Starting School (Routledge Revivals)

Brian Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415839112
• eBook ISBN: 9781135039141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1979, this book considers the culture of a multi-racial community through the eyes of six children about to start school. Each child is from a different background but all live in the same street in a town in the north of England. Following the children from home into school, their six separate lives are unveiled, illustrating the manner in which their six separate worlds are in some ways grounded in their own respective cultures, and in others interwoven with the common experience of school. These Children enter school in search of a multi-cultural society, and a sympathetic appraisal is made of what happens to them as they face such initially daunting prospects as the classroom, television and the playground.

The most compelling element in this book is the way in which education is shown to be able to derive benefit from this cultural diversity. The research was commissioned by the Social Sciences Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, and will be of particular interest to those working in social work and education.

Part One

SIX CHILDREN

1	ENTER VICTORIA

Victoria edges through the oil-hungry, scratched green gate. Tightly, if awkwardly, she clasps mum’s fingers. Her first day at school. And a quarter of an hour early. Her very first: and a nippy autumn mist still clinging ten inches deep across the playground. The thick white line which blocks off the Infant space from the Junior’s ground shimmers into invisibleness before it reaches the footworn steps. The steps dip hazardously in the middle: laid there nearly a hundred years ago, though as yet no one recalls that. Gladstone Road Primary (had it not been for an Irish labourers’ strike) would have been one of the first state schools in the north.

Above the four steps, a large double door with one flap closed and one flap open. Green again. Victoria and mum nudge inside, both seeming to think they should go before the other. Roundabout, people call that paint ‘Corporation Green’. Every school, clinic, lamp post, rent-office, bus stop and council house on this side of town wears a double coat. ‘Bloody wish I’d flogged them that load’ says the grey Lithuanian lollipop lady, who commands the school crossing.

Victoria has beautiful china-blue eyes, and exceptionally long dark lashes. Her hair is lighter: brown-to-blonde, hanging down to the hollow of her back, and nipped at the roots into two splaying strands by a pair of scarlet bobbles: ‘my best bobbles, these are. Look – whizz! whizz! my aunty Maureen gave ’em me at Christmas.’

I first met Gail Lockwood and her five-year-old daughter, Victoria, that summer. Go down School Street, cross the busy link road (if the Rhine valley lorries will let you), turn sharp left by the old Regal Cinema (now a blazingly-lit Green Shield Gift shop), and second right up Lea Royd Lane. Half way up are two facing pubs – the Saracen’s Head and the Ivy Green. Looking for Victoria’s house that first time, I was suddenly slowed down, trapped on the narrow cracking pavement by two shift workers, in mill blue, who lumbered out of the Ivy to climb slowly up the hill, to late lunch and afternoon sleep.

‘She ’as some bloody big tits, ’as our Carole.’

‘Aye, y’right. She has. Our Jean’s as flat as two fried eggs wi’out yolk compared t’your Carole.’

I turned off right along Martin Drive and heard no more. Gail Lockwood lived at number sixteen: a black-and-white bay-windowed house built to buy for £350 in the 1930s when this was a more aspiring neighbourhood. A fenced-in-front patch with tall blue Michaelmas daisies by the window, and pink and purple night-scented stock overhanging the brief pebbled path. A doorbell, with the name M. Lockwood inked above it, and lit up by a small hidden bulb, even in early afternoon.

‘Me, like school?’ said Gail, choking away with high hiccupping laughter. ‘School was mental arithmetic. Aye, oh yes, mental arithmetic and stick. I’ll tell you straight, I was always getting t’cane. Not at our Victoria’s age, but when I was a bit older – 7 or 8 or 9 and so on. The Headmaster, Mr Collenso, had a cane – we all knew it. (He died last Easter y’know.) He had a cane all right in his cupboard, but y’never cheeked Mr Collenso. No, never oh yes, he had this cane in his cupboard, but any way he wasn’t a man y’dare to cheek. I used to meet him later in town by the library or Boots – I don’t know really, but he was a man you felt fond of. A bit fond of, anyway. (Y’know, now I think that, I wonder about that cane. Funny, I’ve never thought before. Did he ’ave a cane in that cupboard?) Anyway old Mikey did. He had it on the desk, right across – on the top, where we could all see.

‘We’d sit there – mental arithmetic – row on row – and really, y’know, we weren’t a bad lot, not badly disciplined children as we know them. Not at all, not at all. But I got that cane again and again.

‘What for? Well … cheek, answering back, dumb insolence, y’know.

‘Hey, once, y’know – we hid it – aye, oh yes hid it and broke it. I was one of them that did it. I’d got to t’pitch, y’know that when he said “Gail Uttley!” I’d walk out with my hand already out in front of me. Hot tempered Irishman, he was – haven’t thought of him for years – Mr Kennedy. Horrible man. Just to think he was in charge of little children – like our Victoria. When you think about it, y’can’t believe it, can you I wonder if he had a problem, or something?’

Gail Lockwood went to Gladstone over twenty years ago. ‘I don’t remember much really. I remember the caning; and mental arithmetic, and oh yes keeping a diary. But my mind’s a blank really, only bits and bats left from them days.

‘Passed 11 plus though. That was the big day. My mum gave me raspberries and cream for tea, and my grandad gave me a gold sovereign he’d kept for years and years. That was fairyland, really, y’know.

‘But grammar school wasn’t so good. I never came off, don’t know why. I somehow went down the sink, don’t know why. Never fitted it, or maybe it never fitted me. Anyway, I got some “O” levels, and felt lucky to get out as soon as I could.

‘My mum said. “Well, what y’going to do? Office work’d be best after grammar school.” So we looked in the Huddersfield Examiner every night, and wrote off to them places – Rapide Fire Extinguishers, ICI and Mytholmroyd Woollen Mending Ltd. I got all three, and we were all excited. Dad sang To be a Pilgrim when he came in from the pub, and heard the news. And mum said “no sense in catching a bus to work, save the bus fare, and go to Mytholmroyd Menders”. So I did, as a kind of junior and invoice clerk and runner and all kinds of odd jobs that a young lass could do.

‘Then Mike courted me, and we got wed. All right, you might not think it, but I had this short black skirt, it got silver buttons down the front. I thought I looked nice, and Mike said I was smashing.

‘Mike was at Mirfield grammar but he left before “O” levels – I think he did – and he got a good screw labouring down the chemical works. Very good money-wise, y’know. We paid for our own wedding really – I know mum did the dinner, and dad did the taxis – but really we did it (well, Mike did it mostly) – anyway we did it ourselves.

‘Mike did the labouring for a few years. Then he did the buses, and we had Victoria. Didn’t like that very much – he had these broken shifts, they call them. One at 6.45 a.m. and off at 11, then back after dinner at 3 and off at 5.30 p.m., and then on the buses from 8.15 to half past eleven. Later sometimes. What with the baby and all, I couldn’t make the home all right that time – it was always (I know it looks it now!), but – really – them days – it was all higgledy pigstye.

‘So after we had Victoria, and then Nat (Nandy, we call him), it was all too much and Mike left the buses, and took up clerking at Brown’s. So now he does 8.24 a.m. to 11.57, then 1 to 5, except for Friday, which is funny. It’s all to do with adding up the hours in the agreement, so it comes right. Anyway, 8.24 it is – and what a rush, what a mess – worse than this! – I can’t describe it!’

Mike and Gail Lockwood turn out to be what the sociological textbooks call ‘early leavers’. The education system in its searching thrust for professional talent, picked them out at eleven – escalated them to grammar school – and then discarded them. Equipped with detailed knowledge of the medieval three-field system, eighteenth-century Latin grammar and the graded rainfall pattern of the Niger delta (both by season and by tributary) they moved onto tapping out the bills at Mytholmroyd Woollen Menders Ltd, and collecting two, three and five pence fares on the Huddersfield bus routes. (‘Y’can pocket a bit – maybe 1p in 25 or 26, but not much, not much more anyway not unless y’have a payday drunk or a green Paki. And that i’nt often.’)

Victoria, when she came, was like springing afresh. All hopes. ‘Mucking her out, gooing at her – all the same. Stuffing her with chips, chips chopped up like, snuggling her down. We didn’t mind, really.

‘We never went out. Never saw a picture, all this permissive society they talk about – well I only hear about it. Never see it – no such luck! Never out, never. Just Victoria.

‘Mike was very good though. One night he’d put her to bed, joggle her a bit and tell her a story. Maybe he’d do it three or four nights, depending on his shifts. And then I’d do it, y’know. Time-wise, he couldn’t have been better, our Mike. She’d have her little pink nightdress on – all teddy bears – and chirrup herself to sleep, not a care in the world. We had cares though.’

In the kitchen, where the family live, there is an orange toy cupboard with one door broken (‘It’s been like that for ages and ages, Mike couldn’t mend a jelly, he’s not a handyman he’s a brainman really’). One side of the cupboard has a pretty purple label, with Victoria pencilled on it. On the broken door is a small stick-on picture of a red railway engine, with Nandy written in the smoke.

Victoria has her dolls on the top shelf: a worn grey-and-green rag doll, with one eye, which is her favourite and goes to bed with her – if she’s pleased with it and the world. Two ‘trendy young miss’ dolls with blue eyes, peroxide white hair and mini-skirts. And a smiling Golliwog with cherry-red trousers, and such large whites to his eyes that they glint from the dark corner of the shelf. In the bottom stands her prize possession: a toy washing machine which Father Christmas brought. Otherwise the cupboard’s a jumble of felt-tip pens, picture books, scribbling pads with her name on the cover, pieces of Lego, and jigsaw boxes with the contents spilling out.

Nandy’s side is much more untidy. He’s claimed most of the Lego, which is all mixed up with pieces of plastic railway, a yellow dumper truck with caterpillar tracks, and a camouflaged helicopter. He has a black cowboy hat with a white fringe, and a faded mark where the Sheriff’s silver star once was. His two-holster cowboy belt is studded with translucent blobs of green, scarlet and blue in an almost oriental fantasy. I don’t know what has happened to the revolvers, but Nandy too has several coloured pens and pencils (mostly dried up or broken), and an ‘Artist’s Sketch Pad’ with his name written on the cover.

Next to the toy cupboard is a small brown table with the television on it. The Radio Times lies like a mat on top of it, one corner of the magazine so often drooping over the top right corner of the screen that no one troubles to move it. We simply do without that patch of the action. Gail underlines the programmes she wants to see, but especially marks favourite children’s and schools’ programmes for Victoria and Nandy.

‘What’s your favourite TV, then, Victoria?’

‘Nearly everything favourite, but not News.’

Victoria has watched television ever since she could focus on it, but it is quite specifically children’s television during the day. She knows the rough time and sequences of all the programmes she likes, though she’s not usually sure of the day. When I first met her in the summer before school began, Gail had already taught her – with the kitchen clock – how to tell the time, by the hour, half hour and quarter hour. She has difficulty with ‘a quarter to’, and announcements on the screen about ‘11.40’ or ‘4.25’ bring her scrambling to her feet, and demanding translation. Gail can’t quite see why she doesn’t understand, and gets a little impatient: but by and large Victoria at four understands as much about the clock as she requires to navigate her own life.

‘I do find her exhausting. She doesn’t let up. She’ll ask you a question and you answer it. And if it requires more, she’ll ask more and more. And she’ll try and trip you up. I find you have to be on your mettle with Vicky really to give her the right answer.

‘I find her so exhausting sometimes that I just knock off. Not with Nandy. He’s a different mind anyway, being a boy – I think they have, I should imagine so anyway.’

During the summer I sometimes see Gail out for short walks with Victoria and Nandy. They take bread to feed the ducks in the nearby park, or go and make faces at the owl in the aviary, or sit in the rose gardens and glimpse the men playing bowls. The children leave Gail to run round and round the bowling green, and squeal in mock terror if a black bowl is rolled too hard and clunks into the surrounding gutter near their feet.

In the park is a fine Victorian museum, packed with displays of stuffed animals, old musical instruments, models of early coal mines, rooms full of the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites, Chartism, Women’s Suffrage, an old toy-maker’s shop that lights up when you press a button, a beehive with a glass side so that you see the comb being busily built, and green tanks full of fat eels, irridescent angel fish and mating frogs.

Victoria and Nandy were taken dozens of times, since it made a delightful detour on an afternoon walk to Granny’s. But this summer the Corporation decides to make a small entrance charge.

‘It’s an outrage. Disgusting, shocking, we used to like to go in … I feel I’m being done somehow. It’s not that it’s a pound a time, but t’principle, like. I was used to running into that museum to look at t’stuffed eagles killing rabbits ever since I was a kid myself down Granny’s. Now y’can’t do that, y’ve got to pay. Is it Britain going into t’Common Market, or what? I don’t know.’

Both Mike and Gail kept loose links with four or five friends who stayed on at grammar school after 15. Those of their friends who stayed the course went on to be schoolteachers, and most stuck to Huddersfield and moved into local schools. At first they felt better off than their friends – they were married instead of shacking up at all-night parties, and they had Victoria, they rented a house of their own. They never seemed to have the same spending money as their student friends, despite all the harsh stories about student grants on TV, but they had something else: each other signed up, and base camp.

So here and there, around town are four primary and one secondary school teacher whom they know. Gail’s brother too is involved in education. He left school at 15 to work as a builder’s labourer, but he’s now been a primary school caretaker for ten years. ‘And from the stories he tells, all I can say is – never cross the caretaker – I never realised t’power they have. Never cross the caretaker – or you’ll pay for it by end of the week.’

Perhaps it is a little of this, perhaps a little of old school memories and unsatisfied desire that makes her watch schools television with Victoria and Nandy. ‘I don’t know. I just like it. I tell you what I really like – I like all the maths. Mike too, and that’s a funny thing because he was never no good at maths at all at school. In fact, when it was maths, teacher would say “Have y’any homework today, Lockwood? Well, get on wi’it then, and keep quiet. No sense in teaching you maths.”’

One Saturday morning in the Co-op butchers she met Emily Kaye, an old friend who sits on the Co-op Education Committee. Emily mentioned they were putting on an evening course at Almondbury School on ‘Children 0 – 5’, and would Gail come?

‘It was proper useless. I mean, we were all mothers – we didn’t need telling all that stuff about how to bring children u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Scene Setting
• Part One: Six Children
• Part Two: In Search of a Culture
• Bibliography
• Index