The three-faced clocktower stands at the corner of The corrugated iron fence surrounding the scrapyard opposite resembled a bad youth arts project but the grand old lady of the docks remained relatively unblemished. Her reputation defying circumstance and age. It’s telling as in this town respect is not given freely. It’s earned. An invisible currency understood by all.
Cold, drizzle, walk quicker, fasten the top button on my Hackett shirt, scan the street, queues too long for me, could probably get in Bar Ibiza but it’s only just gone 12, got some valuable drinking time to kill, make a left, hurrying up, of course, Jockers! Haven’t been there in ages, 80s hell, neon paint, Top Gun posters, barstaff in Frankie shirts, tight dance floor as I recall, easy to squeeze on your way to the bogs, machines? Couple of fruities and a weakest link. Don’t like it, too boring but I love the tunes, “alright mate” “good evening”, go in anyway, undo top button, glance around, [AND DID YOU THINK THIS FOOL COULD NEVER WIN, WELL LOOK AT ME, I’M COMING BACK AGAIN]blondes at the bar, young ‘uns on the stage, make for the bar, hand down and eye contact, “pint of extra cold mate”, still scanning, no sign of Gary or Si, [DON’ T LEAVE ME THIS WAY, I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW I’M AT YOUR COMMAND] plastic glass, hate plastic glasses, neck it anyway, hand on my shoulder, “Now Then Doyle!”, Tommo! Now then!; “you seen who’s in the corner?” “nah” “Caitlin”. Gulp, Caitlin, Fucking Caitlin, Jesus, glance behind optics, see half my face but looks presentable, undo second button, “Where abouts mate?” “Over by the bogs, sat down” “I’ll catch yer later soft lad” deep breaths, lead with left arm, protect pint, where is she?, is this a wind-up? [MY WORRIES AWAY, YOU’RE ALL THE THINGS I’VE GOT TO REMEMBER] She’s there. Sat down in the corner, spare seat next to her, deep breaths, “Hiya” “Hello” “Tommo saw you, said you were here” “did he now?” “Anybody sat here?” “The Invisible Man”, still funny, still beautiful, still hurts, still, “I’ll have a breezer”, [AAAHHH WE FADE TO GREY]
Me, Kevin Beattie, VinceI mainly used to spend Saturday afternoons at my nanas in
I had been threatened by my Uncle on occasions, “If your naughty, your dad will take you to see the Boro” and working on the premise that a problem shared is a misery halved, my dad informed me that not only were we going, but that I was going to be the mascot in two weeks time! At home to a struggling
My first difficulty was when the club wanted some information about me for the programme. What were my interests? This was a problem. I couldn’t honestly admit in print that my interests solely consisted of eating mars bars, watching cartoons and playing Manic Miner so in a desperate attempt to please my dad I said Golf and Fishing.
A bigger problem was that I was crap at football. Not totally hopeless, I could kick a ball properly but being the owner of a robust Rochembackesque physique, not as fit as I might have been. It wasn’t critical, I wasn’t playing but I still didn’t want to make an arse of myself in the kick in when I’d have a chance to score in front of the Holgate. I had appeared as a sub in a school match earlier that year, the games teacher taking pity on me and bringing me on when we were 4-0 up with quarter of an hour to go so I could also accurately tell the programme that I played for the school team. This talent for stretching l'actualité would serve me well in my adult career as a spin doctor.
My biography submitted, we now had to get me a kit. This was before your chain sport stores so off to Jack Hatfield’s. It was the year after McLean Homes had pulled the plug so we had a pristine, sponsorless silky red home shirt, with authentic Addidas stripes down the sleeves. Like a footballing Starsky and Hutch design. We also wore white shorts and socks that season. It looked as distinctive as a Ford Cortina and would probably be worth a few bob if you had one now (the kit, not the Cortina).
I wasn’t allowed to wear the kit to school but still told the few Boro fans that were there that I was going to be leading the lads out on Saturday. Out of a school of 200 in
The big day dawned and I even had a shower, so important was this event. I didn’t really want to but I was assured that Heine Otto showered so that swung the deal. We got to the ground just after dinnertime and after wishing me luck my folks went off to their seats. Leaving me in the capable hands of a PR guy.
Looking back, you could see the writing was on the wall for the club because they were cutting corners everywhere. The programme was a six page newspaper that season called Boro News. It had a picture of Paul Daniels on the front proclaiming that the “Boro Bonanza was magic“. They were also scrimping on the mascots. I wasn’t the only one. I met the other lad, Vince Potter from Eston, an hour before kick off. While both disappointed we wouldn’t be the centres of attention, we decided that if we scored four or six goals, we would share the credit for them equally. You can tell we weren’t regulars in the Chicken Run.
We sat in an ante room and said hello to a frazzled-looking Mike McCullough as he was passing through. Looking back, he should have called his company Atlas because he had the world on his shoulders. We had a mini tour of the North Stand including the ill-fated Sports Centre where we were told that it would soon open to the public. 24 years and counting Charlie.
The time came for us to get ready. We changed out of our tracksuits, walked up the steps and through the tunnel and stood on the side of the threadbare pitch. It was not in the best of condition. We had our photo taken with the latest in a long line of saviours with sellotape knees – in this case, Kevin Beattie. We also got to meet Radio Tees’ rising star – a young Me Mark Page.
For reasons I still don’t fully understand, Mark was dressed as a high court judge with a black cape and white wig. We had to pose with him holding our ears. The headline in the next home programme, and I am not making this up, said “Ear, Ear says the Judge! – he gives mascots a good wigging (but it’s all in good fun)”. I still don’t get it.
We went back into the tunnel and awaited the teams. We met the ref, the wonderfully named Trelford Mills from
I have never been able to boo Titus Bramble with any degree of conviction for precisely this reason. I’ve been there, to his world, you want your legs to move and your head to meet the ball but your body won’t do what you tell it to. It’s not nice.
I eventually regained some composure when I realised that most of the crowd hadn’t come to see me, (Uriah still hasn’t worked that out). I took a deep cleansing breath, looked towards the Holgate and thought “This is it Guy, your big moment, your big chance. You’re the Boro captain, and you’re leading us out at home. This is destiny. Let’s roll!”. I could see there was an unattended ball 20 yards away. I could run on and take it on, easily go by two uninterested defenders, draw Pearsy and slip it inside the right hand post. I could already see myself wheeling away in front of the crowd with a couple of ironic cheers reserved for when the tapped lad scored from three yards during the half-time draw.
I put one foot on the pitch about to break off to the right and fulfil the dream when a large, heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder. It was the PR guy. “Come on son, photo’s now”. I was frogmarched to the centre circle where I met Vince and posed for photos with the captains and the officials. We shook everybody’s hand and we turned to go back to the tunnel. I still harboured thoughts of a quick breakaway to score when Darren Wood I believe, ran up to it and wellied it back to the dugouts. My chance gone, I slouched back up the tunnel. I could never bring myself to warm to Darren Wood after that.
My dad met me, camera in hand, and we walked up the steps to our seats. “Why didn’t you have a shot?” he asked. I couldn’t answer him then and I can’t answer him now. If I had told him that I was scared shitless I’d have got a backhand. Where’s the justice?
We sat down just in time to see the Boro go 2-0 down fairly quickly but in the second half we pulled it back to 2-2. We put the pressure on the
The ball drifted in from the right hand side, Otto rose powerfully and directed his header downwards. The ball bounced up and against the shin of a
Despite the result, we still went and had fish and chips at Rooneys on
The season petered out, we were safe, and despite their win,
BREAK THE BLOODY NET OR YOUR WALKING HOME!
He was everything I hated. Fading blonde wispy hair, small, wiry, untrustworthy and dressed like he managed a charity shop and took advantage of the position.
The Shopping Centre looked like it had been designed by a six year old using Lego as his medium. It was nothing of the sort either. Instead of being an enclosed, shopper friendly building, it was the opposite. It looked like an abstract painting, all impossible angles and grey shading in places where it shouldn’t be. Too bleak and macabre for the cheap and miserable stores like “The Stationary Box” and “
People trudged by on walkways above the shops but you had no earthly idea about how they got there or where they were going to. Not for nothing is BillIngham also home to ICI’s vast plant. The inspiration for “Blade Runner”.
It was also the home of the BillIngham Forum. The local leisure complex as would be described by an American who had never seen it and as reminiscent of ancient
BillIngham also produced and attracted odd people. It was the only part of Teesside that could and did tolerate a nest of Mackems. (A collection of
We had heard the rumours about him before we started our two year duel. We were studying GCSE Chemistry for the last two years of our school life and he was to be our guide. We heard about his unprofessional attitude to work, we heard about his lassez faire attitude to teaching, We heard about his crap car, a duck-egg blue Mark Two Ford Escort, we heard of the boys who waited outside the school gates for him to drive past and give him a ZZ Top-style hand wave culminating in a V sign. We heard he blissfully waved back.
We also heard the story behind his nickname, unusually from another teacher. They tend to stick together in the staffroom, The beaten brigade, trying to maintain a sense of authority and enthusiasm to a bunch that would most likely be either earning twice as much as them in a couple of years or would be serving them sandwiches at a cheap supermarket Deli.
The Cheese pie was a good case in point. Unlike any cheese I have encountered before or since, it was a block of yellowish goop, similar in texture to Styrofoam but moist. It had a pie crust base but this could equally have been cardboard. If I was being charitable, I’d say the top of the concoction looked like a crème brulee, touched up with a blow torch like an expensive chef. It was more than likely burned and produced a film which lay on the top, the consistency and colour of which was reminiscent of the contents of the liquids pouring out from Ethiopians featured on the nightly news at the time.
This was Jardine’s favourite so this is how he became known as Cheese Pie which then became Cheese Pie, Private Eye which then became Cheese Pie scoffing bastard and finally, mainly for brevity, just Cheesy.
I sat on the back bench of the class with a couple of friends and Liam Pike. Pikey was amiable enough but not very bright. He often had to attend the remedial classes organised and taught by Mrs Rinquist. Remedial was the official term for the classes. To us, they were the Rinky-Dinks.
I once had to suffer the ignominy of sitting an entrance tests for the classes because the powers that be confused my terminal laziness with mental issues. I scored the highest total they ever had and told me that I wasn’t retarded but merely unfocused. I still take my victories where I find them.
The benches themselves were not conventional school tables. They were special science benches that had gas taps built into them for connecting bunson burners to for experiments. They also had sinks built within them that had covers that could be lifted out. They were big, rigid and more like the desks that Dickens would perch at and write with a flowing quill. There were five in all spaced at regular intervals. They were so big; you sat at them with a special stool, no standard issue plastic school chair for us. The teacher’s table was on a raised platform of about six inches at the front of the class like an altar. It was flanked by a curious glass contraption to the right known as a fume cupboard. It was like a glass wine cabinet with two large holes in the wall to the supply room behind it, there were also three or four small holes at irregular intervals in the wall. There was a door to the supply room to the left. This was the teacher’s door and only he and his assistant Grayson, Igor to his Frankenstein, could use it. We all had to use the pupil’s door at the back of the room and opposite the end of our desk.
The benches were organised according to the strict school social charter. The “popular” kids and members of the football team sat on the front bench. The brainy kids and ones who were good at science sat on the second, the girls sat on the third bench, the fourth was occupied by boys and girls who found themselves studying Chemistry because of some administrative error and would have been much happier doing home economics or needlework instead, and the fifth and final bench was us. The rebels, the outcasts, Tommy Sampson, the boy who attended school one day a year and spent the rest of it with his mother in their council flat eating pies and playing snooker, Janey, the girl who spent three months in school last year then vanished for the rest of it. She was back now but even we picked up the whispers and sideways glances she attracted from the other girls. My friend Billy, Pikey and me.
We began our Chemistry education with the wide-eyed optimism that would have cheered the heart of any science advocate. We wanted to learn; we were keen and eager and could not wait to take part in experiments and to do Chemistry. Jardine had other ideas.
It may have been his Mormon persuasion. He had confessed to Mormonism a couple of years earlier when another pupil asked him about it for the express purpose of putting around rumours and stories about what Mormons actually did. This opened the floodgates and being a Church of England school, misinformation about other religions was not as discouraged as it may have been. According to the stories he had three wives, he had seven children, their house didn’t have electricity and he made his five wives and ten children plough the back garden of their semi-detached house with forks to better grow the corn that they survived on because they weren’t allowed to go to the shops. His car was horse drawn because his god forbade transport and he was often seen strolling through BillIngham attended by his six wives and 12 children, he sometimes rode the horse to school if the wives and children had church business, and the family had to sit by candlelight in their house made of sticks and straw because electricity and bricks were also verboten by the vengeful Mormon God of BillIngham. Looking back, his actions and demeanour were classic reactions against inadequacy and blunted ambition but they could equally have been the strict covenants of a secretive suburban sex-cult. When you were 14, you weren’t really bothered.
His method of pedagogy was very much old school. As in Victorian. He beamed as he presented us with our brand new, freshly unwrapped textbooks. If it wasn’t against his god’s law, these books would have been his children. So much of his pride, hopes and joy were invested in them. The term began thus.
We read from Chapter One together. The class swots being invited to read the technical pieces to demonstrate their superior understanding and status, the rest of us as makeweights to plough through the text with the comic relief provided by the dyslexics and the stupid who were deliberately given paragraphs containing hard to read words and chemical compounds to pronounce. No actual Chemistry was hinted at or attempted. We assumed this was a scene-setting procedure. To make sure we were fully aware of the wonders we were about to experience and create.
We had two lessons a week and we looked forward to the second one. We came in, placed our bags down and after some lively preliminary chat amongst us, Jardine emerged from the backstage area behind his desk and took up his position. We then took out our books and began reading Chapter Two together.
It slowly began to dawn on us that the die was cast and that this was going to be our Chemistry career.
Young minds are hard to cage. Even in a subject which contained little or no interest. Chemistry was different. It fired you. You had a multitude of chemicals to experiment with, bunson burners that produced flames on command, a water tap on your desk for god’s sake – and we were being asked to read from a collective book. It was like holding a consolidated accountants convention in Billy Smarts Circus.
Human beings have untapped psychic potential. I predict that mankind’s next evolutionary stage will be mental and will see the wide development of precognition, ESP and telekinesis amongst the race. You can already see this randomly and undisciplined with some young children and adults. Mothers and babies have an unspoken, almost supernatural bond. Mothers just know. It’s the same with kids. They can sense energy and messages that adults with closed minds cannot.
An unspoken idea grew between us. Transmitted by eye contact and some unseen energy. The group instinctively knew what they had to do.
If Jardine wasn’t going to teach us Chemistry. We would teach ourselves.
When he went to school, Jardine would have been the second-weakest kid in the class, the most vociferous and active in the bullying of the weakest. You could see this in practice during the reading sessions that we came to dread.
I became one of his victims. A slow and deliberate individual must be slow and stupid. He confused the manner and the method.
I had learned to hide my gifts in the previous couple of years. Due to the disinterest, lack of will or just plain dislike for me from our tutor, I was left to fend for myself in the classroom jungle. Despite being in a prosperous middle class area, the school I attended was a Church of England administered one that didn’t believe in segregation or selection. It opened its arms to the children of the roughest estates of the town and was repaid in kind. The nearest other school and our perpetual rivals, Manorsfield said “thank you very much” and proceeded to build a continuing legacy of achievement and excellence. We had our school gym set on fire.
Despite liking football, I also liked reading and using big words. At the time I hadn’t fully appreciated the necessity of a fashionable haircut, a trendy coat and good personal hygiene. I was easy prey.
One of the biggest ironies in football is that when a player retaliates to a harsh foul or bad tackle then he will be punished more severely than the original aggressor. So it was in the Tutor group. Punished for being myself, punished again for defending myself.
I eventually got wise and actually picked a haircut for myself rather than let the barber indulge himself with one of his wall pictures from 1977. I persuaded my parents to buy me a coat made by a company you’d heard of, rather than one that the guy on the market told them would be big in six months time, hence the good price today. I started taping the top 40 off Radio Tees and started reading my cousins’ “Look In” magazine. It was an effort but I started to fit in.
I also decided to curry favour with the bullies by picking on the genuine weirdo’s and idiots in the class. Kids who went to church and had bags and pencil cases as a result of a promotion by the
You do what you gotta do.
Jardine became a rarer and rarer sight. He was present at the start of the lesson to take the register and then he would disappear into the supply office. Who knew what he did in there? He was conducting experiments, he was reading The Sun, he was reading The Sun and masturbating in there, he was looking at us through one of the holes in the fume cupboard; he was looking at us through one of the holes in the fume cupboard and masturbating in there. The theories were rife, usually of a sexual and deviant nature and it spoke of his wilful lack of awareness or simple self-delusion that he we would be working away in our office while he was in his.
Chemistry was now ours. We started small time. Pikey was a smoker and always had a lighter on him which was essential for our work. The class swots all had a standard issue green Berol pen. For somebody with handwriting as borderline dyslexic as my own, these were fatal and I ended up getting more ink on my hands than on the paper but it was a badge of achievement amongst the intelligentsia of the 4th year. They also melted rather easily when subjected to a constant flame from a desktop gas tap. After a little while, we became performance sculptors operating in the medium of melted plastic. U-shapes, corkscrews, abstractions, we had it all. With a little more enterprise, we could have initiated Brit Art ten years earlier.
There was a primal beauty to lighting a gas tap and turning it to full power to singe the desk. It was even funnier when it was inches away from Laura Kinsey’s straw-like hair, just inches from our rudimentary flamethrower.
Our next project lay with an old video machine located in a cupboard at the back of the class behind us. It was a very early type with one spool so it predated Betamax by about five years. It might have even worked. Not that we were bothered. It was Jardine’s so it must be destroyed.
Billy was the technical genius so was able to advise us which pieces we should remove in order. Every lesson we removed some diode or transistor or rotary device. We should really have kept and catalogued them instead of throwing them in bushes or at other pupils. In amongst the mayhem, we did conduct our own experiments. We took one of the tapes from Cheesy’s Cyclops machine and tied one end to a lamppost opposite the school. We then placed the other end on a pencil and walked the long way home, approx two miles and we hadn’t even dented the reel. We had left a lot of tape in our wake but this was science at work so we felt we could explain it away if challenged.
We discovered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of exercise books in the cupboards in our desks and became a surrogate stationer for the other members of the class and others in our year. If we had been a bit more enterprising, we could have made some money of it but when a pretty girl asks if she can have an exercise book then you don’t really think of charging her. Alan Sugar I’m not.
We didn’t stop at Chemistry. Pikey moved onto advanced biology when he decided that he needed his ear piercing. A safety pin and a pile of paper towels were his instruments when he began the operation. Humans have a grim fascination with pain and the infliction of it. Even more so when they are inflicting on themselves. Nobody watches “You’ve Been Framed” to see cute kittens skidding about a polished wooden floor. They watch to see a pair of boneheads retiling a wet roof in the hope of seeing Darwinism in action.
Isembard Kingdom Brunel once performed an emergency tracheotomy on himself to remove a lodged sixpence in his throat. Pikey couldn’t spell Brunel but his spirit was just wiling as he plunged the safety pin through his earlobe.
Now we were the video nasty generation. Used to seeing bikini-clad teenagers decapitated on grainy films by various demons and hockey-mask wearing serial killers, watching films with titles like “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Driller Killer”, we’d seen it all. We’d laugh if we saw it on screen. Seeing a fountain of blood inches away from your eyes and your classmate’s face go through so many of shades of white in rapid succession that it was like someone making a flipbook out of a Dulux colour wall chart in front of you.
Girls screamed, Pikey fainted and we looked around at each other, as useless as seconds at a duel, waiting for an adult to do something. Of course, Jardine was away so two of the more mature members of the class lifted a slumping Pikey from the desk and carried him outside to seek attention, stemming the flow of blood from his ear with a darkening series of towels. When Jardine came back, he barely noticed the missing pupils.
Bored with Sculpture, we decided to move into Art. Billy was a born artist and like most born artists, was destined for a career in car design or kitchen brochure production. Thankfully that didn’t happen and his career has since bloomed into something approaching his original potential.
It highlights the inequities of the British education system. Exercise books filled with caricatures, designs, doodles and sketches were a valuable progress ional aid for an aspiring artist but that wasn’t important. What was more important was that you sat in a classroom for two hours on an afternoon reading about Chemistry instead of actual doing it or worse, running round a muddy field chasing a ball of various sizes and shapes. I’m not interested in how fast David Hockney could run the 1500 meters but the fact that someone; somewhere was employed to find this out tells you everything you need to know about our society.
We then went to work on our Magnum Opus. We planned our project in specific detail. What our aim was, what materials we would need, the scale, the colours, the dimensions. Billy even produced drafts. All we needed to do now was wait.
We returned to the school that night, after dark, with the materials and set to our task.
The next day, everybody filed into the Chemistry class as usual; Cheesy did the roll call but didn’t disappear off as usual. We became aware of movement outside the window and all eyes turned to look at faithful old Grayson scrubbing away at a large, fluorescent coloured, cartoon piece of cheese decorating the window like the centrepiece of a dairy cathedral. The sun shone through the yellows and oranges and blacks for holes onto the wooden floor. The difference between Art and vandalism is that Art speaks while vandalism shouts. This message was clear. Billy had even disguised his handwriting for the CHEESE PIE label next to it. An Urban Masterpiece.
We had, however, underestimated the malevolence of Jardine. I suppose it was naive of us expecting a humourless automaton to get a joke, let alone enjoy it, but teachers were professionals. We knew they had favourites and discrimination was as rife within the classroom as any banana republic but we forgot they were people. With people’s ideas and emotions. And that people hate things. Jardine hated us.
This was a declaration of war. I’d hinted at the self delusion that surrounded and covered his existence like a musty fog but this act blew it away with the cleansing force of a jet engine. He suddenly realised that he wasn’t the hard but fair master of the class, the big boy in the class of boys who could enjoy the joke but maintain discipline when required, or the charming, older man who girls could confide in and maybe have a crush on. In a stark, Day-Glo, 3D image of a piece of Swiss cheese, Dorian Gray saw his portrait for the first time.
Of course, we were having too much fun to spot, understand or even care about the subtle change in our world. The balance of power was shifting, or more accurately, about to reassert itself.
Meanwhile, the resistance escalated its destructive campaign and the cherished exercise books, his virgin children, were the next victims.
The violations were many and complete. We would deface a book uniformerly and then swap it with another pupil’s clean one. They were eager to enjoy the comedy, we were eager to exert our influence.
Every picture of a scientist wearing glasses in the books was defaced so the glasses became 3D with the addition of red and green lenses. Every eminent scientist with a pipe became a bubble blower or a cannabis smoker with glazed eyes and whacked-out comments to match.
Every animal was seen enjoying coitus with vigorous pervert, sometimes Grayson, more usually Jardine but never labelled.
Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man became a transvestite with a Basque and fishnet stockings for each of his four legs. This actually made him a dead ringer for Tim Currie in “The Rocky Horror Show”.
Molecules became Pac Men or Smiley Faces, The periodic table of elements now included Ice Cream, Hair Gel and of course, Cheese.
We began to pervert scientific knowledge itself through the skilful application of colour specific tippex and Billy’s perfect copperplate handwriting.
Covalent bonds between molecules vanished. Instead they were now held together by bits of string. Absolute Zero was discovered by Kevin Webster from Coronation Street, The Noble Gases were the invention of “posh bastards”, The hardest substance known to mankind was Boy George’s mascara, Destiny is the ratio of Macaroni to the volume on your ghetto blaster, Water in gaseous state was Philip Schofield, Potassium was best used as bath salts, Alkali metals reacted with non-metals to produce ironic compounds, which was the opposite of what they intended in the first place. It was even funnier than it sounds. So good a job had we done on those books that it was rumoured that they were just as funny as the notorious books used in Religious Education lessons. High praise indeed.
Hubris is a concept most adults struggle with, let alone 14 year olds but we had an appointment. I was about to discover that revenge, like cheese pie, was a dish best served cold.
About five months before the end of the course and our exams, Jardine began to take it a little more seriously. We saw more of him during the lessons and, amazingly, actually got more work to do ourselves. He would try and keep us on our toes by bursting in through the pupil’s door instead of his own one. This was met with general derision and shouts that “you’ve just missed your twin brother!” and the more effective “Doyle!” Nothing dissuaded him from the task at hand. Even when we burned a hole in his brand new protective goggles.
We should have realised something was amiss when we saw he was smiling.
He was conducting an experiment at the front of the class that we all had to gather round to get a better view with goggles and all. We seated ourselves at the edge of the desk. He was boiling a test tube with hydrochloric acid with another ingredient which gave off the most sulphurous disgusting smell I have ever come across. It was a mixture of death, bad eggs, mould, damp and inevitably, cheese.
He passed the test tube under the noses of a recoiling class from the far side of the bench toward us. We would be the last people to smell it, even though we could smell it from the other side of the classroom anyway. He came closer, edging his way towards us with the sickening smile of molester approaching a bound child. He was two feet in front of us to the right when he began to stumble. The momentum carried him forward towards the bench and his left arm instinctively came out to break his fall and balance him. The right hand containing the test tube stiffened it’s grip and instead of letting go, began to twist anti-clockwise, toward me.
I was sitting in the stool in my standard school issue navy jumper, black trousers and trainers. The test tube was level with my goggled eyes when it’s mouth began it’s downward path. Within a few seconds, the contents, smell, boiling acid and all, had poured all over and onto my crotch.
When people are shot, the body shuts down the immediate area so for a few seconds, they are unaware of what has happened to them. I felt an initial coldness the same way you do when somebody spills a drink in your lap. What doesn’t happen when a drink is spilled is that everybody in the group runs away from you as quickly as possible, the drink doesn’t begin to heat up expediential and smoke definitely doesn’t begin to rise from your crotch.
The smoke and the heat are greater now, just five seconds after contact, I’d almost forgotten the smell which was now, if it were possible, even worse and centred squarely on me. My sinuses are getting the full benefit now, eyes are filling up with water, my nostrils are trying to close of their own free will to prevent the body from taking in any more damage, and all the while the burning, burning, BURNING is spreading from my genitals to my thighs and my lower stomach.
My body took over. I remained sitting in the stool as my body leapt from it and crashed through the door of the supply room. I stood with the rest of the class, gathering round the door of the room and looking through the fume cupboard as a boy who looks familiar is pulling down his trousers, turning on the cold tap on the large sink as open as he can and trying to sit in the sink so the water soaks his horrible green boxer shorts. All the while, the heat, the pain and most of all the smell, that unforgettable signature stink, are actually getting worse, if such a thing was possible.
In chemistry, such things are possible. Some compounds and mixtures react badly with water intensifying their effects. We would have realised this had we been taught it.
The boy knows that the tap isn’t helping, that more pain is on the way to an area that is not designed to handle it. He knows that 100 meters from the chemistry classroom, down the main corridor to the side entrance to the building and across the playground is the school swimming pool. He lifts himself from the sink and finally manages to kick off his trousers. To anybody watching he resembles a drunken Oliver Reed taking part in “It’s A Knockout”. He makes for the corridor but time is now also his enemy. It’s 3.30pm, the end of the school day and the bell has rung and is ringing. The schools other pupils are vacating their classrooms with haste as they stream toward the exits. This doesn’t register. I am no longer with my classmates watching the situation unfold, I am firmly attached back in my own head as I am racing down a corridor full of school kids wearing a pair of soaking wet boxer shorts. I simply don’t hear the catcalls, laughter and mocking coming from the surprised onlookers and the pursuing group of classmates who have followed me. The pain and smell won’t allow it. I skid left through the double doors of the exit and run towards the pool, still hurting but becoming more aware of the crowds, crowds following, crowds watching, crowds blocking my way, crowds coming out of the changing rooms where I need to be.
I grab the heavy changing room door and pull myself inside, knocking a couple of younger pupils out of my way, I make a swift left into the main male changing area and through the showers and the footbath into the main pool area. Thankfully it is uncovered as I plunge head first, shirt, jumper and trainers into the pool. My one last hope.
Maybe the sheer volume of water counteracts the pain as it begins to numb as I surface in the pool but the smell, the smell of bad eggs and cheese is now amplifying throughout the changing rooms and the gym. I emerge from the pool soaking from head to toe, glancing at the windows, full of jeering, yelling, classmates, banging encouragement and abuse with equal force. I listen to the games teacher talking to me but I don’t hear him. I am an onlooker again but I wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway as he has his hand and sleeve covering his mouth. He leads me by the arm to the entrance of the now empty changing rooms and drapes an old grey towel over my shoulders. I emerge from the entrance to a mixture of cheers and boos, like an early evictee from Big Brother but with no placards or happy family members to greet me. If the towel had been over my head I could have doubled as a sex criminal being led from a courtroom into a waiting van. How I wished there was a waiting van to take me away from the school. The crowd is swelled by the sports teams forced to evacuate the changing rooms due to the virulent smell which swept in like a phalanx of wild horses and took possession of the room entirely. They spared me the ignominy of ringing the fire bell to evacuate the gym but it had the same effect.
I walk alone, unaccompanied, soaking wet and humiliated back towards the main school building. Nobody dare approach me to say anything or to pull down my boxer shorts and inflict further humiliation because of the smell.
Whenever ICI in BillIngham had an ammonia leak, you could smell it in several miles away. I imagined that this would be the same. Local TV host Paul Frost’s bearded concerned face would appear on Tyne Tees TV to warn people to remain indoors and close their windows. There would be a picture of me in the corner of the screen subtitled “Stink Boy” and the picture would cutaway to a chemical expert, probably in a protective suit, talking about the situation.
I trudge slowly back up the corridor to the classroom because I am aware that is important to retrieve my trousers from the utility room. I am greeted by a sheepish looking Grayson who directs me back into the classroom where the trousers are. Some poor soul, most definitely Grayson from the redness of his eyes, had picked up the trousers and placed them in a carrier bag. They are hanging in the fume cupboard.
I walk on the platform, behind the desk to retrieve them and pick them up. I turn to walk back out of the supply room door and see Jardine stood at the end of the desk.
He is wearing his powder blue jacket and his cheddar yellow shirt with matching yellow and brown tie. His fine blond/grey hair is still in the side parting he wears it and he is smiling.
Smiling.
As I walk past I hear him say something like: “Sorry about that” and know that it is all he can do to stop himself from laughing hysterically in my face. I know that will come later for him. His victory total, my humiliation complete.
Grayson, poor Grayson, drives me home with the windows open and the cool air fans blowing on maximum to be greeted by my startled mother. She has seen me come in late before, muddied and bloodied from various escapades but she has never seen me emerge from a strange mans Volvo Estate soaking wet and trouser-less. She opens her mouth to say something but closes it very quickly when her nostrils catch the smell. I kick off my trainers at the front door and run into the bathroom. These were the days before ambulance chaser and frivolous law suits even though we would have had a really good case for compo. In those days, "you must have been doing something".
We attended the classes for the rest of the term. Nobody says anything much about the incident or the aftermath. A couple of half-hearted jokes at the start of the first lesson afterwards, one or two underwhelming choruses of “Great Balls of Fire” but that’s all. They can see in my eyes that I am broken. A lesson has finally been learned in chemistry. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
I leave the school some weeks later with my well deserved F I my back pocket, never to cross swords with Jardine again. I later returned to night school to study Chemistry again and actually found I enjoyed it. It made sense, was involving and the textbooks were so old and dull that I never felt the need to deface them.
It was also some years later and I was returning from a boozy night out in town. It was about 2.30am and for some reason I decided to take a short cut across through the school and planned to walk over the fields. I usually got a taxi home or if I did walk back with friends, we stuck to the roads.
For some reason, I wanted to walk that way.
It had been over ten years since I had been back at the school. New extensions had been built, There was new paint around the place, new grilles over windows, new signs to warn trespassers to keep away and new fences placed at various places to keep trespassers, like me, out.
I walked through the playground keeping to the shadows of the buildings so as not to fall in full view of the halogen lights and security cameras placed about the premises. I edged past the side entrance to the
I continued walking behind the building and turned left again until I was looking at the outside of the chemistry classroom. The blinds were down, as they always were but I crept up, onto the raised walkway that ringed the building to have a look in anyway. The benches, stools, even the fume cupboard, where the same. The posters around the room for various chemical equations and periodic tables were new but this was to be expected. Most importantly, the altar desk was still at the front. I edged along further to look into the Supply room. I could see a desk with two chairs either side and a folded copy of The Sun on the table. Two mugs were on either side.
I jumped down from the path that and was walking away when my foot caught on something hard. I looked down and saw a large stone, buried loosely in the soil near the base of one of the trees that grew in between
I surmised what was going on as he grasped the stone in my palm of his hand and assumed the classic shot-putter position. He then lobbed the stone high towards the window.
It rebounded off and landed at the base of the raised path. Breathing a sigh of relief, I was no longer an onlooker. I picked up the stone, fully meaning to place it back at the base of the tree but in one swift movement, I spun on my heels and lashed out with my arm as I turned, with a primal yell, I hurled the stone toward the window again.
There was no mistake this time as it shattered with a satisfying crash. I saw the large jagged shards at the bottom of the window and at the top right. It had gone through just to the left of centre.
I ran away from the school, behind the gym and towards where the beck ran underneath the field. Into the Valley which followed it. It was overgrown in places with some flat scrub which passed as a pathway. Pitch black it may have been and treacherous to a drunken man but I wasn’t a drunken man. I was a stone-cold sober 14-year old boy again and despite not using it for night on 15 years, I knew the way like the back of my hand. I ran for as long as I could until my lungs and legs both called time on me and I bent over for breath I reflected on my actions.
Numerous lessons occurred to me. That a substance needed a reaction to cause it to change. That just because you happened to make it to your 20’s it didn’t automatically make you a man and that bad things happened to good people and good people did bad things.
The only thing I could be sure of is this – that a grudge matures with age.
Saint Valentine, the martyr,
lost his head for being so brave,
now whirring in his grave.
The swaying never ceases for the tightly-knit family of the lake. Like a drunken but friendly group gathered around a pub piano, swaying to a familiar song, reminding them of good times and old pals, both departed but remain here still in the warmth of the group. The gentle wind guides their rhythm but this happy golden band needs no encouragement.
The book starts with Clough reliving the challenge with Bury’s goalkeeper on Boxing Day 1962 that at the time looked like it had ended the career of the bright young Centre Forward. We all know now that it started it but the book questions rightly, how much the injury affected Clough himself and whether it gave an already fully functioning ego the necessary drive and force of will to make him the man he became. There is something to this as everybody remembers the great manager but Peace, and interview evidence backing him up, that Clough always saw himself as an injured player, always recovering, never retired. Maybe it was easier to bollock an out of form striker if the manager truly believed that he could replace him.
It’s an incredible story from any time period. The top manager in the country, between posts after leaving
The book takes no prisoners in its depictions of the intransigent Billy Bremner and scheming Johnny Giles – the Lords of the Manor who didn’t take kindly to the new Sheriff. Even Peter Taylor, Clough’s closest partner and right hand, comes over as a craven mixture of Phil Neal, Graham Taylor and David Pleat. Portrayed as a money-obsessed apologist, half in love with the main man and unable to function solo. The fact that
Their careers at Middlesbrough are only mentioned in passing as the action flits back and forth between Clough’s rise with Derby, the one, true loves of his footballing life, and his constant travails in picking up the reins of Revie’s team.
The ghost of Revie haunts Clough through the corridors of
Their relationship reminded me of Salieri and Mozart in Amadeus. The proficient and gifted prodigy effortlessly eclipsing the competent, professional mentor. The twist being that here, Clough is the prodigy is obsessed with destroying and surpassing Revie with his own team.
