Memory Lane: Part 15 - Comprehensive School Of Hard Knocks, & The Birth Of The Armstrong-Gilbride Method
In 1981, totally against my will and without prior parental consultation, I had started the final four years of my compulsory education at Hinde House a sprawling comprehensive school. It had, I openly confess, being a dreamer, come as quite a shock to the system, not only because Hinde House was such a large establishment, divided into a lower and upper wing with nearly 1100 pupils, but because back in the early 1980s it still retained a ‘house’ system. The pupils across all four years were divided into four houses named Chantrey, Brearley, Hunter and Sorby after great local industrial tycoons who helped build Sheffield up to be the urban sprawl that it was before the nation’s beloved Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and her inner cabal allegedly decided to destroy the industrial wealth of the North of England.
Personally, I was never of that opinion. I am old enough to recall what the previous Labour government did to fuck up the country, in a way startlingly akin to the present.
Maggie was OK in my books... Deal with it.
Throughout the academic year, pupils were awarded - or in cases of poor performance, deducted - ‘house points’. The house that collected the most points over a given year being awarded a cup. This may seem grand, but the cups simply moved around one of four display cabinets in the upper school hall. Just like feudal serfs in the middle ages, the 2nd and 3rd form pupils were grafting to earn points that the 4th and 5th forms got to brag about and actually see every day. What absolute rot!
We still had corporal punishment in the shape of the cane, and some of the staff at the school had been there when my Mother was a pupil in the 1950’s. The headmaster was old school, and gowns were the order of the day for staff at assemblies. We even retained the cane for the first two years I was there, but course, I was a well-behaved young shaver and never saw the inside of the headmaster’s office, apart from when I had to identify the latest group of bullies to have given me a good kicking or destroyed another item of my personal property in the constant rounds of testosterone fuelled one-upmanship.
For the record, I did, get struck across the back by a teacher, one Mr Napier with a ‘T’ square, one of those metre-long draughtsman’s tools which, has a cross piece to allow it to be held flush along the edge of a desk for the accurate drawing of horizontal lines. One of these instruments weighs in at around 1.5 kilos and I can tell you that if swung like an axe and with some purpose, decapitation would be certain. Rest assured, that the evil old devil did not get away with it, even in 1982!
Mr Napier, that cruel old bastard, is certainly dead now, and those in the care of the English educational system no doubt feel much safer for it.
It goes without saying, that all of this would be fine and dandy for grammar school or other such prestige seat of learning such as borstal, however, Hinde House is located in the heart of Sheffield’s steel making industry - or rather was, when it still had one - hardly where one would expect an educational model taken right out of a P.G Wodehouse tale to exist, let alone flourish.
By the time I had reached the 4th year the headmaster had become a headmistress. This was by the normal method of staff rotation rather than by some arcane transmogrification or act of elective surgical gender reassignment, I am somewhat sad to report. Along with the change of Camp Commandant, came the news that corporal punishment was to be abandoned and so was uniform. Hussah!
Generally a new pupil was placed into the same house as any previous internees from the same family who had been unfortunate enough to be pupils of the school. Accordingly I was assigned by our Commanding Officer to 2B2, meaning class 2, Brearley house, 2nd Year. At Hinde House you actually began as a 2nd Year, which was to say the least confusing. Or perhaps all of the 1st Years had been massacred in an attempted mass breakout and never replaced.
On my first day my parents had packed me off to school with smart new uniform, a haircut that looked as if a basin had been used to shape it and horror of horrors, a briefcase. To this day my mother treasures a photograph of that first day, whilst I merely treasure the thought that I may yet get to choose her nursing home. A nice one, with Alsatian dogs and a decent alarm system!
You will recall that I am the oldest of 3 siblings, and therefore, as was my destiny, I was the prototype test subject for my parents. I walked blindly into what was to come. On the first day, Alan pointed out during the half hour long trek to the new school – I with a sense of foreboding pervading my soul - that a briefcase was trouble in the making. The lad wasn’t wrong.
I’d been taught to speak clearly and politely. I certainly sounded different enough to my peers that I was thought of as ‘posh’ and thus, my fate was sealed. I was the ‘posh ponce’ with bad hair and a handbag and as a result my life was to be a miserable one. From the start, I got the shit kicked out of me, and an extra portion that I didn’t even know I owned.
Driven by the desire to avoid the attentions of the rougher kids, I had managed to write off the briefcase within a month or so - sorry Mum, sorry Dad - and began cultivating a pronounced Yorkshire accent that even after almost thirty years, I use as a ‘safety blanket’ just in case one of the former bullies still has unfinished business.
In my estimation, I had descended into Hell, but all was not lost. I had English, art and history tutors who cared about their charges and were to me, saviours. I had figured early on that a fantasy hero was normally artistic, well versed in folklore and - because of the need to be able to read the odd magical scroll - literate. I considered science to be mere chicanery that was attempting to undermine magic, dallied with religious education – after all you need the gods on your side when questing in chthonic halls - and consigned mathematics to the scrap heap. I could add, subtract, multiply and divide, but after being introduced to algebra at age 7 in what I considered to be a somewhat optimistic move in junior educational practices, knew that I was not destined be the next Pierre De Fermat. So long as I could work out my share of the treasure from an adventure, I was as happy as a hobbit in a tobacconist’s shop.
I was passable in metalwork, and was top of the class in needlework, beating 90 other kids with a blindingly impressive cross-stitch and flair for making quilted needle cases which is still talked about to this day in awe-filled reverence – although admittedly, only by me. I’d been encouraged to cook at home and at 13, could take the home economics teacher to the cleaner with my spaghetti bolognaise (this really happened when she tried to tell me - it was all about following blindly back then - how to make what was considered Bolognaise in 1958, and I was, despite being a timid kid, having none of it, particularly because we had to eat what we cooked and her recipe was from the Borgias cookery school.
So already, my skill set was looking good for a life spent adventuring in wild places, rescuing damsels and kicking the shit out of green skinned minorities. I was pretty sure, that if called upon to do so in the wilderness, I could knock up a pretty robust wyvern cassoulet or create a whole new career as a court poisoner.
In adult life, these are skills that make a chap a ‘renaissance man’ and a darling for the more refined ladies. Alas, in the world of the 1980s teenager they simply mark you out for an early death – or worse as ( in the parlance of my youth, and don't try to fucking correct me if you are a Millennial 'Woke' type... I'm older than you and have seen more than you ever will, because you shout out that everything you don't like or can't deal with is 'offensive'. ) ‘a right queer’ as the more literate of the Neanderthals who preyed upon the weak in my youth, would have put it. Who’s laughing now, eh? Probably the same Neanderthals, because they were so fucking thick, if you told them a joke at Christmas, they stopped laughing in July, having got it around Easter.
Little wonder then, that I never got the frisson of excitement that is supposed to mark out school as the best years of your life. I imagine that compared to being administered to by a trained torturer they possibly were just that. But,as T.D Torquemada didn’t get to Sheffield much, I have no historical benchmark to enable me to make a sound and balanced judgement. Of course, on the up side it meant that I did not have to bother building lasting relationships or competing with my peers.
There was the odd bit of concentrated bullying and a healthy kicking about twice a term, but, if I kept below the radar of contempt. this was pretty acceptable for the early 80s. It was a pattern that would not perceptibly alter until my final year, and then for all the wrong reasons. (This story will be told in a later post, fear not)
Therefore, apart from the bi-quarterly beatings, I was left to get on with the important things in my life, namely role-playing, reading and more role-playing. Did I mention role-playing?
Is really any surprise therefore, that I and a few others (for we were few indeed back then) sought to escape reality and the school of hard knocks, and spend our time down dungeons, leading regiments of pike and shot or zapping the fuck out of Klagnut Empire starships?
Of course not...
As I have already outlined, Alan and I had found Sheffield Runelords a good way down the line, having got our collective foot in the door at GW, and started (for better or worse at the time) to become recognised neophyte 'faces'.
We were, in 1982, heavily into the Holmes edition of the D&D system, and were collecting figures like mad. We were still a little way from Warhammer 1st edition and Games Workshop was a gold mine of stuff to get ourselves lost in.
We were in there one day, when Citadel released the Runequest figure sets and we were taken by the weirdness (this from someone who was comforagble with the idea of a hybrid of bear and owl, you understand) of the Ducks and Jack-O-Bears. We were still a way down the line from actually finding oput about the imeasurable pleasures of that game, but the amazing Perry sculpts, fantastic artwork and sense of something new to us, were powerful aphrodisiacs.
Alan, referred to them as Run-Ee-Kwest figures, which, when heard by Pete Armstrong - that late great mentor and tormentor - on duty for once at the entrance adjacent counter rather than his personal Minas Morgul of the 'figure bar;' at the rear of the store, caused Alan to be the victim of some serious verbal harrassment. I don't think Alan went in quite as often after that. I may be wrong as he certainly was there in '84, but I think he probably did go in less 'on a whim' as Pete and his partner in torment Chris Gilbride would literally ride the 'Limpets' like rodeo horses, if they could get their metaphorical spurs into their flanks.
It perhaps sounds cruel and unacceptable by modern standards, but some 45 years later, I'd pay money to witness those times again. Chris does still sometimes give me a 'workout' on social media, but to be there at that time was something you just can't recreate.
To be recognised in GW was to be a 'face' and to be a 'face' was to get some rough but a lot of smooth times. A carrier bag full of lead anyone? I'll say...
And this constant verbal bullying made us tougher. These guys were a few years older and learning to defend ourselves verbally against them made dealing with the arseholes at school easy - well easier, at least.
It would be some time before I would get the better of them, but it did happen in time and when it did it felt sooooo fuckinbg good, that I can still see it and feel it in my memory's eye as I type.
In the last 15 years or so, this has been renamed the Armstrong-Gilbride Method of Life Skills, and I like to think I was one of the earliest alumini of the first intake of students. I certainly graduated with a distinction.
Ah, me...
Well, if you will excuse me, I have to go and take a long soak with a couple of books on the Irish Catholic Confederates of the 1640s.
TTFN
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