Big School

My final year of junior school ran from September 1976 through to the summer of 1977, during which I assume I must have been the oldest kid in the whole place. There were only ten children in my year, including myself, and my birthday was in September. Having taken up half of my entire life by that point, it felt as though junior school had lasted forever, and it felt like it had been a long, hard journey getting to the age of eleven; but it had been worth it, now that my bunch were Lords of the playground. We'd done the time. We'd put in the hours. We had the experience. The only cloud on our horizon was big school. Big school would send us all back to square one, reducing us to the smallest fish in a bigger, more violent pond.

Actually, it wasn't the only cloud. There was also the end of the world to consider, or to do one's best to avoid considering. Old Mother Shipton had predicted that it would come in 1980, just three years hence. Paul Moorman told me this and I absolutely believed him, having heard of Old Mother Shipton and her predictions. She had been a sixteenth century witch who had foreseen all sorts of stuff according to something or other which had been on the telly. Our school was Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, Warwickshire, at the edge of the Cotswolds, a locale with a rich history of witchcraft and the like, and none of us were entirely sure of that epoch having fully passed. There had been a witchcraft related murder in the fifties over in Quinton, and I never quite summoned the courage to climb Meon Hill, which is where it had happened. It was said that one could only cross Meon Hill from east to west, or possibly west to east. If you attempted it the wrong way around, whichever way that was, you just wouldn't be able to do it, or you would die, or you would meet the devil. All of that stuff was still pretty close to the surface, so I spent the last three years of the seventies really, really wishing that Paul had never told me about Old Mother Shipton.

I tried to dispel his sponsorship of the prophecy by inventing a load of other events she'd predicted which hadn't happened, predictions which Paul could hardly refute, not having heard of them.

'What about the flying saucer invasion that she predicted would happen in 1975?' I scoffed, but my laughter rang hollow. I was fooling no-one but myself.

Still, a year - September to July or thereabouts - was one hell of a long time, so there didn't seem much point in worrying about the end of our era. My friend Matthew had gone to the big school in the nearby town of Shipston, and Mark McFarland had gone to the one in Stratford-upon-Avon. I spoke to Matthew and he seemed to be getting on okay, although it nevertheless sounded terrifying to me. There were hard kids at Shipston High School, like you saw on the news. They got into fights. Shipston was a town, and towns had gangs. Worse still, Old Mother Shipton was buried under the drinking trough at the end of Telegraph Street, although I much later discovered that not only was this untrue but that she had lived in Yorkshire and had no actual association with Shipston aside from a similar name.

We went swimming at the big school every Wednesday morning, all piling onto a coach which took us the three and a half miles to Shipston. I was crap at swimming, but eventually mastered a version of the breast stroke which was mostly just floating, for which I was duly awarded a swimming certificate dated to the 9th of March, 1977. I didn't actually see any fighting in the vicinity of the swimming pool, so maybe it was going to be okay.

We had an American boy in our class during that final year, Jamie Keating. He had an older brother, Sean, and an American father who lived in the village for no reason I was able to discern. More recently I learned that Jamie and Sean's father was Charles Keating, an English rather than American actor who had moved back, having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, and who presumably chose Ilmington because it was handy for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Stranger still, when I moved to America I discovered that he was fairly well known over here, and had played my wife's favourite character in a long-running soap opera called Another World.

I didn't know Sean or Jamie too well, but recall Sean as being pleasant, funny and laid back. This was in contrast to Jamie who was kind of lively, as I suppose younger brothers tend to be. He always seemed to be getting into confrontational situations with other kids who took exception to his being American, or with one other kid who was a bit of an all round pain in the arse, If I'm to be honest. The confrontations mostly took the form of red-faced yelling with heavy emphasis on the terms yank and limey as pejoratives. I don't think anyone really won, and Sean seemed thankfully too elevated to involve himself with such foolishness.

I gave Jamie a wide berth, mainly because I was a bit withdrawn and he was fairly loud, or so it seemed to me. The only conversation I recall having with him was on the way back from a book fair at the big school. We were back on the coach and somehow ended up sitting together.

'Did you see the life-sized Doctor Who cut-out?' he asked me.

'No,' I said bewildered, because I definitely would have noticed something like that.

'Oh man,' he said, wide-eyed. 'I can't believe you didn't see it.'

'Where was it? I was only in the big hall.'

'Yeah, that's where it was. There was a competition too.'

'A competition?'

'Yeah, if you won you could be in Doctor Who. I can't believe you missed out.'

He invented a whole load of other non-existent Doctor Who things which I really should have seen. He'd really honed in on my weakness and kept on pushing that button all the way back to Ilmington. I knew that his testimony couldn't be true, but at the same time I understood that he wouldn't tell a lie or make something up, so whatever he'd seen must have inhabited some sort of potential reality, perhaps the same one in which Dan Dare had lived as an actual historical figure, possibly. I was trying to get my head around it but not doing very well.

On the other hand, we'd been right inside the school and still hadn't seen any shootings or stabbings or however it usually went down.

I took the eleven plus, failed, and didn't get to go to Stratford-upon-Avon like Mark McFarland. Only after taking the test did I understand that this had apparently been desirable. I was therefore destined to attend big school in Shipston with all the other farmhands and labourers of tomorrow, but Matthew insisted that it would probably be okay, and that he himself hadn't been in a single fight that whole year. I wasn't reassured because Matthew was more worldly than me, and knew, by way of example, where his older brother kept his stash of bathroom magazines. Also I suspected I was probably a bit more punchable and would have to keep my head down. Nevertheless I tried to keep myself from worrying over what was still an unknown.

My final idyllic year at Ilmington came to an end, opening onto a long hot summer of garish pop music and mucking about on bikes. It was the last good thing for a while.

On the other hand, it turned out that Old Mother Shipton had got her dates wrong, so swings and roundabouts...