I was not a particularly clever or confident child, never the bright little button who sat on the top table with all the clever children, with his hand always in the air to answer the teacher’s questions, the talented artist, sharp at number work, the good speller, the one who won all the cups, captained the school team, took the lead part in the school play. I was a member of the unremarkable majority – the average pupil, the big hump in the academic bell, the ‘nothing special’ sort of child, ordinary, biddable, quiet.
Last year I visited my former infant school headmistress, the redoubtable Miss Wilkinson. She was a 101 years old but still had the shining eyes of the great teacher.
‘You have done very well, Gervase,’ she said, shaking my hand. ‘All those books you have written. Doctor this and professor that – you have more degrees than a thermometer.’ Then she added with a twinkle in those shining eyes, ‘And you were never one of the brightest in the class, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ I replied. ‘I suppose I was a pretty average child but if I’ve achieved anything in life it is because of my parents and teachers like you who believed in me and encouraged me.’
‘And you do recall,’ she asked, ‘when you wet yourself?’
‘Of course,’ I replied. The occasion remains ingrained in my memory.
At the infant nativity play, I was one of the extras. The curtains opened and there I stood, on the otherwise empty stage, next to the cardboard stable, six years old and stiff as a lamp-post. I was the palm tree. I was encased in brown crêpe paper with two big bunches of papier mâché coconuts dangling from my neck, a clump of bright green cardboard leaves in each hand and more arranged like a crown on my head. My mother had knitted me a pale green woollen balaclava helmet through which my little face peeped. I was so excited and stared out at all the faces in the audience.
Then someone in the front row laughed and that started off others laughing, too. They were laughing at me! It was the first occasion anyone had laughed at me and I felt so alone and upset and had wriggled nervously. I looked for my parents and, seeing them in the second row, I focused on them. They, of course, were not laughing. I began to cry and then, frozen under the bright lights and frightened, I wet myself. It seeped through the brown crêpe paper, leaving a large dark stain in the front. The audience laughed louder. I was devastated.
On the way home, my face wet with tears, my father held my small hand between his great fat fingers and he told me that I was the best palm tree he had ever seen. My mother told me that I was the star of the show. I knew full well at the time that they were not telling me the truth, but it was so good to be told. I felt so secure and so loved.
‘And do you remember, Miss Wilkinson,’ I asked her now, ‘what you said to me when I came off the stage? Instead of being cross, and telling me I should have gone to the toilet before the show, as some teachers might well have done, you put your arm round me and said, “Don’t worry, love, it’s not the end of the world. Why, when I was your age, I used to wet my knickers, too.” ’ There was a short silence. Then a small smile came to my former teacher’s lips. ‘It’s funny how things come full circle.’
In this collection of stories, anecdotes and poems, the shining stars are the children, all of whom I met over my years as a schools inspector in the great county of Yorkshire. They will, I hope, delight you as they did me, with their blunt observations on life, their disarming honesty and their irrepressible humour. For me, whatever their background and abilities, they will forever be my bright little stars.