1992 And A Hero Called Eli

     It seems years ago now. I suppose it was, but it seems a damned sight more than just 12 years ago. Life then was all about running the small village school at which I’d arrived six years earlier. It was still as run down as ever and needed a complete makeover but there was no money in the LEA kitty.

     We’d lost both our mothers by now. They had both given us huge help with two difficult children. Our daughter was our own but had Special Needs. We had fostered a little boy from when he was just a year old. That became adoption. He had a whole raft of special needs of a different kind. We had our hands full.

     Mother-in-law died suddenly staying in Bristol with her sister. We were stunned. She was in her 80s but the kind of person you thought would go on forever. The situation was absurd. The body was brought to Leeds for an autopsy. Then it went back down again to Bristol for the cremation. It went by train both ways. That was nice. She loved train journeys. The ashes came back to Leeds by road and somehow they got lost. The bizarre thing was I had a new secretary by now. Beryl had retired. The new one was crisp, efficient and everything you needed. But she was also spooky. She believed in the supernatural and ‘seeing’ things. I’d told her all about the missing Ashes. It was surreal. She went into a kind of trance right there in front of me and then held her head in her hands. After a while she came out of it and announced she’d ‘seen’ the ashes and they were at a transport depot in Morley. She phoned up and amazingly, that’s exactly where they were and she went out to collect them. My own mother’s final journey in Todmorden was much less dramatic except the steeply sloping path from the church to the hearse after the service was covered in ice. The coffin was on a trolley and I said a silent prayer that the guys hanging onto it had non slip shoes. If they’d let go of that trolley it would have finished halfway down Burnley Road with all of us chasing after it shouting, ‘Come back mother.’

     The outside world was an odd kind of place with unrest in many places. There were riots in Los Angeles, fighting in Georgia in the former Soviet Union and dreadful scenes in Sarajevo as what was once Yugoslavia was torn apart by warlords and ethnic cleansing as whole communities were systematically destroyed and murdered. But in South Africa progress toward ending apartheid was approved. Ironically it was a whites-only referendum. The Tories under John Major won a fourth term in office. Another Disneyland opened just outside Paris. The late Robert Maxwell was found to have stolen all his employees’ pension funds.  The Olympics took place in Barcelona. Bill Clinton was elected President of the USA. There was a huge fire at Windsor Castle.

     Looking back I know I worked my arse off trying to make silk purses out of what to me were pigs’ ears. And that was the staff (not all of them I have to say but enough to drive you nuts) not the kids. National Curriculum reigned supreme with targets and attainments to meet, or at least try. And while I struggled at Thorpe, Frank Casper struggled at Burnley until after one dreadful afternoon at Scarborough his days at Turf Moor were over. There had been several years in the old Fourth Division including the harrowing season that ended with the Orient game and skin-of-the-teeth survival as a league club. It was a time when the dwindling band of supporters saw some of the worst teams, the worst individual players and the worst games, one after the other.

     Consolations came from occasional days when you could meet up with other heads. We were all in the same boat, frustrated, irritated and worn out by SEAC ring binders and today I’ve forgotten what SEAC stood for except I remember the ring binders, 12 of them I think, one for each subject, that drove us insane. There was one meet-up I was particularly looking forward to. I’d just told one staff member he was a professional disgrace. Lunch and a glass of wine seemed a nice idea. A few of us exchanged horror stories at a hotel in Allerton Bywater, a clapped out ex mining village in those days. The Victorian hotel had seen better days but the lunch was good. The meeting was light-hearted, almost frivolous; we were all so giddy at having escaped for the afternoon. Liz from Rothwell C of E had a particularly important item:

     ‘Ceilings,’ she began. She’d applied for a Public Entertainment Licence for the Bar because she had a PTA function to organise where the public as well as parents would be admitted. Such things once upon a time were straightforward but life was becoming complicated with whole new rafts of rules and regulations.  But Liz filled in the form and sent it away to Civic Hall. Back came a reply to inform her she’d need a Ceilings and Buildings Safety Certificate.

     ‘But where do I get one of those from?’ she asked.

     ‘A chartered surveyor: you’ll need a structural survey done. We’re tightening up on schools.’

     Liz was horrified. ‘But what if they won’t provide the certificate,’ she asked.

    ‘You’ll need to close the school.’

     Stephanie the Head at Robin Hood School had a concert to organise and so dutifully had phoned the local Fire Brigade to double check on the number of people allowed in the hall at any one moment. A couple of them had turned up in uniform to assess the Hall.

     ‘Hmmm,’ they hummed and humphed. ‘Between 80 and 90 would be the safe limit.’

     ‘That’s plus the children?’ replied Stef.

     ‘Er no that’s the top limit,’ said Fireman Sam.

     ‘But I have 140 children here every day,’ said a wide-eyed Stef. ‘Are you saying I can only have 90 in at once?’

     ‘Bit of a problem then,’ said the Fire Chief.

     ‘What on earth am I supposed to do?’ she asked mouth agape.

     ‘Close the school maybe,’ said the man in the yellow helmet.

      Stephanie calm, said no more, smiled and thanked them for their help. Both she and Liz continued with their events. It’s what we did back then as well as cross our fingers when NorHolst came to drill outside school in connection with motorway widening.  Or at least they drilled until the din suddenly stopped and a guy came rushing in to say keep the kids indoors until further notice.

     ‘Why?’ I asked, faced with this guy in a yellow jacket looking panic-stricken in the office doorway.

     ‘Because we’ve drilled through a gas main,’ he announced. 

     At the end of January something happened that filled me with glee as well as Burnley winning a few games under new man Jimmy Mullen.  Not that I ever got to a game there anymore on a regular basis. School and family were all-consuming. Education Secretary Ken Clarke, (liked beer and jazz so was Ok by me) published the report of the committee that went by the name of the ‘Three Wise Men’. It absolutely turned upside down all the cant and rubbish that had been the foundation of what was known in Leeds as ‘Good Primary Practice’ a philosophy and doctrine that was espoused by a team of advisers who had no belief in phonics, blackboards (whiteboards today), direct teaching, single subject teaching, whole classwork, desks facing the front, spelling tests, times-tables and any kind of formality. In other words, everything I had ever practised. The belief was that self-learning was the key, group-work was the only way forward, the integrated day, and if a classroom looked busy then learning was surely taking place, if a classroom looked attractive then it must surely be a good classroom. More time was spent on teaching teachers how to display pictures than how to teach reading. It was a philosophy that diminished the teacher as the centre of teaching. It was a disaster. Because I was the opposite of all they said, I was told I’d never get another headship in Leeds. There were a few of us in that boat. Not that this bothered me. Thorpe was my limit and big enough. Working with the staff I already had was like being punished for something done in a previous life; a bit like that Greek fella Sisyphus who had to push a huge boulder up a hill over and over again because when he got it to the top it always rolled back down again. What sane person could possibly want more of that, something bigger and more headaches?

     ‘All head teachers should teach,’ the report said. I felt vindicated. I taught every day of the week morning and afternoon. The Alexander report had already blasted the Leeds Advisory Division, a clique of highly paid people who thought they knew all there was to know about teaching and drove round the city spouting their nonsense. I’d kept a copy under my pillow for weeks.

     Sometimes things happened that you’d think were made up or from a Monty Python sketch: like the time I had to find the water meter. Schools had to pay water bills out of the school budget. It was a new measure and we were told to take water meter readings regularly. This was fine if you knew where it was. I didn’t. Neither did the caretaker. Normal usage had to be paid for but if there was a fire and the school burned down the water would be free that the brigade used. So, Heads were advised to take a reading as soon as a fire started, and then take a second reading when the firefighters had finished and gone. I looked at it and decided the world had gone mad. Joining in the spirit of the thing I instructed Mary if ever there was a fire she’d to put more wood on while I ran out and read the meter; that was assuming we ever found it.

     She too had no idea where it was other than some years earlier she’d heard a story that it was under the pavement somewhere outside the school.  Out we went and looked in vain. Parents wondered what the hell I was doing peering intently at cracks in the pavement, and even getting on my hands and knees if something looked vaguely promising. I decided they’d never believe the real reason so I told them I was looking for a 50p I’d lost. Some of them believed me. It was that kind of village.

     I had a good pal called Frank, another Head in Leeds and he too had received the memo and had rolled off his swivel chair laughing. It was a time when saying ‘man overboard’ was taboo if you were a sailor, or ‘man the pumps’ if you were a fireman. In fact you were a fire-person. Sexism was an industry.  I went out one night with a stick and a torch to poke and prod around. It was winter and dark. It was a rounders post, a white one, so I was subjected to predictable one-liners about my eyesight from the kids coming home from the Comprehensive down the road.

     Days later we still hadn’t found it so I phoned the Water Board to ask them to come and take a look. Days after that, a couple of blokes and a van actually arrived. They lifted pavements and dug holes. Several holes and a couple of days later an official arrived to say they could not find any meter so they’d have to provide one.

     One by one the holes were filled in and then a parent sauntered over, hands in his coat pockets, looked, tut tutted and looked at me.  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘All this for a 50p, bloody ridiculous.’

     Of course it was well known by now that I was a Burnley supporter. And until this particular year Burnley had not been doing at all well. People thought it was funny. After all this was Leeds I lived in. But things were on the up as Jimmy Mullen provided the spark that galvanised a team of players that included illustrious names like Roger Eli, John Francis and John Deary. It looked like something good was happening after seven years of ignominy. 

     David was one of the most challenging children I ever came across, challenging being a euphemism of course for bloody naughty. His naughtiness had begun in the infants (Key Stage One these days) with an eff off here, and eff off there, everywhere an eff eff. And then with a glance of angelic innocence his reign of terror would begin for the day.   

     It was the biting of people’s ankles in assembly that made us really sit up and take notice. That, followed by the doggy noises, began to set him apart.  This was odd behaviour, we thought, even for Thorpe and we fondly labelled him the kid from hell. The first time he absconded it was to run outside and sit on the roof of the shed in the playground where we took him his dinner. If it was teatime it would have been a High Tea. It was due to rain so I was confident he would soon come back in. It did rain. He did not come back in. He ran home.

     As his naughtiness escalated, we enrolled the help of a behaviour expert from the Education Welfare Office. This guy bragged about his 100% success rate and there was a way to modify even the worst behaviour. He talked to him. He counselled him. He appealed to him. All failed so he resorted to the well-known technique of Time Out. This was in the draughty corridor by the cloakroom.  He stood there on several occasions until the day came he ran back in and hammered on his classroom door demanding to be let in. The behaviour expert was all smiles.

     ‘Success,’ he crowed. ‘He wants to be back in the classroom. Every child is good at heart.’ He walked across the hall and let the boy into the classroom preening himself on yet another success. David went in and kicked the teacher.

     The expert was stunned and even upset. He had never experienced failure he said. The best was to come. The lad turned round and kicked the expert on the shin for good measure and then ran off home. I was rather pleased. At this point we re-named him Damien and the expert was never seen again though I did hear he had begun to hallucinate.

     None of this would have been too bad except that on a day that Damien was in school and participating in lessons for a change, we had a student in from Bretton College filming a PE lesson. Lessons were too much for the lad. Once again he ran out of the classroom and this time sat on top of the piano for a change. The student thought it was wonderful filming him on the piano, pulling coat pegs off the wall and then kicking the classroom door again before running home with the student in hot pursuit filming his little legs disappearing down the lane.

     The Behaviour Modification Programme was abandoned. Survival was the target. The classroom assistant took to wearing shinpads. His classmates learned to duck away from the pencils and rubbers he hurled at them. His teacher left the door open so he could run away unhindered. He had frequent absences and his favourite tricks included riding up and down the lane outside the school doing stunts and wheelies on his bike taunting me. For a change he took to riding outside my pal Stewart’s school a mile or so away at Middleton.

     ‘What are you doing here?’ Stewart thundered at him one morning. ‘Go back to your own school and be naughty.’

    ‘Can’t,’ said Damien. ‘I’m effing expended.’

     Evidence that this lad was indeed Satan’s spawn came later when he blacked out half the village while the YEB had been doing electrical work in the area. Somehow he acquired some bolt cutters and cut through a cable. To this day only he and Beelzebub know how he survived.

     In the final week of one term, there was a call from the police. ‘Got a lad here called Damien, caught him jumping in front of cars, says he comes to your school, lucky to be alive.’

     I gulped. ‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘Offend him not lest he zaps you with a bolt of lightning.’

     ‘Naughty little sod isn’t he,’ said PC Plod. ‘If you ask me, a bloody good hiding would soon sort him out.

    I sighed and agreed. That’s true, I thought, but those days were long gone.

     I was 48. By some miracle I didn’t look 48. By some miracle I didn’t feel 48. Headmastering was a necessary evil but I managed to find plenty of laughs such as the day little Carole’s budgie died and fell off the perch.

     ‘Oh dear it’s flown to heaven,’ said her mum to console her.

     ‘No it’s not; it’s still int bottom o’ cage,’ replied Carole.

      In April there were celebrations at York when Burnley ended the lean years with a win that won them promotion. It truly was one of the great nights in the club’s history. Supporters had packed the ground. The atmosphere was electric and when John Francis scored the goal that won the game as the roars filled the whole city not just the ground.  Words could never be enough to describe the jubilation and utter joy. Seven years of pain and heartache were over.  Roger Eli had dazzled, John Francis had run like a gazelle, Mike Conroy had scored goals for fun. John Pender and Steve Davis had been rocks.

    At school I have to confess there was one area where I perhaps did drive people mad. I had a mania for looking in cupboards.

     It was not so much first encounters with people that unnerved me; it was first encounters with cupboards.  Being a Capricorn, neat, tidy, fastidious, I was a stickler for orderliness and straightness. If pencils didn’t lean in the pot at the correct uniform angle, I re-arranged them. If any sheaf of papers was not stacked correctly, I straightened them. If the newspaper was creased, I had to smooth it out. As a classroom teacher my own cupboards and stock room was always immaculate, gloriously spotless and everything labelled and in its place. I looked at other people’s and felt smug and superior. But it was as a Head that I first encountered other people’s cupboards less concerned with order than myself and I realised there was some truth in the old maxim: ‘Show me a person’s cupboard and I’ll show you the teacher.’

     It didn’t take long to find out how true it was in dear Mrs Plenderleith’s room when I opened what was labelled the art cupboard and more or less the complete contents, paint trays, brushes, tins with loose lids, palettes,  pencils, crayons, you name it; all spilled out all over the floor at my feet. It was a defining moment. I’d only been in the school a week and realised immediately; ‘Hmmm, yes, there’s work to be done here.’  I’d offered to take the class while its prim, rather long-faced owner was given a little time to come to terms with the idea there was a new head in town. It wasn’t just one foot she had stuck in the 60s, it was both. 

     At the back of the room near a stained and sad-looking sink was what was optimistically labelled ART. It looked forlorn and aged with faded brown doors. After all the paintstuffs had fallen out, it was followed by heaps of newspapers, glue, containers, pins, staples and coloured pencils, most of which needed sharpening. I surveyed the debris with a mixture of calm detachment and iron-willed resolve.  The resolve was that in this school, never again would any disgracefully kept cupboard be allowed to take me by surprise. Not that this meant I issued firm edicts and warnings. It just meant I opened all other cupboards more carefully in future.

     I kept sane by writing about all these things in the Times Educational Supplement. And I even got a fee. I kept sane by escaping to a large caravan on the coast most weekends. I worked hours and hours in that falling-to-bits school but I shot out at bang on 3.30 every Friday as often as possible for as long as I was there.

     We only got to Turf Moor once that year and saw a 2-1 win in the league and a 2-0 win in the FA Cup. The rest of the time I read reports and watched the results every Saturday afternoon. We weren’t really part of that glorious season. I look back on it now and feel I really missed out on something. It was a badge of honour to be there, to be able to say ‘I was at York when Burnley won promotion.’ 

    For a small school it had far too many children with problems. Craig was a lad whose mother came in on an almost weekly basis to talk about his weird behaviour. Sometimes it was funny. Some of the old blokes kept rabbits in their allotments over the road. One of them stopped me one day to say one of his prize rabbits had gone missing. It might have got out, would I keep an eye out for it on the school field. A few days later Craig’s mother came in a very embarrassed state. She’d noticed the smell from Craig’s bedroom getting worse and worse. When it became unbearable she went in and there under the bed was the rabbit. Craig wouldn’t tell her where they’d come from. I put two and two together. I was after all the Head and people expected me to be smart and clever. Craig then owned up. He’d pinched it from the allotments and taken it home under his coat and sneaked it in and up the stairs and fed it on chips and scraps until his mother had discovered it. Craig’s father was a short little Scotsman who’d spent most of the previous years telling Craig he was useless and stupid. Well there’s your answer I thought but decided an Educational Psychologist could have the pleasure of telling them.  

     One day the Head of Rodillian School came up for a chat. We liaised quite a bit. I liked John and he understood the problems our kids had and went through. So far he’d appreciated the standards we tried to instil. But Martin had gone too far. He’d always been dippy at Thorpe but likeable with it and his equally scatty mother was a joy to talk to. But whilst he was fine with the family atmosphere of the little village school he was a fish out of water at the giant secondary school and soon went off the rails. He was now in big trouble. He’d phoned the police and wanted money. They asked him to call again and the next time they taped the call and played it to some of the staff at the school. They recognised Craig’s little voice straightaway demanding £2,000 or he’d blow up Rodillian School. Say what you like about Thorpe school but we always encouraged the kids to show initiative and think big.    

     Sometimes I wondered if the staff too had behaviour problems. Long faces, grumbles and tears were regular events. The women were even worse. One of them was miffed because the school had no sieves for her topic on holes and refused to bring her own kitchen from the kitchen. One of them was miffed there were no torches. There were. They’d been in the science box for four years.  The same woman wondered where all the thermometers had gone. Then she remembered; she’d broken them all the previous year. There was a guy to whom I’d had to give a 5-page document basically telling him to pull his bloody finger out. There was a Monday morning when I had to laugh, though not in front of him. His brother, a professional footballer in the lower leagues had got married and his best man was none other than the big star and England player, David Platt. They’d shared a house together, along with Roger Eli in Crewe and Platt regaled the wedding guests at the dinner with racy tales of life in that house. It was so racy and shocking it made the red top newspapers and the deputy brought a copy in, horrified, to show me.  Apparently it had ruined the day and journalists latched onto it. I feigned shock and horror, and then laughed all morning.

     Far too many of these kids in Thorpe had emotional problems that came from disturbed backgrounds. Case Conferences were frequent. It was as if Leeds City Housing had decided that the council estate there was the place to dump all their difficult families. But there were still several ‘respectable’ families there, people who’d been there years and worked for a living or were now retired.

     And then I nearly became famous. There was a £3million shortfall in funding pay awards in Leeds. For the city to find that money, schools had their budgets slashed. It affected me as much as anyone. I was incensed and wrote a two page letter to give to the card-carrying labour councillor Chairman of Governors and asked him to send it to anyone he could he could think of. The next thing I knew someone from Labour Leader Neil Kinnock’s office rang. They were knocked for six by the letter. Could they use it? Could they send it to the Daily Mirror? Could Kinnock use it in his next big speech? I said yes but they’d better inform Leeds CC. To this day I have no idea if it ever appeared in the Mirror or if Kinnock used it. I do remember a very anxious and irate phone call from the Leeds education offices to ask me what the hell was I playing at? It was the run-up to the General Election. Could I be the man to topple the Government, I wondered. Sadly no, John Major was re-elected.

     If season ‘91/92 was special with every player a hero, it was Roger Eli who was the cult hero. Roger knew the deputy’s brother well when they were at Crewe together, but hadn’t heard the story of David Platt’s best man’s speech. Roger was the cult hero of the season, running, chasing, giving it all he’d got. He was voted Player of the Season, and for good measure his headed goal that rocketed past Peter Shilton in a cup game against Derby was Goal of the Season.  How could I possibly know then that the subject of the deputy’s brother’s wedding would be mentioned again nearly 20 years later when I ghosted Roger Eli’s book, Thanks for the Memories. 

     I sit here now and think, it’s a funny old world.