Extract #2 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’

Him Off The Viz

Extract from ‘Oh Dear. Big School.’

I made friends with most of the kids at school easily, and my humour certainly helped. I would try to make all the kids laugh. I was the ‘class clown’, that’s for sure. I always wanted to do something creative with the jokes. I felt it was a natural thing; comedy came easily to me. My friend Gordon Poad and I would recite Monty Python at one another endlessly and eventually kids would ask us to act out whole sketches for them during break times. We eventually got a new English teacher, Miss Gajdus, who brought drama lessons to the school for the first time, and unlike the other teachers fanned the flames of our thespian behaviour, which had previously been seen as a nuisance at best and disturbing at worst. We wrote sketches and performed them in front of the class. Using the skills we were learning at the local People’s Theatre (more on that later), we involved anyone in the class who was willing to take part in the productions. Miss Gajdus was delighted, and Gordon and I were selected for a special drama course that took us out of lessons for a while and culminated in a performance at the Gulbenkian Theatre in the city centre. This was a very proud moment for us both and the others involved, and of course for my parents, who saw me perform on stage.

Miss Gajdus was an exception at Heaton – she was friendly, supportive and quite normal. Most of our teachers seemed to be a random collection of social misfits.

Tekkas!

Raggytash

There was a teacher known as Raggytash, due to his unkempt moustache. One day he was struggling to control his pupils. The problem seemed to emanate from one particular corner of the class. He singled out a girl who was continually starting conversations and giggling with her friends and shouted, ‘Tracy! Will you stop being so immature!’

Tracy responded instantly. ‘How man. Fuckin’ Raggytash. Divven’t fuckin’ caall me immature. I’ve had more cocks than ye’ve had hot dinners!’

She was suspended. Not expelled, just suspended.

Stretch Armstrong

There was Mr Armstrong, known as ‘S-t-r-e-t-c-h Armstrong!’ after the elasticated action toy, or more commonly ‘Fitter’ Armstrong due to his unbelievable ability to go from mild-mannered bespectacled boffin to Nazi commandant on speed in a split second. It was often a hot topic before his classes if he would ‘tek a fit’ that day. His glasses would steam up as he screamed at us in rage as he ‘threw a dickie mint’, his pitch getting higher and higher as he warned us all of the terrible consequences of our misbehaviour and disrespect. He would bang his fist or any available object against the desk as he went into his crescendo. On one occasion he picked up Ian Brumpton’s brand-new wooden ruler and smacked it repeatedly on our bench as he ‘hoyed a wobbler’. As he finished his ‘blue fit’ he turned to walk back to his own table, returning to Ian a piece of wood that was still a ruler at one end but a frayed fan of split timber at the other.

Dozy Dawson

Then there was ‘Dozy’ Dawson, a technical drawing teacher, who really was quite an eccentric, even amongst the bizarre haul of other-worldly weirdos who staffed the school. He was remarkably forgetful and pretty thick skinned. I always thought he’d make a great Dr Who. He picked up a new nickname, ‘Two-Ties’ Dawson, when he arrived one day, you guessed it, wearing two ties. My friends Peter and Andy were both in his form as he tried to take the register.

‘Sir! Sir!’ Andy shouted.

‘Shut up, boy! Can’t you see I’m taking the register?’

‘But Sir! Sir! You’re …’ Andy pleaded.

‘Be quiet at once!’ Dawson cried.

‘You’ve got two ties on, Sir!’ Peter piped up as the class all tittered.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, boy!’

He continued to call out names. More and more kids began to shout out.

‘Sir! Sir! It’s true!’

‘Have a look, Sir! You’ve got two ties on!’

Eventually he reached down with one hand and felt clumsily around the front of his neck. He confirmed to himself by means of incoherent mumbles that he was indeed wearing one tie too many. He simply tugged at the top one until it untied and came free and stuffed it into his pocket, never once ceasing his work filling in the attendance register.

Mr Mackay

Music was subject in which you fell into one of only two extreme categories: very lucky, or very unlucky. The school had two music teachers: Mr Young, whose age befitted his name, and Mr Lewis, who was old. Mr Young had long hair, played the guitar, encouraged his pupils to embrace music by creating their own, and gave special free guitar lessons during his lunch breaks. Mr Lewis was a humourless Scottish disciplinarian dressed in a tweed suit and orange brogues that creaked when he walked. His nickname was ‘Mr Mackay’, which makes little sense unless you’re familiar with the TV series Porridge. Mr Lewis’s entire demeanour was exactly that of the zero-tolerance prison guard. Lewis’s lessons comprised of his pupils standing to attention and singing hymns, tedious lectures on the life of Beethoven, and being forced to listen for hours to his hideously scratched vinyl opera records on a Dansette record player.

Mr Young’s room was big and airy and full of instruments, with walls covered with interesting colourful pictures. Mr Lewis’s room was as stark a contrast as is possible: bare, with nothing but a piano and the Dansette in one corner and a blackboard on the wall with rows of seats facing it. These were divided down the centre – boys on one side, girls on the other. No child in Mr Lewis’s classes ever got to touch a musical instrument. Pop music was a forbidden subject.

At the beginning of each year the kids would all scrum around the timetables to see who they had to teach their subjects. There was always a feeling of sinking like a stone if Mr Lewis featured on your rota. Sadly, I got him every time. With my love of music being as strong as it is, and with my ability to play instruments, something I’ve picked up in recent years, I can’t help feeling that I could have really done something in my life with music if I’d had the encouragement. Sadly, this wasn’t a word in Mr Lewis’s vocabulary.

Brasso

Mr Hully had a very shiny face. We called him ‘Brasso’ and put the word about that his wife buffed up his face with metal polish every morning before school.

Miss Shite

There was Miss Wright. She was a very attractive young woman with tumbling light brown curls and a penchant for slightly hippyesque clothes. She taught me history in my fourth year. She was one of the softest teachers we ever had, but we really liked her, so we took full advantage of her, but not in nasty ways. One day she popped out in the middle of a lesson to get a textbook. Paul Simms suggested we light up a tab in the classroom. It was an unusual classroom known as the ‘audio-visual room’ and unlike all the others it didn’t have any windows along the corridor, just a door with a glass panel, so was more secluded. A lad was sent to the door to ‘keep toot for tekkas’ and Simmsy lit up the cigarette. He passed it around to me and Paul Smith and we all had a few ‘drags’. The alarm went up from the lookout. ‘Tekka!’ He returned swiftly to his seat.

With a rather blasé attitude, we decided on a very quick last round of drags, wafting wildly at the smoky air with exercise books, but as Simmsy was passed the tab for the last time Miss Wright walked back in. In a panic, he put the lit cigarette into his mouth. This was a trick some of us could do – if the lit end faces backwards, you can hold the other end between your lips or teeth, keeping your tongue well out of the way. However, it could only be kept there for a few seconds. All of the class’s eyes were secretly on Simmsy. None of us were able to believe what we were seeing. It seemed to go on forever. His face went red and then gradually turned grey, then waxy white. Smithy and me were pissing ourselves, trying to keep silent and not draw any attention to him. A little puff of smoke came out of Simmsy’s right ear before he coughed out the saliva-soaked remains of the tab under his desk, along with a dense cloud of fumes. Fortunately, Miss Wright’s attention was distracted by activity on the other side of the room. We were all bemused that she never mentioned the smell. Simmsy wasn’t at all well for the rest of the day.

Gravyface

There was one youngish teacher; I don’t remember his real name. He had a browny-red, short-yet-scruffy beard and we called him ‘Gravyface’. Poor Mr Gravyface was assaulted by two of the school’s less notorious but most sinister ments. They ambushed him by leaping off the roofs of the bike sheds as he patrolled around ‘on duty’ one dinnertime. The reason they gave for their actions was simple: in an attempt to leave school as soon as possible they had ensured, by absenteeism and a total lack of interest in all education, that they weren’t entered for any exams. However, this sterling effort had been for nothing, as by law they wouldn’t be allowed to leave until their sixteenth birthdays. So, as logic would have it, their only course of action was expulsion. What finer way to achieve such an ultimate goal than GBH on a ‘tekka’?

Simon Donald’s autobiography ‘Him Off The Viz’ will be released on October 7th and is available from Amazon, Tonto Books and all good book stores. Simon will also be performing tonight at The Grinning Idiot’s St Dominic’s and Boardwalk venues. Tickets are available here.