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Date: 05/01/25
"Chut!" And Giggles
Down the years, I have written many disobliging and frankly derogatory things about my former secondary school.
I would like to think that they were all justified, at least as measured by my own experience of the place. It was a bully-strewn establishment which was not only non-aspirational, but positively anti-aspirational, which treated its inmates as creatures to be got shot of as soon as their five years were up without any real attempt positively to engage with them in the interim; and it was ruled over by a vicious, scrawny little man the detestation for whom on the part of the pupils was matched only by the contempt in which he was held by his staff (this was a fact of which I was made aware only many years later).
Still, there were some instances of hilarity which have stayed with me, and I thought that I'd recount two of them here just to start the year with something amusing.
When I first went there in September 1973, the French master was a man called Gethin Jones. He seemed to be a good teacher, saddled as he was with a class which had never studied the language in their primary schools.
At the end of our first year, however, he decamped for another secondary school in the county, and for our second year we were saddled with a sequence of supply teachers (although one of them - Mlle Richards, who drove a Renault 4 with a Breton flag sticker on its tailgate - was an object of lustful veneration by at least three male members of our class).
Some degree of permanence was promised at the start of our third year by the arrival of Mlle. Boyer, a Parisienne in her twenties. It soon became bloodily apparent, however, that - whatever her virtues may have been - she was utterly incapable of even keeping order on a couple of dozen thirteen-year-olds, let alone actually teaching them anything. Youths of that age - regardless of gender - have an instinct for knowing when they have an easy target before them which would make a shark in the vicinity of a cruise-ship sinking pause in horrified admiration.
So it proved with the unfortunate Mlle. Indeed, lessons so often devolved into such a tra-la-la that one lunchtime we were summoned to Room 4 to be given a dressing-down by the head of languages Mrs. Parry and the deputy headmaster (a rotund, pompous man with eyes like a Cavalier King Charles spaniel's; or like chapel hat-pegs if you prefer). The effect was short-lived if ever it lived at all, and the chaos continued.
On to the événement: the standard book for learning French in our - and many another - secondary school at that time was Longman's Audio-Visual French. This was a combination of open-reel tapes, slides and a book, in which we learned all about la vie quotidienne bourgeoise of the Marsaud family (M., Mme, their daughters Marie-France and Claudette and their son Jean-Paul). Exactly how bourgeois they were was evidenced - to our sensibilities and experience at least - by the fact that they went on ski-ing holidays.
On this occasion, rather than listen to - and repeat from - the tape (I can still hear the announcer's voice saying, "Écoutez...et répétez!"), Mlle B. got us to read aloud from the book. There was a drawing of Jean-Paul coming down la piste - perforce not for once dressed in the Breton shirt which was his regular garb. The caption described the noise made by the skis over the snow. "Chut!", it said. So the boy who was reading - I don't remember exactly who it was now - either Cliff Owens or Kev Arthur - read it out as it was spelt (to his monoglot way of thinking), i.e., to rhyme with 'gut'.
At which, Mlle Boyer - 'ow you say - a perdu sa merde. She started shouting, "No! It is not pronounced 'chut'! It is pronounced 'shit'! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!". The difficulty on our part of keeping something remotely resembling a straight face in such a circumstance was obviated by the fact that the poor woman was oblivious to our mirth, such was her tizzy.
By the end of the year, she had got (in this order) married, pregnant and most emphatically out of there. Having, I might add, given me my best ever exam score of 96 per cent. This I thought rather sporting of her, in that my exam essay (on the subject of 'Le Match') had our boys in red hammering the crap out of Les Bleus at the Parc Des Princes. Perhaps she wasn't a rugby fan...
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Story number two comes from the following school year. It was in May or June 1977, when I was in the fourth year. A fine early summer's day, and our usual gang was kicking a football about on that part of the school's football pitch which was level with the end of the school's middle block.
The 'usual gang' in this case comprised me, Al, Gary, Rhys, Dawes, IBW (pronounced EEE-boo), the aforementioned Cliff and Kev, Lewie and Hunchie, and we weren't playing an actual game or anything structured like that; we were just kicking the ball to one another.
So it was that the ball fell to Lewie, who leathered it directly at Hunchie, who was standing facing Lewie at a distance of no more than about seven feet. Therefore, the ball was heading at high speed straight at Hunchie's goolies.
Hunchie - with that understandable instinctive sense of wishing to protect his future prospects - half-turned to his right, which meant that the ball impacted on his front left pocket with a hearty 'Smack!'.
We all winced.
"Lewie, yer bastard!", yelped Hunchie. And then was silent as clouds of smoke started billowing from his trousers. We were then treated to the sight of a fifteen-year old boy doing a dance which appeared to be one part Navaho to three parts Tirolean as he tried to beat out the conflagration. This could, of course, have been serious, but our reaction - combined with the lack of empathy typical of the breed - was one of hysterical laughter and the concomitant endangering of our own nether garments.
What had happened was that Hunchie, being an illicit smoker, kept his matches in his front left pocket. The impact of the ball had crushed the nearly-full box of England's Glory in there, the match-heads had all ground against each other, and the whole bloody lot had gone off at once.
It's one of the perils of smoking they never tell people about.
The blaze was extinguished quickly and Hunchie seemed no worse for the ordeal, although how he was going to explain the charred pocket lining to his mother was something he never vouchsafed to us. Nonetheless, I have from time to time since used the phrase, "I haven't laughed so much since Hunchie's trousers caught fire!", to general lack of comprehension on the part of my hearers.
