Blast Off

A gate directly from your back garden onto the school grounds is both very good and very bad. This was the situation when I was growing up in the late 1960's and early 1970's in a market town in Suffolk. When we first moved to the house the gate just led to a playing field. That was good. Instant access to a large grassed area of football pitches all with proper white lined markings including a penalty spot and full sized goalposts. There were regular pub league matches on a weekend and  five a side tournaments during the summer weekday evenings where what I regarded then as old men, but probably in the prime of their lives in their late 20's and early 30's, ran around out of breathe, legging each other up and allowing me to expand my vocabulary of profanities. I have a favourite photograph of me and Anthony Whitbread on the team photo for one of the five a side teams. The players all looked like Noddy Holder from Slade with long sideburns and semi-permed hair.  Within a couple of years of moving in to the house I was horrified when construction started on a new junior school on the far side of the playing field. This would replace the very old flint encrusted school which I then attended, some walking distance away, which had started to sink into some old chalk workings. The old outside toilets at that place would be replaced by proper indoor sanitation at the new site. The emergence of the new school out of the ground added to our recreational facilities. We would wander about amongst the half built walls, move piles of masonry by hand and form ramps, see-saws and more bridge crossings using the scaffold planks and all manner of raw materials that were just lying around. There was unrestricted access even in the latter stages of the build. I have a strong recollection  of a coloured pencil drawing of a Red Indian Chief being on display on one of the metal upright pillars in what would eventually become the assembly hall. A skillful portrait done by one of the contractors, many years before anyone knew of the Village People. The school was finished during the summer holidays so that we could start a full academic year from the September. I did not take well to the change and disruption which inevitably took place in new surroundings. This is a character trait that persists to the present day. My younger sister, I am embarassed to admit, was often called into my classroom to keep me calm if I was throwing a bit of a wobbler. Still, all that advanced education obviously gave her a head start so I take credit for that. When used to go to school the back garden gate became a dreaded place. It was in clear sight of the house so we were waved off by mother without any opportunity to double back or abscond. I stayed for school dinners but the thought of my younger siblings at home with dippy egg and soldiers, watching tele and surrounded by familiar things was tormenting. The return home through the gate was however a wonderful time. The school field was regularly used for Fetes and events and so we had a front row vantage point from the garden. All of a sudden we would find a lot of new found friends playing in it. We had just taken delivery of a brand new climbing frame, purchased using cash and collected tokens from a Kelloggs cereal. It was alternately red and blue to its frame with ladders, monkey bars and other horizontal spars. This afforded an excellent view over a donkey derby or a sports day or the tent in which there was strong competition for the prize for the best home made coconut ice. The climbing frame, uprooted from its pegged anchors and laid on its side made, in our minds, a wholly authentic space rocket at a time when our imaginations and grainy black and white TV's pictures were heavily into the amazing adventure of the space race. I remember being told by my parents that the rather vague outline of a figure amongst a black but faintly light speckled background on our television was in fact Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. He was not really my favourite astronaut. I always pretended I was Jim Lovell in the flights into orbit of the climbing frame which launched regularly from the back garden. I cannot remember why I always chose to be Jim Lovell, perhaps just in the fancy name which embodied all things American. Being called Lovell also seemed to attract the girls. Still I could not help but grin in association when Tom Hanks played him in the 1995 Apollo 13 movie. I have never been back to the old house but I would expect that any gate onto the school grounds is long gone in favour of stout and sharp topped palisade fencing. This is a sign of the society we live in now.At one time school was an exciting and stimulating experience as words and numbers fell into place in young minds and the world started to assume a recognisable order. Things have changed dramatically and fences and gates now encircle school fields and buildings. Why such precautions ? Well the problem is that it is the alienated and disaffected few who you could never actually get into school when they were supposed to be there who are now always those most keen to break back in and wreak havoc and set it on fire.