TWO

‘I mean, I really cannot understand what on earth possessed you . . .’

I thought that Max had forgotten it. She had given me a good ten minutes of earbashing as we bumped over the field and parked, a ticking-off that had subsided only gradually; suddenly, as we approached the main entrance to the school (feeling exhausted, hot and dusty, as if we’d been for a three-day hike in Death Valley), she had started up again. ‘I don’t like people like that,’ I reiterated. ‘They’re the kind of people who run golf clubs for their own convenience, and who run for the council as if it was their own personal fiefdom . . . And who become traffic wardens.’

‘They do a necessary job.’

‘But they do it with such glee! It’s people like him’ – I indicated my friend who was still imperiously directing cars into the Outback while close behind him there were acres of available parking – ‘who formed the small but essential cogs in the Nazi war machine.’

And Max did then what only Max can do, which was to deflate me with a giggle and a very accurate observation. ‘You sound like your father.’

We entered the foyer of the school; or rather, Max entered it and I stalked into it. Some surly looking yobbo with a fuzzy felt moustache, a shirt with a phobia of underpants and a tie contorted into what was then popularly known as a ‘Double Windsor’ thrust a programme at me, his expression suggesting that he was secretly wishing that it was a Bowie knife. We moved on into the main hall. Most of what was happening tonight was of no interest to us. This was primarily an evening when the parents could talk to their offspring’s teachers although, to be more accurate, it was usually the teachers who did the talking. Mr Arthur Silsby was the headmaster, and had been for as long as I could remember; he was a patient of the practice and thus I knew that he was a dedicated man, always keen to do his best for the school and the children. Tonight, he had laid on a variety of exhibitions, displays and demonstrations to show that Bensham Manor not just an upgraded secondary modern, it was a shining example of comprehensive education. Thus, in the art department, we would be able to find hundreds of pictures, sculptures, collages and pasta mosaics, in the gymnasium we could marvel at an unrivalled demonstration of backward rolls, flips, handstands and ‘crabs’ and in the newly constructed science wing we would be blinded by flashes, deafened by bangs and electrocuted by static electricity.

In the hall in which Max and I found ourselves, there were rows of desks alternating with rows of chairs; the teachers sat at the desks hiding behind piles of loose-leaf folders, the parents either sat in front of them like nervous applicants for a job or waited on the rows of chairs, the women gossiping, the men looking as if they were hacked off that they were missing that night’s Starsky and Hutch, scattered pupils resembling zombies on the point of attack. All of which found me appalled and intrigued in equal measures. Wherever I looked, the faces were uniformly bored and I found myself wondering just what, precisely, was the point of this ritual? I remembered it from the point of the children, but the memory was no happier than the vista before me; it was one of ennui leavened by slight trepidation that one or more of the teachers (usually the geography teacher, I recall) was going to tell my parents exactly what he thought of me. Through this whole melange stalked the tall, slightly stooped figure of Mr Silsby, his face bearing a mask of worry, clearly terrified that something could go so easily wrong.

We pushed through the hall, heading for the small garden at the back of the gymnasium that Dad had spent the last three months preparing and planting with the help of a dozen or so of the less academically bright final year children. He had become really enthusiastic about the project, telling us over Sunday dinners (always a joint of meat or a chicken, accompanied by roast potatoes, roast parsnips and two green veg, together with a side order of enough saturated fat to cause his drains to clog up regularly) how the sprouts were doing, that the soft fruits had blight or that the runner beans were a beauty to behold. During these eulogies, he would wave his eating implements around, depositing small flecks of gravy and minuscule servings of vegetables around the table; we had learned long ago never to wear our best when breaking bread with Dad.

In the gymnasium, children of assorted shapes and sizes performed various gymnastic manoeuvres with greater or lesser skill and success, supervised by a tall but thin woman of about forty or so with short dark brown hair, big eyes and a slight pout; she wore tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt. There were perhaps thirty parents looking on.

As we walked past, Max murmured, ‘Bet she’s a lesbian.’

I was shocked. ‘Max! I didn’t know you knew of such things.’

‘My old PE teacher was definitely one. She used to wander around the changing rooms and the showers, pretending she was there to make sure that we weren’t whipping each other with wet towels, but in reality she was perving on the naked girls. Makes my flesh crawl.’

‘They all prowl the changing rooms,’ I pointed out. ‘They’re supposed to. It’s in the job description that they have to make the pupils feel inadequate, terrified and slightly sick.’

‘Then they’re all homosexuals and lesbians.’

It seemed that there was no arguing with her.

On the far side of the gymnasium, a side door had been opened and it was through this, at the rear of the school, that we found Dad. He was talking animatedly to a small group of parents, explaining, no doubt, the intricacies of pricking out, how to make your carrots grow straight (one of his favourites) and the evils of parsnip canker. Half a dozen youths – large boys and pubescent girls – were variously showing off some of the produce that had come from the garden; impressive looking lettuces, juicy red tomatoes, salad onions and baskets of new potatoes. Both Max and I were impressed and I felt pleased for Dad that he had made such a success of the venture; I had the impression that this was probably something of a triumph over the odds. Certainly the location was not totally what I would have called hospitable; the vegetable plot was situated at the base of a brick wall that was five feet high and topped with broken glass; it was heavily and garishly graffitied, not something I found particularly pleasant on the eye. One good thing about the plot was that it was south-facing, although the slight problem with that was that for most of the day the sun was blocked out by the edifice of the gymnasium on the other side, about twenty yards distant, and also badly defaced by graffiti; in the intervening gap was a cinder running track, as well as areas for the long jump, the high jump and the shot put; the grass around these was browned and weed-strewn. It all had something of the air of a prison backyard.