Here are the things I learned from playgroup:
Anthony owned that playgroup. So much so, he didn’t even need a surname. Like all true leaders – Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Chico – a second, family name was superfluous.
The playgroup that Anthony presided over was brutal – feudal – like a toddler’s version of Game of Thrones. Justice was swift and merciless. Get on the wrong side of Anthony and he would bite your face, drive a buggy into your knees or smash a Fisher-Price My First Medical Kit over your head. The day he did the latter was, coincidentally, the day I discovered irony.
I don’t know why Anthony and I hit it off. Perhaps I was the much-needed moderate queen to his despotic king. Perhaps my pudding-bowl fringe screamed, ‘I was put on this earth to be your henchman.’ Perhaps he was just looking for someone happy to go around saying ‘Sorry’ after he’d battered and smacked his way around the group. I don’t know. All I know is that he hated everyone else. But he loved me.
Anthony’s modus operandi was to be the first to everything: every toy, every experience, every break-time snack. I remember the teachers once organized a tea party. A vast array of sandwiches and scones and cakes sat on a gingham tablecloth behind glass doors in a prescient sign of what awaited me in adulthood. No sooner had those glass doors opened than Anthony steamed in, elbowing everybody out of his way, whereupon he firmly pressed his dirty thumbs into every snack in sight. There wasn’t an egg-and-cress bap without his DNA on it, nor a square of Nimble without his fingerprints embedded deep into the dough.
I looked on with a mixture of awe and dread. It was like watching a rogue Staffie cock his leg against the opulent fruits de mer display at Harrods Food Hall – half of me was appalled, the other half applauded the sheer, glorious chutzpah of it all.
Anthony’s finest hour came when the playgroup’s new slide arrived. We’d been promised this new toy for weeks, and there it was in all its magnificent wooden glory. His eyes burned as he saw it wheeled into place. I could hear the cogs of his brain whirring, trying to figure out how best to stamp his authority on his peers once and for all. The teachers moved the slide into its new home, and just as they stood back to admire their work Anthony launched himself at the steps for the inaugural descent. Before the teachers could so much as shout his name, he had made his way down the chute and was standing for applause at the bottom.
Immediately I knew something was wrong. Pure instinct. Like when a rabbit sits up, alert in a field, and knows it’s being stalked. Something told me I didn’t want to go down that slide any more, and so I let my friends jostle past me to the front of the queue. Sure enough a few seconds later there was a loud cry. We all crowded around the slide to find a poor girl called Melissa stranded midway down, legs akimbo, buttocks seemingly glued to the wood.
I shot a glance at Anthony. The front of his trousers was soaked through. He had wilfully, deliberately pissed himself all the way down the slide. One thing I did know: wet slide, no glide. Not so much a scorched earth as a damp chute policy. And very effective it was too. Nobody but Anthony ever went on it again.
I don’t know what happened to Anthony. He disappeared from my life as forcefully as he’d arrived. Back then he was deemed a ‘little character’; nowadays he’d go by the slightly longer label of ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disordered, oppositionally defiant’. I imagine he’s now either in a penthouse office at Canary Wharf running Europe’s finances or drawing pictures with crayons using his feet in a rubber room somewhere in a secure facility. With Anthony it could have gone either way.
After playgroup, Mum and Dad decided to send me to the local Catholic school.
|
Dad: |
Ronnie Corbett’s children were at that school with you. |
|
|
Me: |
Is that pertinent? |
|
|
Dad: |
No, it’s name-dropping. |
The school in question was a little convent outfit in Sanderstead, just where the concrete of Croydon met the manicured park life of Surrey suburb. There were trees and front lawns and everything felt neat and clean.
The most exciting thing that could possibly happen at our school (or indeed I imagine at any school) was someone cracking their head open on the playground. We’d heard about this – someone said, ‘Nicholas fell and cracked his head open.’ Open. We imagined a head split in two, with blood and brains spilling out of it, and sat around in gangs at break praying for it to happen until the sight of a wimple sent us rushing back to class.
The nuns were a terrifying bunch led by Head Horror Sister Mary Dorothy. Sister Mary was old-school strict with an old-school belief in right or wrong – and by old-school I mean MEDIEVAL. It was bad enough I was a brunette (mildly satanic) with short hair (sorcerer’s overtones), but the crunch point came when she discovered I was also left-handed (aka the full Beelzebub). Every time I sat down to eat in the school hall I found myself surrounded by wimpled women telling me to swap my cutlery around. Nineteen seventies beefburgers were rigid offerings at the best of times, but try cutting into one with a weak right hand that has never used a knife before. My brain would hurt and my fingers ache, but every time I tried to swap the utensils back, the nuns would descend again until I became exhausted and confused and tearful.
I started getting skinny. I started resisting going to school of a morning and became paranoid at mealtimes, wondering why my parents didn’t swoop on me when I picked up my knife and fork in my usual fashion. Finally, Mum managed to get the truth out of me. Dad went very quiet. You only ever worried about Dad when he went very quiet. The next day he went in and ‘had a word’ with Sister Mary Dorothy, which involved backing her against a wall and telling her to leave his daughter alone. Effectively, he went a bit Liam Neeson on her ass. It’s easy to see why – ask my dad to splay his fingers, and two on each hand are battered out of shape courtesy of the ceaseless rectifying ministrations of the Brothers of Holy Joe’s School for Boys in 1940s Beulah Hill.
The other thing the nuns loved to do was make you finish your food. Not because there were starving kids in the world – oh no, they didn’t seem too concerned with all that. No, they simply wanted to see a five-year-old face down in cold tapioca or collapsed in a puddle of viscous, greasy gravy.
One day I got locked into a war of attrition with a starchy ball of Smash instant mashed potato, which had been delivered lovelessly from the clutches of an ice-cream scoop. It sat there, and so did I. Neither of us moved. Neither of us was going anywhere. Sister Mary Dorothy did her rounds of the hall, wordlessly peering at our plates and dismissing those lucky enough to have finished. I had not finished. As she walked by, I nonchalantly flicked a lump of potato off my fork, which landed, by accident rather than design, just feet in front of her.
She carried on, polished shoes clicking on the polished floor, until her toes hit the tattie slime.
The rest was pure poetry.
My classmates watched as the Bride of Christ skidded, feet outstretched, until the wall provided a brake. There was a crunching sound and then silence.
‘Has she cracked her head open?’ said Thomas, the kid next to me.
‘Maybe.’
‘I think she has. She’s cracked her head! She’s cracked her head!’
A ripple of excitement went down the table.
I quietly picked up my fork with my right hand and let a little smirk cross my face. If you’re going to be treated like a devil, you might as well behave like one.
Lesson learned.