PT4

Mr. Hudson was the headmaster of the big school.  That was the junior school about a mile straight along Eastholme Drive, turning right at the end, then another half-mile or so through leafy suburbs.  A bus-ride if you had the fare – a good walk if not.

It’s probably pushing it a bit to say Mr. Hudson was a sadist.  He was more a disciplinarian.  The trouble is, his charges were all between the ages of seven and eleven.  To be fair, we’d been introduced to the slipper and the ruler across the back of the legs at infant school, which had been run by the sweetest women teachers.

Most of the staff in the junior school had something to hit the kids with.  Mr. Hudson had his cane, which he was happy to be seen flexing.  Mr. Henry had his “Paddywhack”, a thick, firm bat, which seemed to have been fashioned especially for the purpose.  I can’t remember what Mr. Williams had.  Maybe he managed without.  Miss Stroud – a veteran – had her own short cane, which she administered across the fingers.   Mrs. Cole simply knocked you from your seat with a slap across the head.  The rest, I think, showed more leniency.

Our class entered junior school in 1969, year of The Beatles’ final recordings and the first moon landings.  I was only aware of the latter.  It was a big, old establishment compared to the four brand-new classrooms of the infant school, the headmistress of which had been like a kindly grandmother.  Mr. Hudson was a tweed-suited ex-major who had seen service with the Royal Artillery during the war and may have experienced a few too many loud bangs.

The start of each school day and the end of play-time was marked with the blowing of a whistle – no doubt the one he used to signal barrages.  At the sound of the whistle, every child stood statue-still and silent.  The slightest movement could result in the perpetrator being directed to stand outside the headmaster’s office to await admission for the cane.  He knew the value of making you wait.

Morning Assembly – hymns and prayers – was brought to a conclusion with a suitable piece of music played from a teak gramophone – standard issue.  I remember the Trumpet Voluntary being a favourite, and Carmen (the march of something or other).  Mr. Hudson would stand, slightly at ease, at the front, yellow-white hair combed smartly back, teeth like ivory organ-pipes rising to a crescendo.  He may have worn a pocket-watch.

At the end of Assembly, each class would file out, arms swinging smartly.  Mr. Hudson had an eye for these things.

The school was probably built in the early part of the twentieth century.  Most of its classrooms were in two single-storey blocks that reached out in a wide angle from the high-vaulted hall.  The hall roof was more recent, the original having been blown off by a German bomb during a Baedeker air-raid in 1942.

Across the play-ground were a number of prefab classrooms that had been added at different times to accommodate baby-boomers.  I began in one of those, where I was taught by a grey-haired Mrs. Findlay.  She was a kindly soul, most unlike her trigger-happy colleagues.  There was something safe about her room, looking across the empty space toward the forbidding old school with its high windows.  Mrs. Findlay wasn’t a hippie, but the newer prefabs leant towards those more enlightened times.

Play-times were spent outside almost regardless of weather – my recollection anyway – boys wearing short-trousers, girls in dresses.  Scrubbed knees were commonplace and dull moments in class could be zoned out of picking at the scabs on one’s knees.

Lunch-times meant queueing to enter the hall.  The queue had to be orderly and quiet and was patrolled by teachers.  I recall being pulled out of the dinner-line by Miss Stroud and caned across the hand for being “disorderly”.

My main recollection of school dinners is of the variously coloured metal jugs that held drinking-water and custard.  The water was poured into Duralex glasses, from which I drank wine years later in the Pollo café on Old Compton Street.

In comparative terms, I don’t suppose it was a bad school.  The teachers appeared to want us to learn, they’d just inherited a way of maintaining order with which they presumably found no fault.  Mr. Hudson brought his military discipline to bear on small children in the best way he knew.  He even tried to introduce some culture.  Maybe some of it stuck.

But it’s hard to see now how that kind of discipline contributed to the development of healthy spirits.  When I look at the bright and confident children I meet today, almost every one is years ahead of where I was at that age.  Nothing is perfect, but when people question the idea of progressive thinking, it's worth looking at the way we treat children in and out of school these days - real progress has been made. 

Here’s to a confident and talented generation.