Part Two

Most of our summer holidays at this time were taken either in Minehead in Somerset, or in Llandudno, North Wales. Minehead was (and as far as I know, still is) a quiet little resort at the end of the West Somerset steam railway, however as such ventures tend only to operate at weekends, inevitably it was a case of the train from Liverpool to Taunton and then usually a taxi for the 20-mile journey to Minehead, during which I was invariably sick as it was practically the only time during the whole year that I travelled by car. Fortunately, Dad found a good hotel, the Glen Rock, and Mr and Mrs Dick looked after us year on year. The only problem was that our week in Minehead had a tendency to become predictable, catching the bus to outlying villages like Allerford (for the walk up to the picture-book village of Selworthy and the slog up Dunkery Beacon before returning to Minehead from the west) or the train to Dunster for the Castle and a gentle walk back along the beach. I have a suspicion that I could go back to Minehead tomorrow and know my way around a good part of it, from the steam railway around the harbour to the lifeboat station and some of the paths up North Hill where we would stroll in the evening. Something in the West Country air is definitely a tonic, and I do count it a shame that I go back so infrequently. Llandudno, however, is somewhere we’ve gone back to time after time down the years. Again, to an extent the attractions became a little predictable- one day would be a tram ride to the top of the Great Orme for ice creams with the sheep at the top, one or two days on the beach and a bus trip to Conway for the Castle; this last we could also accomplish by taking the train down to Llandudno Junction and walking over the Conwy estuary bridge.

At the same time, Grandma and I would usually go down to Auntie Joan’s in Surrey for a week at some point during the year, sometimes accompanied by Mum and/or Dad. The house which she shared with Uncle Chad and my cousin Claire was situated about ten minutes from Ewell West railway station and twenty minutes thence to London Waterloo, so we spent a lot of time going up to see the museums and historic buildings, which only served to fire my imagination. The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum were favourites which usually meant a trip to South Kensington at some point and, most importantly for a family group with children in tow, were free of charge, but Auntie Joan also specialised in the use of I-Spy London, one of the “I-Spy” series of children’s books where you earned I-Spy points by spotting particular animals, buildings or vehicles. The particular advantage of the London book was that it joined together a lot of the capital’s buildings, statues, plaques and so on into a walk which was ideal for a Sunday afternoon, remembering how dull Sundays were in Britain in the 1970s even in central London, with practically everything closed and even national museums only open for a few hours. The London Underground fascinated me from the beginning and still does; arriving at Euston, I used to plead with Grandma to take the Northern Line to Waterloo rather than a taxi. The decision was nearly always dependent on the amount of luggage we had, but on at least one occasion resulted in us being separated at Euston and not reunited for a couple of hours. The disadvantage was that our Saturdays would nearly always be spent on one of Auntie Joan’s shopping expeditions around Epsom; for anybody who doesn’t know it, the centre of Epsom is (or used to be) based on a central shopping street about a third of a mile long, which forked at either end, and we would generally start in the middle on one side and work our way around, finishing at Sainsbury’s, which was more or less next to where we started. Auntie Joan’s powers of endurance where shops are concerned have never been doubted, and by the end of the excursion Claire and I would inevitably be thoroughly fed up, if slightly mollified by a bit of pocket money.

Rather than a separate middle school, Vyner had a Lower and an Upper School, and the classes in the Upper were named rather than numbered- Bidston, Mason, Goodwin and Worcester, taking their names from local streets. Mason and Goodwin took theirs from a trio of avenues on an isolated estate which, it later transpired, had been built by the council with problem families in mind, separated from the nearby estates by a dual carriageway to the north and the grounds of Holy Cross, the local Catholic primary school, to the west. In Bidston I was taught by Mrs Piper, returning in her married form and on a permanent basis; I remember her as demanding, but she had a right to be- I was by this stage beginning to push at some of the boundaries, often telling lies either to get people into trouble or glamorise a fairly dull home life. A moveable partition separated Bidston’s form room from the school library, where I would often spend time reading or writing- for the life of me I can’t remember much of what I used to read at the time apart from a couple of ranges of illustrated children’s readers- one with a set of multicoloured pirates, I seem to remember, and one with a paranormal aspect of which all I can remember is an image of a bus waiting in woodland on a foggy night. Mrs Piper read us L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and Erich Kastner’s Emil and the Detectives among others, but as with many boys of that age, much of my reading took the form of comics and football magazines. It would have been around this time- the FA Cup successes of 1981 and 1982- that I first took an interest in football and, showing an early determination to be different, I picked Tottenham Hotspur rather than Liverpool or Everton. Probably relieved not to have fathered an Evertonian, Dad was happy to encourage me and would often bring back a Tottenham programme from the shop at Anfield. At the time I preferred Shoot, but looking at childrens’ football magazines today it seems as if their early eighties counterparts had much more reading in them, as some of my favourite parts were the weekly columns by playing professionals like Gary Shaw and Peter Withe of Aston Villa. I also became an avid collector of Panini football stickers, although the only album I ever completed was Football ‘82- again, looking at the current versions, there’s an all-consuming emphasis on the Premiership to the exclusion of everything else and it seems strange to think that some twenty years ago, even the old Third Division got a look-in- I do wonder whether the general footballing knowledge of young supporters has suffered as a consequence, and whether your average nine-year-old knows what Chesterfield’s home ground is called.

Moving up to Mason in the next year, I was under the supervision of Mr Bolger, a red-haired Evertonian, who again seems to have enjoyed teaching me even if it wasn’t always apparent. If I have a visual memory of this year, it’s of the end results of a class project on ancient Egypt which led to monuments being created out of cardboard boxes inspired by a BBC schools series on the subject. Having already discovered the Greek and Roman legends in some volumes of re-told stories, the Egyptian myths and culture also struck a chord in me, so that visiting Auntie Joan that Easter, I persuaded Grandma to take me to the British Museum so that I could see the Egyptian relics- although some of the hideously shrivelled mummies were probably a bit strong for me, as a nine-year-old of what used to be called a sensitive disposition. I can remember more events of this year- this was, after all, the year of the Falklands War, the 20p piece and the World Cup in Spain, and on reflection I can see that it was around this time that many of my interests came into being, many of which have stayed with me ever since. Ancient cultures and mythology is one- I can remember acquiring books on the Aztecs and Incas at the time as well- but another one took place in the November of 1981 and seems now to be a permanent presence.

I’d probably always been aware of Doctor Who, as indeed most children of the 1970s were, but while I can remember watching occasional episodes here and there- enough to conclude that I probably watched most if not all of Tom Baker’s penultimate season- being, as I say, a child of a sensitive disposition, I preferred to get my spooks from Rentaghost and my sci-fi from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Even now, I don’t think Tom Baker will ever be my favourite Doctor, simply because of the association with childhood terrors. But at the beginning of 1981, Baker vacated the role, and at the end of the year the BBC marked the arrival of the Fifth Doctor with a series of selected repeats. In many ways, it was an ideal line-up; a classic episode Monday to Thursday and, as I recall, a monster movie on the Friday evening (which took our household quite happily through to Blankety Blank, but that’s beside the point). I think what grabbed me, from William Hartnell’s opening episode onwards, was the sense of adventure and mystery, as well as the way that the repeats were also watched by the other two brightest children in my class, so the episodes were thoroughly dissected by Joe, Jane and myself. From that five-week series of repeats, my enthusiasm was fired both by Peter Davison’s first season in the role and by discovering the range of book-length adaptations of the television stories in local bookshops, where I was generally taken on a Saturday morning. Over the years, my enthusiasm for Doctor Who has waxed and waned, but it’s also given me a great deal of enjoyment and not a few friends along the way.

After my first real World Cup in the summer of 1982, it was back to Goodwin and quite probably the most unhappy year of my school career. I spent this year in the custody of Mr Randall, who managed to balance an air of bullish joviality with an approach to me which bordered on the unprofessional. There are several reasons: for one, when Vyner’s headmaster, Mr Holroyd, had been unwell for the best part of a year, Randall had been in temporary charge and quite probably hoping to be offered the headship on a permanent basis; the following year, Mr Holroyd retired and a head from outside was appointed. My parents and I now also believe that Randall had a personal animosity towards me based on his politics; Mr Holroyd had put me forward for the entrance examination for Birkenhead School, the local private boy's school, to which Randall apparently had political objections based on dogmatic left-wing politics. To be honest, I’ve never quite understood left-wing dogma; while I can see that this country is probably a better place for many innovations which have come from the left, I have to wonder what kind of person is prepared to deny a child opportunity to satisfy their political conscience. The net effect was that my day-to-day life became almost intolerably unhappy. Randall would take every opportunity to humiliate me, picking me up on every slightest mistake in my work while Mr Holroyd was coaching me for better things. Perhaps he thought he was simply taking me down a peg or two for my own sake- in any case, the net effect was not far short of bullying. The amazing thing was his popularity, both with other pupils and parents- whenever a show or an event was called for, he could usually be relied upon to deliver, whether it was a self-penned song for the Christmas play or organising a school trip. I don’t know whether children still have school trips, but we had a few- the museums in Liverpool (to which Dad was already accustomed to taking me at the weekend), a country park which had built on the site of an old wildlife attraction complete with bearpit, on one occasion the long trek to York and in our last year, Jodrell Bank.

That particular year, the local council had decided to abolish middle schools and admit pupils to senior schools at age twelve rather than thirteen, so both Goodwin and Worcester (previously the top form at Vyner) would be going on to senior school in the same year. This troubled me a great deal; I had, after all, known many of my fellow pupils for more than half my life, and after a very settled seven years with the same faces and the same surroundings, I was seriously daunted by moving on. While all the girls would go to Park High School, for boys there were the “options” of Park or Birkenhead Institute, which had started out its life as a respectable boys’ school serving some of the more well-to-do suburbs of the town, but over time had started to draw its intake instead from the council estates which were later built up there, so that by the time my parents had to consider my options, it was notorious for systematic bullying. A combination of falling rolls and the poor reputation of the school have since seen it redeveloped for housing. As I’ve said, Mr Holroyd encouraged my parents to put me forward for Birkenhead School, and so on two Saturday mornings I turned up and took the two entrance papers, based largely on general knowledge, English and maths. I must confess at this point that, having my reservations about being separated from my friends and not wanting to have Saturday school either, there were one or two Maths questions which I deliberately answered wrongly, but all to no avail as my other answers were good enough for me to pass- and just as well, for shortly afterwards my parents received the letter from the council’s education department informing them that I had been allocated to Birkenhead Institute.