Famous At Eleven

and my darkly comical 1980s school days

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If you follow my work you’ll know that I write about a lot of different topics. Many tie into the current cultural issues coming from my GenX perspective.

However, I am also going to be embarking on more personal anecdotal autobiographical pieces and am going to be dipping my toes into some short personal stories about my life. This is the first.

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Chapter One - Fame and Misfortune

It was a drizzly weekday morning in November 1982, I was at home with my Mum and we were waiting for a reporter from the local newspaper to come round to interview us.

I had my least crappy clothes on and my mum had told me to brush my hair to make it tidier.

When the reporter lady arrived we sat down in the living room and she started asking me questions. I didn’t say much. My mum did most of the talking. The lady pulled out a notepad and pen from her bag and started by asking me how I felt about not being at school for so long and being alone at home most days. I shrugged and said “It’s ok I suppose”. My Mum glared at me and interjected “Well you have been having those nightmares haven’t you?” I looked at her and she stared intensely into my eyes, urging me to agree. “Yes. I have” I lied. Then my Mum took over and started explaining about how I was traumatised by the ordeal of not being at school and how it was weighing down on me emotionally. This was all news to me.

After the interview, we went into the kitchen and the lady got a fancy camera out of her bag and took photos of me and Mum sitting at the kitchen table. My mum laid out books onto the table to make it look like I was studying. We sat together and the lady told me to look at the books and hold my pen, while my Mum lent in closely to me, pointed at the page looking at me “lovingly”. It was supposed to be a photo of my Mum “homeschooling” me.

The whole thing was completely staged of course. My mum hadn’t been “homeschooling” me at all.

Also, this was one of the few moments in my life that I remember my Mum sitting that close to me and actually putting her arm around me. It was weird.

If you’re wondering what is going on here, let me explain.

In my last year of junior school, like every other kid in the country, I had to choose what secondary school I wanted to go and fill out a form putting down my school choices. I really wanted to go to the school most of my friends were going to. It was a little bit of a rough school but was very near my house. My parents had different ideas. They didn’t want me to go to this school, so put a different school down which was further away. I didn’t want to go to this other school. But I wasn’t asked.

The other school was near where we used to live when I was much younger. It was a school my Mum knew as she had worked in the pub next to the school as a bartender for a while and she liked all the teachers who would come in. I don’t think my parents’ choice was based solely on that. The school had a reasonably good reputation, so I do understand their reasoning. But the local council refused their choice and assigned me to the local school. My parents were fuming and “appealed” this. The appeal was refused. So they then had a fight with the local council that went on for months.

Apparently, the school they wanted to send me to was oversubscribed and out of our “catchment area”. But that didn’t deter my parents and they dug their heels in and said that they were going to keep me at home in protest, until I got a place there. I don’t know the full details of the fight, but there was another school that they offered to us, which was, apparently, almost the same distance away. So on the grounds of this, and some other technicalities, my parents were advised that they had a good case.

For me however, all my friends were going to this local school and I didn’t have a school to go to. I just chose not to think about it too much and the summer holidays rolled on quite unremarkably for me. I just got on with it going out on my roller-skates and bike on the council estate I grew up on.

To set the scene and give you an idea of when this was, that summer “Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners” was number one here in the UK forever! I hated the bloody song and still do. But it was inescapable and everywhere. I didn’t understand the whole dungarees and hairy armpits thing. But that’s a whole other conversation.

When September came and all my friends were starting their new school, at first I was really worried about this. Both my parents worked and I would be alone at home, Monday to Friday during the daytime. But I very quickly got used to this and started to love my time alone at home. I would listen to music, make my own lunch, read, watch TV, pop out to the local shop for snacks. I was QUEEN of the castle. I loved it. I didn’t even want my parents to get home, I was enjoying my time alone so much.

After the piece was published in the local newspaper with that awfully pretentious posed photograph, the council gave in, and I got a place at the school of their choice. My parents had won. It was late November and I had been home alone for almost three months.

I remember going to the school uniform shop to get my new uniform. Navy blue v-neck jumper, white starched shirts with collars, a gold/yellow tie, a navy blazer with the school coat of arms on the front pocket and a blue kilt. Only the special school blue kilt had to be ordered and would take a couple of weeks to arrive. So I wore this old “red kilt” I owned (that I hated) as a temporary substitute.

About a week before my first day at my new school, we travelled to the school and met the reporter again there. I wore my new school uniform (with the ghastly red kilt) and it was a blustery cold November morning. I stood in front of the school in the wind, freezing my arse off. I had to hold onto the railing of the school gate in front of the school sign and smile while she took photos of me. My hair was blowing all over the place and I stood there with a fake smile plastered across my face, that looked more like a strained grimace as I squinted in the wind. I looked like a right bloody twat. And that hideous photo ended up being HUGE and on the front page of the local free newspaper that was posted through every single front door in the whole borough. I don’t remember the exact wording of the headline, but it was something about a local family “winning”. I certainly didn’t feel like I was “winning”. I hated the whole thing.

Then came my first day at the new, supposedly amazing school that my parents had gone through so much trouble to get me into. I had to sit in the school office downstairs waiting on my own while the year head teacher went off for what seemed like ages. When she came back, she said “Right! Come with me” and she marched me off purposefully across the school. She didn’t say a word to me. I just followed her. The school seemed massive to me. We went through corridors, a big hall, up flights of stairs and we finally arrived at a classroom door that she briskly knocked on and swung open. It was well into the first lesson of the school day.

As we walked in, she had a quiet word with the teacher who nodded as I stood at the front of the classroom awkwardly looking around at the kids who had at this point, all stopped what they were doing and were gawping at me. The head teacher introduced me to the class and I stood there and kind of apprehensively gave a little wave and said “hello”. One of the kids shouted “she was on the front page of the newspaper!” to which all the other kids started howling with laughter. It turned out the whole class had seen that dreaded piece. Of course they had. Another kid said “look at her kilt!” and the kids laughed even more. I was mortified. The head teacher said “That’s enough!” And the kids quietened down a bit. She nodded to the class teacher and left. The kids started up again as the teacher tried to quieten down the class, pointed to an empty desk and told me to sit down.

The girl sitting next to me whispered in my ear. “Undo your blazer and top button and loosen your tie”. I looked at her and said “Why?” She said “because you look like a stiff”. Stiff? What was all this about? Was she serious? It seemed insane to me. But I complied. I took out my nice new pencil box out of my bag and put it on my desk. She then looked at it and started laughing “you better put that away too!” I said “why?” She said “Because it’s too posh and won’t last round here. Just get a pen out. That’s all you need”. So I complied.

And so she and a few of her friends took me under their wing.

The next few weeks was a crash course in figuring out what not to do to stand out like a sore thumb. But I did stand out and there was bugger all I could do about it. Everyone in that school had seen my photo on that newspaper. There was no escape.

I didn’t know where any of the classrooms were. I wasn’t given a timetable. I had no idea what was going on. The teachers had no time to explain anything to me and were generally really stressed out just trying to keep the chaos and noise down in lessons and be heard. I felt like I was a burden to them. They didn’t really know what to do with me, and what’s more, I soon figured out that you don’t go to the teacher for anything. They were the teachers. It was us and them.

The whole experience was like the wild west. I just quietly fumbled around, watching the other kids and trying to figure out how to behave in this new, chaotic, “Lord of the Flies”, feral world I was thrown into. My junior school was very small, cosy and sweet. This was a huge school and was very “uncosy”.

It didn’t help that my “new friends” would deliberately send me to the wrong classrooms for a laugh and steal my bag, empty out the contents and throw my belongings around or trash them. But they were all I had and believe it or not, they were actually the nice ones.

So I just played along and laughed it off. I didn’t hate them. They “could” be really kind to me one minute, but then sabotage me the next. I never really knew where I stood with them and I found them really hard to get my head around. But as a general rule, they were nice to me when they were on their own with me, but when they all got together, they would show-off in front of each other and mob mentality would set in. I learned a lot about human nature that year.

But I got used to it all and they were funny. I know this seems like a weird thing to say considering. But they were. Even when I was the butt of their jokes, the jokes were “funny”. They were also very entertaining and not boring. They were characters. It was a roller coaster ride. Never a dull moment. I just had to toughen up and roll with it. I had no choice.

When I went home to my parents I didn’t tell them any of this. They were just so happy I was in this school, I didn’t want to burst their bubble. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the school they had so fervently fought to get me into, wasn’t at all what they thought it was. They would have freaked out if they knew what was going on in that school. They had no idea.

So I just cherry picked my stories and told them what they wanted to hear.

Later on, when I did try and gently explain to them what was going on for me at school (it got worse), they just outright called me a liar. So there was little point getting into it.

And so the template had been set for the next few years at secondary school and problems at home. It turns out, first impressions really do matter and I could never really shake off how I started at that school. It followed me for five years. I was the “posh kid”. Which was weird really because I grew up on one of the most crappy estates in the borough and had WAY less money and “stuff” than most of my friends. But I had gone to a semi-decent junior school and actually “read books”. What a weirdo.

But most importantly, I was that kid who was on the front page of the newspaper. The kids were under the impression that because of this, I was some kind of attention seeker who thought I was special and better than them. I didn’t. Far from it. But there was nothing I could do to shake off this reputation. Trying made everything worse. So I gave up and by the end of my school days didn’t care and stopped trying to please anyone. Not the kids. Not the teachers and certainly not my parents. So I just became comfortable with just doing my own thing.

I’m sure a therapist nowadays would have a field day with all this. There’s so much to unravel. But for me this was just my life. This was normal. It was only later in life when I started telling people about all this that I realised that none of this was normal.

But learning early that I could be self-reliant and it was okay to “not fit in” would prove to be a very useful superpower going forward. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this at the time but in retrospect I can actually laugh about all this. There is a dark comedy to it all.

To be continued……

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