A Muddy Cluster – Senior School Memories (Part I)

Senior school was horrific. I was educated at a comprehensive school in Barking & Dagenham in Essex and it would have been more beneficial to my development had I just stayed at home for five years and eaten glue.

The night before my first day at big school, I watched ‘Red Dwarf’. I then went to bed and cried. It wasn’t just the fear of the unknown that gripped me beneath my Dangermouse duvet; it was the fear of the known. I knew this wasn’t going to work. I just knew it.

The Blobs

The dye was cast when I went to my first art class. If I was going to achieve anything in this place it would be in art class. But as I entered the classroom, the smell hit me. That smell. That earthy smell. I could forget about pencils, papers and paints for the first term. I was about to be imprisoned inside a fortress made of sodding clay.

Mr. Turner took the class. He was one of those over-stretched teachers who also taught English and PE, yet didn’t look happy in any role. Before his arrival every week, my fellow classmates would locate bits of clay from around the room and hurl them with ferocity at the enormous wall on one side. Mr. Turner would enter the room, survey the muddy cluster of shit-blobs on the wall and begin the lesson.

He often silenced the class by smashing a rolling pin down upon one of our hard, wooden desks. God, that noise. It was like being struck by the pin itself. The lunatic.

So for the next few months, I produced a succession of embarrassingly wonky, ugly and inadequate clay containers. I had no control over clay; it just did what it wanted to do. It was as if a distracted, fat-fingered man was responsible for all my work.

The Gloves

To add to the humiliation, the eczema on my hands was reacting badly to the clay so my mum bought surgical gloves to wear during lessons. Now, my original approach to big school was to not stand out in any way; to disappear into the fabric like one of the permanent clay spots on the wall of the classroom. Pulling on a pair of surgical gloves at the beginning of every lesson like a Harley Street surgeon didn’t assist me in this quest. Immediately, my fellow pupils struck me off the mental list of school stereotypes; I was neither the ‘bully’, the ‘clown’ nor the ‘cool kid’. I was the ‘neurotic’; except that children at this age don’t know what ‘neurotic’ means, so they probably opted for the more common colloquialism, ‘pussy’.

My label had been handed to me and my enthusiasm for art had vapourised. Still, only five years to go.