Slap Happy

It is always a nice feeling of relief if something you are not looking forward to is cancelled or postponed. In adult life this may involve a dreaded meeting or a presentation for which you may not be confident of its outcome or adequately prepared. In such a scenario, the reprieve will give an opportunity for that mental preparation or attention to detail necessary to wing it better.

In childhood I experienced many similar moments of foreboding and trepidation.

In home life any serious misbehaviour was met by the potential sanction from our Mother of ‘Just you wait until your Father gets home’. To his credit Father was a very fair and reasonable man and did give myself and siblings considerable leeway even if we were particularly badly behaved or disruptive. I can only ever remember two occasions of actual punishment in the form of a short sharp slap and although meted out by the man he will have felt more aggrieved and dispirited by the whole thing even though it was entirely justified.

One of the events was in the Morris Minor. We had been driven a long way to collect Auntie Jessie for what would be a very rare stay with us. She would be well into her later years at the time, a slim, upright and dignified lady, very quietly spoken, immaculately dressed and groomed and I recall a spinster well into her 80’s until she surprised and delighted everyone by getting married to a long term companion in her residential home. I expect that a bit of showing off combined with over indulgence in barley sugar travel sweets  contributed to all of us children larking about in the confined space of the back seat. It was only me however who transgressed the law of “How children must behave in the presence of a Maiden Aunt” (1889 version, revised 1953). I commented in a loud and unabashed voice that I could see the hairs up her nose. That was enough for our father, usually of ultimate patience and tolerance, who executed an emergency stop somewhere between Bedfordshire and Suffolk and then gave me a resounding slap on my bare leg between shorts and long socks. It was a stinger. My siblings, relieved that they had escaped punishment, settled down and the remainder of the journey was conducted in reverential silence.

In the winter months of my younger years there was a frequent cancellation of school as the post war boilers regularly failed or a pipe burst and cascaded water through the asbestos laggings into the assembly hall and classrooms. This information, nowadays conveyed by e mail, text or by local radio was only known then by battling through the ice and snow and then being turned away at the playground entrance. The feeling of relief and enjoyment at getting at least a day off school is still capable of being recalled even some 40 years later. The attraction of skiving was first appreciated.

In secondary school it was always a bonus if the regular teacher could not take a particular lesson and it was too late or the timetable did not permit a late substitute. We would be left to private study or relied upon to behave in a responsible manner. Idle hands and minds do make for significant potential for trouble. As a member of a maths class of around 40 teenage boys with no staff member it was not long before battle commenced using chewed up and saliva bonded bits of paper. These were torn from the margins of school text books and were spat out or, more effectively projected on the end of a flexible ruler. One of our number, in miscalculating the elasticity of his ruler sent a spitball rocketing into the air where it affixed itself to the high positioned ceiling. This pioneering effort was swiftly followed by all participants and within a few minutes the ceiling effectively resembled a cave roof of stalactities. The noise of the riotous behaviour soon attracted the attention of a Senior Master, Mr Stinson, or nicknamed ‘Bing-bong’ the origins of which, I do not know.

The classroom was immediately silenced and we were lectured on the anti social and disrespectful aspects of our behaviour. At that stage of the recriminations we were expecting to get away with just a short sharp verbal warning. That was just before the spit, holding up the pebble-dash effect on the ceiling, started to dry out under the principal in Physics that heat rises and from a group of recently rampant pubescent male students that was considerable. As it appeared to Bing Bong that it had started to snow indoors he looked up to see our handiwork. The whole class suffered a detention for a week in addition to writing out 100 lines each. The sentence to be copied was itself over two lines, complex in punctuation and grammar and not capable of being transcribed by taping ten pens together in a pan pipe type arrangement. We were always closely supervised from that day onwards.

In student life any excuse to skive off was sought. My complete trust in my coursemates did however backfire seriously. I was rushing to the exam hall to sit an Economics paper in an important end of year series when, as I passed a familiar face from my year, he muttered that the exam had been cancelled. I had not prepared for the paper very well so took this news to be my salvation, well for at least a few days. I about turned and went off for a pleasurable non-academic day. It turned out the information was bogus. I had missed the exam and had to re-sit it some time later. I was not the only one deceived by the actions of that familiar face and this meant that the authorities were a bit more lenient than if I had just absconded to do better things.

In adult life I may be a bit more cynical and less trusting which is a necessary measure but a shame. I firmly work on the assumption that if something sounds too good to be true it will certainly be the case