I should thank all the schools I’ve taught in or attended, about ten altogether. But especially I want to thank Colin Dwelly and the teachers and children of Inglehurst Junior School, and especially especially I want to thank Philip Fox and his class. I spent a happy year in and out of Inglehurst, watching and listening, sniffing the air (Ah, Plasticine!)… and remembering. Every day I took home pagefuls of ideas for poems. It was like catching fish in a barrel. It was there that I saw a boy looking for the answer – up at the ceiling, down at the floor; the seagull in the playground, the wet coats (quietly steaming) in the cloakroom. Once I even found an entire ‘poem’ written in chalk on grey metal containers, full of school dinners, stacked up in the school yard. It went:
Ingle jun gravy
Ingle jun sweet
Ingle jun veg
Ingle jun meat!
The Longest Kiss Contest, by the way, really happened, though it was in a dormitory on a school trip, not a cloakroom in a school. So, after a fashion, did The Mad Professor’s Daughter. Years ago, I had a girl named Linda Smith in my class who loved making up plays. She arranged much of my timetable around their rehearsal and performance. The Mad Professor’s Daughter (more or less) was one of them. Thanks, Linda! The Boy Without a Name was a real boy, and I really can’t remember his name. Kicking a Ball is three-quarters true as well; it’s about me. Heard it in the Playground – the poem, not the book – is for performance (I hope). I imagine a whole classful of children belting it out.
Allan Ahlberg
August 1988