Within three months of starting secondary school, five of us boys in a first year class could do passable imitations of some of our teachers. Every verbal quirk, every facial expression, every gesture and every word was fed into our mental recording faculty, analysed, held up for ridicule, derided, exaggerated, reproduced, refined and honed for future performances in front of classmates and understanding parents – especially if one of the parents was also a colleague of the ‘victims', whose every verbal quirk, every facial expression, etc. One man came in for special treatment because he was probably one of the most obnoxious members of the teaching staff, who was head of the technical studies department for whose activities we showed neither aptitude nor interest. We pupils were optimistic about the first two periods on the Thursday morning of the first week of term. After the first month, we had learnt the import of the Sisyphus myth. The teacher, a skeletal-featured man with the build of a bag of bones, demonstrated an electro-magnet. We were mistaken to believe that such an ambitious project would be entrusted to us 12-year-olds. However, since the main component of an electro-magnet is a coil of copper wire, we were shown a perfunctory diagram of a coil winding machine on the blackboard. The teacher produced such a device, consisting of a hand crank and spindles. Altogether, this machine could not rival the excitement and anticipation bred by the electro-magnet. We sighed inwardly and set to work, cutting 10 by 25 rectangles of an unidentified sheet metal, truncating one of the angles of the metal rectangles and drilling two holes according to the blackboard diagram, which remained in place for the entire first term. We sliced, cut, drilled, sawed, filed, inscribed our initials on our rectangles, and cast them in a cardboard box in the recess of the workshop until the next week. After being kept waiting outside the technical studies block on winter mornings for at least 20 minutes, we were allowed in when ‘Skull Features', later dubbed ‘the Skull' ordered us to ‘lead on in complete and utter silence' into his department. The Skull was from the north of England, which meant he had an accent that was prominent down our way, hence his command sounded like: ‘Lead on in complete and ooter saalence'. As you can imagine, we five boys adopted this imperative as the first item for derision as we giggled behind our hacksaws and files. As we entered other classrooms for other lessons, we could guarantee raising a laugh with ‘lead on...' in a parody of a northern English accent. Every Thursday morning, we would try to find our metal plates that would never become a coil winding machine. We scrabbled, scrapped and scrumbled around the cardboard box that allegedly contained our work, only to find that the pieces had disappeared, or that someone else had taken them and not owned up. Strange, all fifteen of us ended up cutting the same rectangles and drilling the same holes and truncating the same corner week after week. We grew to hate this task. We detested the Skull even more for his indifference and arrogance. He had not a good word to say to any of us or our efforts. It was if he resented our presence, even though he had been contracted as a teacher to impart skills and knowledge that could be tossed into a cardboard box and forgotten. Despite this, there were some glimmers of humour in the dark satanic mill of the Skull's workshop. Once, he caught three boys on a drilling machine. One boy held the metal plate with his bare hands. Another boy lowered the drill bit and the third offered advice, except that his thumb was ripped by swarf – the twiddly bits of metal that are removed from a piece of metal during drilling. The Skull exploded. ‘Stand by yer benches! All on yer!' he bellowed. We scampered to our benches like frightened cats, stood rigidly to attention and waited for the immortal words. ‘When yer coom in ‘ere, this is mah domain. Ah doan't care what yer do outside mah domain, boot when yer coom in ‘ere, yer doan't act like a lot o' fools clowns an' hooligans. I said one person at a machine! Joost one person! Now get back to work!' So much for health and safety awareness. But the ‘fools, clowns and hooligans' was probably one of the funniest coinages of the day, not to mention the songs. Music was timetabled for the last two periods on Thursday, which offered yet another outlet for our scorn and disapproval of the bony tyrant of the technical studies department. We substituted our own lyrics for those of the approved songs that we were dragged through by a stocky woman pianist, who wore a kipper tie wider than the classroom window. The Skull permeated our warped songs. The best was yet to come. The room where we were given maths overlooked the campus. An ambulance with a blue flashing light drew up in a hurry outside the reception area. From the opposite side of the campus, we could see three figures approaching the parked ambulance fast. A youth whose face spoke volumes of pain was flanked by the Skull and another tech studies teacher. The injured youth was cradling a bleeding hand that had been hastily wrapped tightly in a white bathroom towel. We five exchanged glances. My neighbour whispered: ‘There's one who acted like a fool clown and a hooligan.' Another piped up: ‘Only one at a machine!' Yet the Skull continued to use school facilities with impunity to keep his precious canoe club – a weekend club of his – going, i.e. fibreglass resin, wood, moulds, clamps, welding equipment, trailers and fuel – all at the expense of the local education authority. One might suppose he was continuing the Roman tradition on entering public life: go into politics, spout out verbosities, enrich oneself and to hell with the plebs. When you are twelve years old, you live under a dictatorship staffed by adults of dubious credentials. While we dared not speak out against them, laughing up our sleeves was our safety valve and good fun, albeit sick at times.
