Primary School

The Heart

At the heart of it all, at the very centre of everything, is a boy.

He is seven or eight years old, and he stands in his accustomed position, facing the wall with his hands over his face, wishing it would stop.

Through his tears and the gaps in his fingers he looks at the pink, sparkling granite, the ridge of mortar between the irregular shaped blocks of stone, the sandstone window ledge just above his eye level and tries to block them out.

He has no idea when it started, or why, just that this is where he stands every day whenever he is in the playground, while everyone he knows in the world who isn't either an adult or a relative stands around him in a semi circle, chanting, laughing, occasionally pushing or kicking him.

He doesn't understand why everyone seems to hate him, he never does anything but try to be friends, to fit in, but every little attempt is seized upon and turned around, twisted to make him once more the target.

If he should dare to lash out, as he occasionally does when it all gets too much, it is greeted with wild laughter and cat calls, intensifying the torture even further.

If one of these wild flails should actually connect then he is plunged into an even deeper hell of recriminations, calls of,

“What did you do that for?!” or,

“You can give it but you can't take it.”

All he wants is for it to stop, but it never does.

Muncaster Church of England primary school was exactly a mile from my house, uphill all the way except for the last hundred yards when the road sloped down again briefly before a last climb to its peak, about 50 yards beyond the school. The school itself was part of a small row of buildings along the left hand side of the road, beginning with the local Police Constable’s house which backed on to the infants yard, and finishing with two semi-detached cottages backing on to the juniors playground. Also adjoining the juniors playground was the headmasters house. Across the road from the school was the gatehouse and entrance for Muncaster Castle, our school was part of the Castle's estate.

I have vague memories of my first few days there. Because we were a rural community, there was no such thing as a nursery school, instead you started at Muncaster aged three and went two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The infants classroom was divided into three tables – Big, Middle and Small, which was the table you were on until you graduated from Nursery status to Infant status aged five and moved up to Middle Table.

My first real memory of the room is me standing next to Small Table in some confusion as to what is going on. My birthday is in June and so I must have been one of the last to arrive that year, I don't feel like I know anyone in the room at all and a girl called S. who is Canadian and lives on a catamaran on the estuary is telling me it's time for maths. I don't even know what maths is.

The first year must have been ok, however, as at the end of it I told my parents I wouldn't go back unless I could go full time. The county council were approached, and a special dispensation was made for me to go to school every day of the school week rather than just the two.

The two classrooms at Muncaster were joined by a large central room which served multiple purposes. Assembly, PE, music, TV, school plays and of course lunch, served by the cook through a hatch from the kitchen and distributed by the dinnerlady to the various tables of children.

Assembly was held every morning by the Headmaster in front of the whole school, a massive twenty-three children when I first started that slowly dwindled to just seven by the time they closed the school when I was nine. By that time we were all in the juniors classroom together and the cook and dinnerlady were long gone, leaving the one woman who had been a constant throughout my time there, Mrs B., as our sole adult supervision.

Mrs B. was a tall thin woman with one kidney. Her husband worked for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd at nearby Sellafield and she would constantly rail against the people in the media who dared to criticise the safety of Nuclear Power. If one of the children dared to repeat something they had seen on TV or that their parents had said that criticised the industry then she would treat them to the full extent of her wrath, scorn and sarcasm.

When I arrived at Muncaster, Mrs B. was the infants teacher, replaced occasionally by supply teachers when she had to make trips to hospital for the treatment of her kidney disorder, there were three or four of these ladies, one of whom, Mrs C., a kind and loving, nurturing teacher, is the only adult I remember from the school with any degree of affection, other than the cleaner.

The headmaster taught the juniors, and while I progressed from table to table we went through three such men, Mr F., a classic British teacher with half moon glasses and a quick temper who cried during his retirement ceremony in the dining room; Mr Fr., tall, dark haired and ultra strict, who made all his charges start any statement addressed to him with “Please Sir,” and finish with “Sir.” (“Please sir, yes sir, it did sir”); and Mr R., tall skinny and bald with a friendly smile.

After the departure of Mr R., Mrs B. was elevated to the position of Headmistress and moved to the Junior classroom, coincidentally at the same time that I and my class mates from Big Table moved through there too. Leaving one of the supply teachers, Miss H., short and rotund with mousey, bobbed hair and a lovely temperament, to look after what remained of the dwindling infant class.

During the years in the infant classroom Mrs B. had shown her temper and intolerance to us on many occasions. She ruled by embarrassment, and the fear of it. If you found something difficult to grasp she would eventually stand you up and tell everyone in the classroom how stupid you were. If a child were to commit the cardinal sin of wetting themselves at their table, usually out of fear of asking to go to the toilet, then she would vent her anger by telling the classroom what a baby they were, sometimes even questioning the ability of their parents to bring up their own children.

Once, when one of the boys from the village was taken out of the school by their parents and sent to the Catholic school in nearby Seascale. Mrs B. dedicated weeks to the constant slandering of both child and parents, along with the school and Catholics in general.

I. B. was two years older than me, his mother was the dinner lady and he was my first bully. I have scattered memories of encounters with him while I was in the infant classroom, by the time I was on middle table, he had moved up to the juniors so I only saw him in the dinner room or outside school, and that was infrequently as I lived in Ravenglass and he lived in Broad Oak, a hamlet several miles away. I once stood up to him, it was in the infants room, he was pushing me and saying mean things and I just lashed out a punch that landed square in the middle of his face. There was a split second of abject terror while the shock of what had just happened registered across his face and then suddenly he was shaking my hand saying, “Good punch mate, brilliant.” and then he left.

I'm pretty sure he was the ringleader when I moved up to the juniors, certainly once he left for secondary school, the torment ended, for a little while.

I can see, smell, feel even taste the wall in my mind as clear as if it were yesterday, the ridge that ran through the middle of the mortar between the granite blocks, the pink and black facets in the granite that made it sparkle even on a cloudy day, the sandstone lintel that made up the bottom of one of the classroom windows.

We would be sent out to play and the taunting would start almost immediately, sometimes I would chase the entire group around the playground, crying and lashing out but never able to actually catch them while they all laughed hysterically, sometimes we might actually be able to play some game or other where I was able to join in but invariably I would say some innocent thing that one of them would seize upon and then I would end up by the wall, two or three inches away, with my hands over my face, just waiting for playtime to be over so as I could return to the relative safety of the classroom. Sometimes, now that I have started to think about it properly, I step outside the boy and look at him from above or from the road that runs along the edge of the playground. He stands there looking so small and helpless and I just cry and cry. I wish I could step in, to tell them to stop, to hug him and tell him it's ok. But I can't and the pain is unbearable.

Whenever I visit my parents as an adult, I will invariably end up driving past the school, now a country guest house, a number of times. Every single time, my eyes fix on that one spot on the wall where I would stand and my heart will fill with sadness as I mourn that child’s happiness.

Whenever things get difficult in my life from this time onwards. Through the hell of secondary school, throughout all my relationships, throughout all my work, whenever there's an argument or I feel under pressure, then in my minds eye I see the wall through my tear stained fingers and I freeze, hoping it will all go away, that if I just stand here quietly, it will stop. This is why I don't do well in arguments, particularly domestic ones.

In the infants, my mum would take me to school and pick me up, usually pushing her bike on the way there in the morning so as she could free-wheel back to the village on the way home. In the afternoons at the end of school, there would usually be a group of mums from Ravenglass all together, and a big gang of us would all walk back down the hill, it was almost always a happy and carefree time, where the kids would walk along the top of bankings or down our own secret paths at the edge of the woods next to the pavement. I remember laughing a lot.

By the juniors, I was walking or cycling to and from the school by myself. I would set off alone and walk the mile to the school with an ever increasing sense of foreboding, wondering how long I would have before somebody would begin the chanting and I would end up at the wall.

Once, I set off from our house with such dread, that I couldn't even start up the hill. I couldn't go, I felt physically sick with the prospect of another day of abuse looming over me. I couldn't just go home and say I didn't want to go, I had tried telling my parents I was being picked on once and it hadn't worked, so, about 50 yards from the end of our path, I saw a concrete fence post planted at the side of the road. I went to it and scraped from the bridge to the end of my nose up and down it until blood began to flow and then turned around and went home, telling my mum that I'd tripped and fallen on the way. It hurt like hell but at least I didn't have to go to school that day. I was no more than eight years old.

The junior classroom, like the infants, had three tables, these were named, in a rather more grown up fashion, Bottom, Middle and Top. By the time I reached Top, there were only seven children left in the school and we were all in the one room. When I was on Bottom though, the room was still relatively full and every person in it, excepting Mrs B., would be in the semi-circle around me at the wall at playtimes.

It was regularly remarked by all the children that Mrs B. had gone power mad when she became headmistress, someone had heard the word, 'megalomaniac' and it was bandied around a lot. Certainly her outbursts of public humiliation grew worse and worse. One boy, A. G., of whom I was terrified, was stood up by her almost daily so that she could tell the class how “stupid” he was, how he “refused” to learn, how getting him to work was “like getting blood from a stone”. Poor A. would be kept in at playtimes and made to do extra work, we would look in through the windows to see the two of them physically fighting. One day, as the end of his last year at Muncaster approached, she stood him up and told us all how she was having him sent to a “Special School” rather than Millom, the school everyone else went to, it was a school for other kids who “refused to learn”. A. stood there, bright red, staring at his feet while she looked on with her hateful smile, clearly relishing her victory over this insolent ten year old child. Within the first term of his time at the “Special School”, A. was diagnosed as being dyslexic.

At some point during my time on Bottom Table, a new girl arrived in the village, S. H.. She was red haired, with freckles, very pretty, with a beautiful smile and a slight lisp. At her previous school she had already learned to do joined up writing in a cursive script that Mrs B. was extremely impressed with. She went on about it so much that one Friday I decided that I too would learn to write joined up before Mrs B. had taught us to and therefore impress her and be praised in front of the class like S. had been. I made it my mission to have learnt how to do this by the time we returned to school on the following Monday.

All that weekend I had my parents show me how to join letters together and I practised and practised. It wasn't quite the fancy cursive style that Susan had but I was sure that my initiative would impress Mrs B. still.

On Monday morning we had some piece of writing to do and I of course set to with my new grown up style. I handed my piece in with everyone else, smiling and excited about the congratulations I was surely about to receive.

This wasn't, however, how things turned out.

A look of utter fury crossed Mrs B.’s face before she commanded me to stand up.

“And what is this supposed to be?” she sneered at me.

“Umm, joined up writing Mrs B.,”

“Who do you think you are? Really, who do you think you are? What do you think you were doing?!” (big grins and barely muffled sniggers all round the class)

“...”

“This is nothing more than joined script, not cursive. This is common, and badly done, you think you're all big and clever don't you? Well this is terrible and you are not big or clever. SIT DOWN!”

I sat down, with tears running down my face, numb from the shock of my good idea going so badly wrong. I looked around the room and all I could see were people looking at me and laughing while all I could hear was Mrs B. re-telling S. how wonderful her writing was.

The way in and out of the school, to the car park which served both it and Muncaster Castle, was through the gate at the top of the infants playground. To get to this from the juniors you followed a path around the edge of the school furthest from the road, not very long, but considerably longer than the patch which went up the other side of the school, between the kitchen and the wall that ran along the road. This directly connected the two playgrounds but was, for some unspecified reason, forbidden.

For a little while L. D. and I took to ducking down beneath the windows when we left school in the afternoons and running up the forbidden path, thus beating everyone else to the car park by about twenty seconds. We got away with this for a while until one day, as I rounded the corner of the building, Mrs B. stepped out of the kitchen doorway to catch us, obviously having got wise to what we were doing. L. was lucky enough to realise what had happened before he got to the corner of the building and so wasn't caught, he turned and fled the proper way. I stood there while Mrs B. hissed that she would deal with me later, then walked dejectedly around the other edge of the school. This was going to be bad.

The next day at assembly, I was brought to stand at the front, facing the rest of the school. For what seemed like hours Mrs B. stood and told everyone what a bad person I was, how I felt I was “better than everyone else in the school”, how I felt that “Rules don't apply to me” and how I needed to be “Taken down a peg or two”. She went on and on while I stared at my feet because every time I looked up, all I could see were gleeful smiles. My cheeks burned, tears pricked my eyes. Eventually I was told to sit back down. My punishment for this heinous crime was, as I clearly felt I was above them in some way, to be separated from the rest of the juniors. I was banished back to the infants classroom where I sat by myself on a small table in the library part of their classroom. I wouldn't have minded this at all, but for the fact I was regularly summoned down to the juniors for humiliation and also that play times were still spent in the juniors playground, facing the wall. The humiliations would usually take the form of one of the kids from Top Table, being sent to tell me “Mrs B. wants to see you”, a message always delivered with a big grin. Often it was for the weekly spelling or multiplication test, but they always neglected to tell me this. I would arrive in the juniors class room to a statement along the lines of “Here IT is at last” from Mrs B., she would then say it was time for the test. I would then say I had to go back to get my pencil which would infuriate her still more, commanded to run I would hear her telling the rest of the room how useless I was and how she didn't even know why she bothered with me. I would return and after another bout of abuse the test would commence, followed by playtime. Obviously everyone would have plenty of ammunition from my recent public humiliation to keep me facing the wall throughout the playtime.

I've no idea how long I spent on my own table in the infants, it seemed like a year, I guess it was probably about a term.

Outside of the school yard, things were generally ok, for some reason the abuse only ever took place within the confines of the school. This was maybe partly due to I. B. living far enough away from Ravenglass for him not to be a part of our regular social circle, although I don't know this for sure. Anyway, as an only child, I was more than able to entertain myself and if things started to take a turn for the worse I would play alone. I had several dens that were mine alone, that I never even told anyone else about, mainly near to my house and the station of the narrow gauge steam railway that I lived on. I would play out imaginary games which usually involved me suddenly discovering that I was actually a prince or even a king or that I was a knight of old or lived alone far from any other human contact. I was also exceptionally good at playing board games by myself, some times playing Monopoly as four separate players usually on behalf of various stuffed toys, generally I would have a favourite in any game that I would pretend I wasn't helping to win, but I could happily play board games by myself for hours on end.

I would also wander around the various sheds and offices of the railway, looking for 'jobs' and ways to 'help' people. Most of the people who worked on the railway had known me since I was born, my mum and dad had met working there and indeed my mum still ran the stores for the two gift shops that were at either end of the seven mile line up to Eskdale. Our house, the station house at Ravenglass, came with her job and we lived there from when I was about eighteen months old until she quit her job when I was about twenty-three.

By the time I reached Top Table, my penultimate year of primary school, There were just seven children left at Muncaster. Ravenglass seemed to be a village in it's death throws. As the older generations slowly died off, their houses were bought as holiday homes that were lived in for two weeks a year, the community was dying and there were less and less kids. It was decided that Muncaster would close and that the remaining children would move to Waberthwaite, the next nearest school. During our last summer term at Muncaster we would be driven up to Waberthwaite a couple of times a week so as we could integrate with all the new, unknown children. There were forty-two children at Waberthwaite and it seemed massive, especially as everyone shared the same playground. The noise was unbelievable.

We had our last days at Muncaster, a school photo taken in exactly the spot where I had spent all that time facing the wall, and we were presented with a Bible to help us through the rest of our lives.

I never saw Mrs B. again, and never wanted to.

The headmaster at Waberthwaite was Mr D., a lovely man with a kind smile who was both easy going but commanded a deep respect from the children, he rarely got angry and on those times when he did, we would feel bad for having upset him. The only time he would talk about you in front of the class would be if you had done well. If you needed a reprimand, it would be done quietly but firmly by his desk so no one else could hear. That year at Waberthwaite was one of the happiest of my entire school life.