its case. And, with a look of pure hatred for me and my classmates he, once more, began to play the intro.

Would our ordeal never end?

Oddly, second time around didn’t seem quite so bad. And don't ask my how, but some of us found louder voices and, thankfully, the headmaster and the teachers that were closest to the stage, sang along with us and, as we came to the end of the song that I will never forget for as long as I live, we even got a polite ripple of applause.

But I was right about one thing: Scotty, in tantrum-mode, had made himself look a right pillock.