School. Until the age of 11, I loved school. It was a magical place with loads of girls and two rather fit Teachers, Mrs Foster was beautiful but unattainable, being already married, so I had to settle for being engaged to her daughter Susan at the age of 9. However, at age 10, I was welcomed into the bosom of Miss Bruin’s class and what a bosom it was. Blond and fleshy and smelling like the perfume counter at Boots, if, as you scrumped up the outer pole supports of the slide in the Recreation Grounds, you were to trap your willie between your leg and the pole and if, at that moment, you could imagine the smell of her hair close to her swan like neck, you could experience one of those schoolboy moments that in an ecstasy of not so innocence, would cause you to swoon, lose your grip, slide back down the pole and get an Indian burn on your leg. But it was worth it.

Unfortunately, in the following year, we had Miss Baum who was the antithesis of Miss Bruin. Short, fat with a busom that came down to her navel and complimentary arse for ballast, balding, she smelt like the bins round the back of Boots. She had a mole with whiskers and boy, it looked like a mole with whiskers, you could almost imagine it burrowing around in there. It would be nice to say that she was a gentle soul, but she wasn’t. In fact she was an ogre who terrorized generations of children from Walton Primary.

And then there was Starchy. Our beloved headmaster, Mr. Archibald Sterry. Starchie was a fifty a day man. First and forefinger of right hand stained an indelible yellow, his teeth closely matching. Tall, gaunt, graying and balding, you tried to avoid getting too close to Archie, in case you developed a nicotine habit before you started smoking.

A fair number of my fellow school chums were the sons and daughters of Colliery workers. Most of the other villages round about were Colliery villages also and, at age 11, we all took an exam called the Eleven Plus. This exam dictated your future. If you failed, you went to Crofton Secondary Modern. A hotbed of turpitude designed to churn out Colliers, Plumbers and Electricians. At age 12 you got to take another exam which if you passed would allow you to attend Normanton Grammar, a similar hotbed of turpitude designed to churn out Colliery clerks, Plumbing shop managers and Electrical salesmen. If however, you passed the Eleven Plus, you were sent to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School Wakefield, whereby your future was assured, usually in your Father’s business. My Dad was a coal miner and the last thing he wanted was a son following in his footsteps, or so I thought.

But the real anomaly in all this, was the fact that QEGS, as it was affectionately known, had a limit on the number of students it would accept from the Eleven Plus exam which, as I recall, was about 6 per year. The remaining150 boys took the QEGS entrance exam, The one that began with,

“Question 1 – Does your father have a Cheque Book? YES / NO

Question 2 – Is it a big fat Cheque Book? YES / NO

Boys who answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above may proceed to Matron for a grope of the gonads and a cough. Boys who answer ‘No’ to either or both of the above may proceed to Crofton Secondary Modern School for a kick in the Gonads and a lifetime of turpitude. End”

By some fluke of happenstance, I passed the Eleven Plus, but it wasn’t until sometime later that I realized the implications of the 6 boy limit, which were that if you were born in a year of 7 Einsteins, then one poor intelligent bastard was going to end up with 7 years of “Deadlegs” administered on Crofton Recreation Fields. Whereas if you born in a year of 100% morons, 6 poor bastards were going to end up with 7 years of “Deadlegs” administered on QEGS Fives Courts. Either way, some poor bastard was getting deadlegged.

My father was absolutely chuffed that I passed the Eleven Plus, although I could never figure out why. It transpired that he had also passed the Eleven Plus and been sent to QEGS. Why then did he work as the Pit Electrician? It may have been due to the lifelong hatred that QEGS managed to instill in those who passed the Eleven Plus.

For a start, there was the uniform, which came in two models. The first was made of something called “Barathea”, this was an incredibly fine Marino wool, produced in ancient water powered mills, where magic elves tended the looms. This produced a cloth that was lightweight, but warm even in the depths of winter. It had a sheen as of burnished copper. It shed water like an otters’ mantle. It never wore out and spit, did not stick to it. The alternative, was something glued together out of old felt shoe liners, permanently damp, with no insulating properties whatsoever and a thread of spittle attached from the hem. Needless to say, all the Fee Boys wore Barathea blazers, whereas the Eleven Plus kids trudged round like they were delivering the coal.

My Father’s parents went one further. Rugby Union was the ordained sport and there were 2 strips required, one in Amber and Navy Hoops, the other all Navy. They could not afford either, but the lady who was to become my Grandma Mabel, had an old lace nightgown which was black and therefore close enough to Navy. This was to be my Father’s rugby shirt. He knew better than to argue and accepted the shirt in good grace. He took the scissors and was about to start removing the lace from around the neck and sleeves, when Mabel asked him what he thought he was doing. Dad tried to explain that removing the lace would help make him less of a target, whereupon Mabel advised that she did not want the boys at his new school thinking that she could not afford a ‘Lace’ nightgown. The lace stayed on and my Father played rugby in it for several years.

When he finally got out of there, he had no desire to be anything like his erstwhile school chums, he apprenticed as an Electrician and took up Rugby League. The only thing that he took from QEGS was an ability to do the Daily Express crossword faster than anyone else at the Pit.

And he wanted me to go to this school. So that I could have the opportunities that he never had. Hang on Dad, there’s a rabbit out somewhere. You had exactly the same opportunities albeit your parents were much poorer, blame them for having 11 kids when you had the good sense to keep it down to 4, but essentially the opportunities were just the same. Okay I didn’t have to run around in the mud in my mum’s night gown while 15 beef-fed Yorkshire lads tried to get me in a ruck, but the principles were the same. Actually, I think the Principal was the same, just a bit more doddery, and the school was almost exactly the same. This was a place built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First and the toilets smelt like they still hadn’t got the plumbing past inspection. There was a memorial to “Our Glorious Dead”, most of whom had died in the canteen and still appeared to be there. You know a school is up itself when it has a “Fives Court”. This is a replica of an area outside the Chapel at Eton College, where an archaic form of handball/squash was invented. This is a game which will never make it to the Olympics, especially as it had to be played amidst a sea of fag ends.

I hated this school. I didn’t fit in and, being some form of genetic midget until the age of 16, I was bullied, physically and psychologically, by the school, the staff and the students. I hated going to school. I would hang about in the kitchen at home until the top of the bus could be glimpsed as it past under the Nine Arches railway bridge. This was just over the ridge beyond Brice’s Farm. If I grabbed my bag and ran to the bus stop (150metres, or 160yards as it was then) as fast as possible, I might just catch it. Usually I didn’t. That meant I was late for assembly and had to come in at the end. Most of my teachers thought I was Catholic, because I came in after prayers. I hated the wait before lessons, because that’s when the student bullying went on. I hated the classes, because that’s when the teacher bullying went on. I hated gym and sports because that’s when the student and teacher bullying went on and I hated breaks because that was when the whole place just crushed you.

I had my occasional outbursts. I once actually used a stink bomb, dropping it in a metal waste basket just before the French teacher came in. Bad timing, he was off sick and the replacement was a lady who got one whiff and ran from the room. I owned up, but the Staff were so worried that the incident would be seen as an offence against a lady, that instead of getting suspended, or even expelled, they decided to hush it up and administer a sound thrashing instead. Harry Gatis, the diminutive, beady eyed, gristle faced, Maths teacher was delegated to take care of it. Harry was a hard bastard. The next day he came to our Classroom assembly. He strutted up and down between the desks describing the heinous act. He sweated anger. The tension in the room was incredible. He swaggered down the aisle towards me. I was almost peeing myself. He let go with a terrific swipe that lifted Pete Bridgewater completely out of his desk and sent him crashing to the floor. I really thought he was going to start kicking him in the head. Poor Pete Bridgewater had the misfortune to be of my height, with my blond hair and sitting at the desk in front of me. 28 arms shot in the air. Not mine and not Pete’s, he was way too far gone. “Sir! Sir! Sir! It weren’t him! It were Dainton Sir!” Harry’s beady little eyes, misted with anger, had given him the wrong target. He turned to me, but I think the Form teacher realised that this was getting close to GBH and stepped in. Pete was accused of smirking, hence the wrath, and I was given the distinct impression that should I ever step out from the herd again, I would be hunted down and dismembered.

The next time that I stepped out of line actually involved a very personal member of mine and his 2 accompanists. It was lunchtime and the quiet boys were enjoying their usual game of “Hot Rice”. I have no idea where this name came from. It involved an old tennis ball and one guy who was ‘It’. He ran around, bouncing the ball and if he could get within throwing range of someone, shouted “Hot Rice”. Everybody had to stop and he got to wang the ball at his intended victim who, once the ball was thrown, could try and dodge. If hit, you were also on and the 2 of you could then pursue and pass the ball. Last man standing was the winner.

On this particular lunchtime, one of the bigger guys decided to have some fun and pocketed our ball. He wasn’t one of the usual bullies, in fact most of the time he was almost human and maybe that’s why it got to me. I launched myself onto his back and started whacking him round the ears. I am sure that one of the blows hurt him, because he reacted by reaching over his shoulder and plucking me off, then swinging me in a wide arc until my downward glide met his upthrusting knee. The point of connection being my gonads. There is nothing in my life’s experience, before or since, quite like a knee in the balls. When you see these guys in the movies, beating the shit out of each other and then getting up again, frankly what a load of bollocks. Seeing stars and tweety birds is actually closer to the truth. One good knee to the nuts and you ain’t goin to walk for a while. There is just blinding white light, searing pain and the belief that your children will never be subjected to an experience like this, because you are never going to be able to have children.. I thought my life was over.

After several hours of lying there, trying not to puke up my testies, I was assisted to the Office where, still very green in the face, I explained my predicament. Frank Staziker, the school Gym Instructor and resident Nazi was called. He looked me in the eye and said “Count them”. “Count what Sir?” “Count your bollocks boy!” I didn’t have bollocks, I had a ball of flame nestled in the pit of my stomach. Gingerly, I felt around down there and said “2 Sir”, mainly because I didn’t want him feeling around down there. “Alright, excused Gym next period, go and sit in the Library.” What good sitting in the Library was supposed to do I have no idea, but that was pretty much Frank’s answer to any medical emergency. “Sir! Sir! Jacksons just got his arm trapped in the door and it’s been ripped off at the shoulder sir!” “Mmmm. Tell him to sit in the Library”.

I am not intentionally going for the sympathy vote, when I say that my Dad died when I was 13. He was probably one of the best blokes who ever walked this Earth. He very rarely got angry, he hardly ever drank, he was Chairman of the Parish Council and every Pound he earned went to his family. We had loads of stuff. Other Dads got into debt and our Dad would always help out. He would buy the racing bike off the bloke who needed the money, the Hornby Train set, whatever. He was the most loved man at Walton pit. At 13, every one of his mates told me so and he left a huge hole in my life.

But we are talking about School here and, after he died, that got worse. Now I was more than the midget poor boy, I was the half-orphaned midget poor boy. The Eleven Plus meant that I didn’t have to pay fees, but now the Local Council paid for my uniform, books and dinner money. It sounds like a minor issue, but when each week, the roll call was held for people to pay for school dinners and the Form master gets to, “Dainton. Ah yes, Dainton doesn’t pay”, in front of 29 other kids, it becomes an issue. I could have gone bad. The opportunities were all there and I slipped over the edge a couple of times but my Dad had married a woman with the biggest heart in the World and between them they had bred love into 3 Boys before they got to me. So I didn’t go bad, because I was loved. I went cheeky instead. I couldn’t fight, but I developed a knack of being able to talk my way out of trouble. I could make people laugh.

I became some sort of mascot. The little kid that didn’t get bullied, but got his hair tousled instead. They knew I had a temper and some pretty foul language and the cheek just kind of flowed out of me. One particular day I had been having a go at some of the rugby boys about all the time they spent in the baths together after a match. Maybe it struck a nerve. Several of them grabbed me, buttoned up my blazer and threaded the window pole through the arm, behind my back and out the other arm. Elizabethan schools have high windows, with big cast iron frames, you had to be a Titan to be able to lift one of those poles and pull a window open. They built a mountain of chairs and desks and passed me up it, then balanced one end of the pole on the top window and the other on top of the bookshelves. They then dismantled the mountain and buggered off, leaving me crucified.

None of this did I take passively. There was a continual stream of obscenities issuing from my lips, but in big old stone schools like this, there was always someone screaming in a dungeon somewhere and here I was, in the topmost garret. Nobody heard. I hung there pondering my options. Any attempt at movement would mean falling 15 feet with a bargepole strapped to my back. Broken limbs were a definite. But hanging there indefinitely would probably lead to gangrene in the armpits. Not a nice option either. That left rescue. I yelled for help and then heard steps coming closer and assumed that they must be returning to get me, because if I was seriously maimed, someone might get a detention. So I called to them, “Get back here you testosterone freaks of nature! I will personally fuck every one of you and your mothers. Then I will tear out your fucking hearts, rip off your heads and shit down your neck you sorry bunch of bastards……………..Oh!……..Hello Sir.”

It was the English Master who, for some reason had heard my yell and taken it seriously. “Ah, Dainton. Very descriptive use of the Anglo-Saxon. If you get some of that precision into your diction, without the obscenity, we might be getting somewhere. Some issues with the plurals though.” This was a man who had berated me the previous week for asking, “When can we have us homework back Sir?”

He looked up at me, quizzically. “Dainton…..Just what do you think you are doing up there?” The most obvious answer was also the most appropriate, “Just hanging about Sir”. “Wait there, I will get someone.” Right, like I was going to run away. He returned shortly with 2 caretakers several ladders and a crowd of boys and they managed to get me down and extricate the pole. “Who did this Dainton?” “Don’t know Sir. I didn’t see their faces”. He knew who had done it. The testosterone freaks were the Colts rugby team who trained under his tutelage, but he didn’t want them getting into trouble and so the matter was laid to rest.

Perhaps it was the stretching imposed by the crucifiction, or maybe it was the adrenalin burst as I pondered my fate, but shortly after that, some retarded hormone or other kicked in and I grew to six feet in about eight months. I then had even less reason to be bullied but, as a result, I not only had the shabbiest uniform in the place, the trousers were at half mast and the blazer looked like a Tommy Cooper doing dodgy card tricks. Everywhere I went, people were saying, “Spoon. Bottle. Bottle. Spoon. Just like that! Ahahahahahahaha!” I still couldn’t wait to get out of that place.

‘O’ Levels came along and I managed to scrape through Maths, English Lang., English Lit., Geography and Art. The grades were appalling but the Council were still paying my fees and the School was happy to take them and so they let me in to do ‘A’s. Geography was a joke and the Teacher lived in my village, except he lived in a posh, privately built, bungalow and I lived in a Pit-owned semi. After another year of disrupting his idyllic village life, it seemed like a good idea to drop Geoger and concentrate on English (not my first language, so still difficult), Art and General Studies.

English was pretty much all Literature at this stage and passing the exam entailed learning whole sections of various bits by heart. Rote has never been my thing, I am more of an extemporaneous sort of guy. I once played Mrs. Hudson in a Sherlock Holmes school play and had a line. My Mum came all the way on the bus and sat through 2 hours of schoolboy theatrics to watch me blow it.

Art was a different matter. The Head of the Department, in fact the only teacher in the Department, was great guy. He really encouraged us to experiment and was really patient with us which, of course, we interpreted as a sign of weakness. There were only 4 of us doing Art and so he enrolled us in a Life drawing class at the local Tech. Quite how he slipped this past the Board of Governors was anybodies’ guess, but there we were, every Wednesday afternoon for 2 hours, drawing naked ladies. Well Joyce to be precise. Every week we would go over to the Tech and set up our easels. A naked Joyce would come in from behind a screen and the Teacher would pose her in some demure attitude, allowing his hand to gently brush against some of the good bits, and then go out to smoke for the rest of the class whilst we tried desperately to chat up Joyce. One week he rushed in and announced that he had to be elsewhere, then rushed out. Shortly after a young and very attractive black woman came in and announced that Joyce was off sick and she would be our model, what was she to do?

Four, extremely anxious, adolescents, suggested that Joyce just usually got her kit off and let us pose her. To our delight, we were able to watch her strip, whilst we arranged our pencils, and then we posed her, spread across a chaise-longue in a style reminiscent of “Parade” or “Health and Efficiency”. Nothing would be left to the imagination in this one. But alas, fifteen minutes in and the Teacher passed by to see how things were going and threw a bluey and the new girl was re-positioned in a more Grecian manner.

School sports were, for me, just another form of torture. Being a midget ensured that Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in Winter, were spent cold, wet and hurting underneath a pile of aspiring Nazis, nominally called Rugby and in Summer having someone throw a very hard ball at your testicles, nominally called Cricket. That is, if you ever actually got to see the ball. Most often, I would run round in circles for a couple of hours, with no idea what was going on and no sight of a ball. So I took up cross-country running, I was already lonely, so what the heck and, with running, you could time your return to the showers so as to avoid the rat-tail wielding Nazis, even if it meant getting back after dark. By the time I was big enough to get my own back on the sports field, I had absolutely no ball skills whatsoever. A lack that was to plague me for the rest of my life.

To this day, I have no recollection of what General Studies entailed. However, I finished school with ‘A’ levels in General Studies and Art, having only achieved another ‘O’ level pass in English. There was no big deal for me about leaving School, in reality, I had left it at Four o’clock on my first day and never really went back.

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