Free from hormones, free from hang ups, free from trying to fit in, free from worrying about the future and not having enough past to regret anything? Primary school was a blast.
Primary school was actually an infant and junior school. Different Heads, different buildings but on the same large plot of land. Both felt like they had large playgrounds and large fields. We’d sit making daisy chains and there were cherry blossoms.
Herringthorpe wasn’t the fanciest of areas but the smell of grass and the pink petals scattered around the yard made it feel pretty lush to me.
The infant school was a low mass of corrugated iron (wall and I think roof) and a couple of temporary classrooms. Which sounds grim, but the corrugated iron was painted yellow and the whole interior smelled of playdough, polish and powder paint with just a reassuring hint of disinfectant.
The parquet floored hall was a focal point. There was a cardboard model of a birthday cake on the stage at the front. On your birthday the headteacher – Mrs Buist with resplendent bouffant hairdo – would call you to the front of the assembly and award you a sweet from within it.
I remember belting out We Are Sailing in assembly quite regularly. I knew this was to do with the Faulklands war although I didn’t really know what the Faulkland’s war was.
In that hall we’d do PE in our pants. By the time my little brother was there, the laundry chaos at home had reached critical mass with odd items of clothing finding their way into the wrong room and wardrobes. One of his resounding memories is looking down in PE to see his pants were frilly and had flowers on, “It was like one of those nightmares”.
My other brother also had a traumatic hall related event: he played Joseph in the nativity, got a bit overwhelmed by the occasion of it all and fainted at the birth.
The other kids were generally kind (apart from the one that kicked the door in of my toilet cubicle) and happy (apart from the crying child called Joy). I returned from having the chicken pox once and started to cry myself. I was allowed to sit outside beneath the cherry trees with friends while I felt better. We took our time in the sunshine; it was always sunny at primary school apart from the time it snowed and we spent the day making snowballs that got so big the whole class had to push them in order to get them moving.
There was a small bit of asphalt that had lifted in the corner of the playground to reveal a tiny lump of rock. I can still see the scene in my imagination of that rock growing into a volcano and overwhelming Rotherham. We must have played that game of pretend a lot.
I was put in amongst the academic kids. I was compliant and I learn well by listening and reading and to be honest if you do what you are told while looking attentive and like you are enjoying it all while being able to sit still then people will assume you know what you are doing even if you don’t: I made quite a decent living off that misguided assumption for a while.
The whole of infants went up to the juniors. Juniors was a larger, red brick building. The hall stood prominent in the centre with two wings going off either side. It had a similar smell to infants, similar flooring but this time I remember old radiators so hot they could burn your skin off and covered in bubbles of paint that you could pick off to find soft, gooy bits underneath.
Boys and girls mucked in together not too aware most of the time of too much difference between them. That started to change in the final year where I remember lists of who was the prettiest girl being past around by the boys. I was aware that I wasn’t on it but I was also proudly aware that I looked like a character on a kids TV show Marmalade Atkinson and so that was OK with me.
More peculiar in retrospect was – when laying the newspaper on the tables before art – the boys starting to squabble about who got the page 3 girl page on their table. Sounds grim. And it was grim. And it paved the way for all sorts of frustrations in my life as my life progressed. But also, they did just tend to draw a pair of specs on the tits, making them look like ginormous googly eyes which I always found quite funny.
We played a game called Jam Doughnut which involved catching someone, making them crouch down then all forming a human ring around them on the floor. THere was kiss catch and Tiggy Bob Down (you had to – you got it – bob down when you were tigged). Games of pretend continued: this time, if you ran round a bin three times it turned into a soldier that you had to escape from.
If you were naughty, you were sent under the clock – a clock at the bottom of steps that went up to the staff room and headmasters room. It was the school equivalent of the stocks but rather than villages throwing rotten cabbages at you, teachers would throw you filthy looks.
Is writing a memoir about confessing? I don’t know. But in case it is, I remember breaking a big metre long ruler and the teacher just assuming it was the boy who wasn’t compliant and couldn’t sit still and didn’t learn best by reading and me letting him take the blame. And I remember in the final year a mean streak developing – perhaps in a few of us, I’m not sure but certainly in me – and making up horrible songs in the playground about a girl who used to be my friend. We weren’t sent under the clock. There was a discussion in the heads office, the tone of which suggested it was all a bit out of character. I hope it was. Not that that would have made much difference to the girl.
The singing and playing on the one computer in the school as it was wheeled classroom to classroom and the reading comprehension and the plays and the mucking about. The boy being told off and asked to leave the classroom, striding out giving zero fucks while doing the Nazi march. Sitting in lines at story time plaiting each others hair. The spam fritters (LOVED THEM) and cold brown custard (HATED IT) stitch together into a mental patchwork memory blanket of happiness.
Primary culminated in an amazing sports day (YELLOWS WON. BLUES YOU LOSE.) and a one week trip to Whitby. We found fossils and stood under the Whale Jaw and played on the rocks. A couple of years ago, I took my kids there. We did the same and the fact the kids seemed to like it as much as I did when I was just a little younger than them made me very happy.
When I’d left for Secondary and later six form I’d now and then bump into old Herringthorpe school pals, often down the massive night club called The Zone. You’d both sort of revert to childhood, grinning at the memory of it all, seeing each other as who we were then clueless as to what was going on in our lives or minds now. It was sunny good times to see them.
Cogito Ergo Mum 