Worn Out

If you are a fan of the big cult movies of the 1970's the following scene may seem familiar to you. 

It is a bleak landscape, windswept. 
An eerie silence. 
A line of men and women in red bomber jackets prepare to leave the comfort of their environment and set off for the unknown. 
They are lean and healthy in appearance and would certainly have a steely look of determination in their eyes if they were not hidden from view by mirrored sunglasses. 

Hold on a minute. 

I will introduce a few edits to that particular action in order to make it more representative of the subject of today's writing. 

It is still a bleak landscape, windswept but with the noise, albeit eerie of a waste compactor at a Civic Refuse Tip. 
There is a line of men and women but they are of secondary school age. 
Funnily enough, they are all wearing the same red coloured jackets, not quite bomber style but those types marketed as ski jackets but not at all suited to comfortable or warm use on a ski slope. It must have a been a clearance sale offer from a discontinued line or perhaps salvaged or liberated from the aforementioned rubbish dump for fear of the poor quality garments burning out the motor on the waste compactor. 
The group are far from lean and healthy looking. 
The males are surly and stand hunched up and with slouched shoulders. 
Most have a halo of thick cigarette smoke swirling about in the sweeping wind. 
The females huddle together as protection against the unwanted attentions of the male contingent. 

In their eyes there is a collective lethargy, a reluctance to do anything strenuous or exciting.

It is the usual queue of pupils awaiting in the hamlet of Wawne for the monday morning school bus to the seats of learning, the Grammar and High School in nearby Beverley, East Yorkshire. 

I was a regular spectator at the gates of the Grammar for Boys for the arrival of the red clad Wawne mob. 

They would spill out of the bus as though a carpet of lava, such was the density of colour of a dozen or so persons clad in those plasticky and no doubt highly combustible jackets. In a further mass of red they would make their way up the drive like a giant ladybird but one with a sore head, a bad temper, muttering obscenities and still surrounded by a cloud of ciggy smoke. 

The group only dispersed to go to their respective year classrooms but it would not be too long before they would congregate again and make the same lurching movement back to the bus stop. 

The individuals were not at all related in spite of the genetic disposition towards the same outer garments. 

That point was however contested by the rest of the school and there were regular jibes about "who was looking after the village whilst it's idiots were all in Beverley?", "just look what happens when cousins marry" and many others which are just too offensive to mention in polite company. 

Granted, they did have some similar visual characteristics and personality traits but that was generally attributed by us normal kids to their having been born and brought up downwind of a Waste Compactor, what with all of the potentially harmful emissions and all that. 

We did not ever have a desire or compulsion to go to Wawne itself although I was a regular visitor with my Father to the tip with garden and household waste which was within site of the settlement. 

Apparently it consisted of about fifteen properties being a mixture of Council Houses, executive detached, some self build ,a few farmsteads and a couple of barn conversions. 

The vacating of the hamlet by its teenagers during term time will have seen a 60% to 75% decrease in the population turning the place from a sleepy hamlet into an even more sleepy one. 

They did speak the Queen's English, or at least a version of it that we could understand without reverting to an interpreter or sub-titles. 

What did come to the attention of the teaching staff as a common problem amongst the Wawne-ees was a terrible standard of handwriting upon presentation each day of their set homework projects. 

It was at best an undecipherable scrawl, erratic, clumsy and with no pattern or structure. (I do not think that any of them made it into the Medical Profession whose practitioners are renowned for spidery handwriting). 

The strange thing was that if the group were asked to present their writing after a classroom session then it was almost normal. 

This phenomena took some time to fathom. 

The explanation, when revealed was more than obvious. 

The reluctant pupils pooled their intelligence in the pursuit of completing their homework on the short bus journey into town. The road to Wawne was notoriously bad being potholed, rucked and with a nasty camber to the grass verge, The road was regularly hammered by the movement of the large refuse trucks travelling to and from the waste depot and it was deemed by the Council to be best policy to only resurface when enough complaints had been received at County Hall. 

The laying down of a lovely smooth carriageway always coincided with a good set of test marks for the Wawne pupils but with a gradual decline in acheivement as the road deteriorated. 

One year the usual local bus company lost the contract to a slick new operation. Their brand new coach with super-duper hydraulic suspension  (gas filled)  and with a similar floating system to the passenger seating was able to nullify the influence of the awful road surface and consequently the academic results for the students of Wawne reached an unprecedented high. 

The service of the new luxury vehicle was short lived due to budgetary constraints and normality returned to the hand written scripts with the resumption of the school run by the old boneshaking post war coach. 

The Wawne lot just seemed a lot happier, in their own way, as a consequence. It had been a Close Encounter for them with a good education.