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AOSA ANNUAL REPORT 2001 |
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The first address that I remember being able to relate to was that of
Clifford Weschenfelder, because we came from the same school era. Without looking it up I do
recall his mention of the boys’ schoolroom, but my own major memory was that of the cold
times, when it was usual to sit on the pipes until the tail end of our trousers was It’s odd the things which come back after so many years. Day scholars did not have tuck boxes, and I don’t know how I arranged it, but I used to rent space in David Siddle’s tuck box. It was the days of “one for one peanut butter” or “two for one raspberry jam,” but I used to keep a can of baked beans in a bottom corner of his box, so that I could spread my beans on my daily issue of bread and dripping from the Pendle line-up. My mother never knew, otherwise I would have been hauled on the carpet again for gravely insulting her home cooking. I do recall that Taff’s history lessons were always a bit of a mystery. The parts which had real numbers attached to them started around the year 1000, and prior to that there were no real annual numbers and it was all called by different era names, like stone, iron and dark. I did take notice that every year after that date had a unique number and that each year had only one significant event in it, or at least one of passing social or political importance. It was also apparent that there were just enough significant things or events of passing importance to go around, because there was never a year when two things happened, nor was there ever a year when nothing happened. But the trick was to remember which significant event matched which year number, like one of those “match list A with list B” competitions in the weekend newspaper. I became much more interested in history later in my adult years when I began to discover all those periods which did not have actual numbers attached to them, but instead had names, so my interest was grabbed more by the Icelandic Sagas, or the Dark Ages (which was before they had electric light,) or life in an Anglo Saxon village, when everyone had names like Ethelthrelth, Athelthroth or Thruthelthrolth. Sometimes History got mixed up with Art, as when for homework once I had to draw the front aspect of the Palace of Versailles across two pages of exercise book. With all those windows there was just no way I had the talent to do that freehand, but my father did, being an artist. I turned in a perfect piece of line drawing for homework, but unfortunately, even with all his different pencils and thumb shading, he only got 7 out of 10 for it and I daren’t tell him. Eng. Lit. was a real problem though. Henry IV came in two parts - and we only did one of them. With Keats, I could never understand why anyone would write an Ode On A Grecian Urn. At that time, I was much more interested in those same Grecian urns that Jacques Cousteau was finding below the sea. My book on Keats is still full of notes in the margins, and I still don’t understand them. I was more inclined to wonder “why on Earth did he bother writing it?” or, the kind of question which got me into trouble more than once, “What does a Grecian Earn”? That question was right up there with “how do you make a Venetian Blind”? Of course Miss Nicholson’s assignments, bless her, didn’t help
either. Homework tasks which started with the words “compare and contrast” or “discuss”
always baffled me and were difficult to get going. From that point on I usually had trouble
in deciding what my first word was going to be. “Discuss the contention that 15th century
Italian literature is moribund.” It only had to be followed by “in a changing world”,
or “provide examples,” and I could be stopped cold. |
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getting
scorched, at which time we had to change positions and sit on our hands to get them warm.
That never lasted long because in no time at all we were getting blistered palms, then it
was back to the scorching trousers again. I knew I was in my era when Cliff’s address came
along. Speaking of things happening to me, actually I became rather well known, probably the
better word is notorious, for something which DID NOT happen to me when I first arrived at
Ayton in 1946 as a 10 year old. After six weeks I was sent for and put on the carpet, by
whom I don’t know, and asked why I had not been to any piano lessons? The trouble was that
both parents and teachers had forgotten to let the pupil know that he’d been booked for
piano lessons. After that it was boring hours on a weekly basis of Für Elise and Handel’s
Largo. I never bothered with the exercises, I just played the music. Life on the football
and cricket fields of Stokesley and Ayton was far too precious to spend time practising
scales, arpeggios and finger exercises, much to the dismay and disapproval of teachers and
parents alike.