Beating time

The expression 'lancing the boil' that I used recently triggered some childhood memories.

My mother had hopes for her second child: a girl would be her much-needed companion in a male household and would be taught to cook and skivvy as her mother did. In those days one only knew the sex of a baby when it appeared, so I think she was probably quite disappointed when I, a boy, popped out. From then on, at moments of high drama with me, her messy and annoying second son, she would say to me: 'you should have been a girl, you know'.

Still, in a life of hard knocks she had learned to make the best of a bad job – if I couldn't be a girl, at least I could be a doctor. The first step on this career path was taken soon after my emergence into this cold world: she named me after the doctor who had delivered me. That done, she just had to wait twenty years and all would turn out as it should.

Almost before I could read, medical dictionaries and textbooks started appearing in the house. It never occurred to me at the time that my mother was going to make a doctor out of me even before I got to medical school. When I ran out of Biggles books I dipped into these. They could answer the questions upon questions that came into my childish mind: what do women look like, you know, down there? What on earth are testicles for? My parents were spared all the embarrassing birds and bees discussions, for which they were singularly badly equipped – in the presence of strangers they addressed each other as Mr and Mrs.

One book I remember well was a sales catalogue of medical instruments. It was there that I found the special lance for slicing open boils, the memory of which set me off on this tale. There was also a scraper for cleaning out gonorrhoea from the urethra – shove it in as far as it would go, pull the thread to open the little umbrella at the end, the pull it out steadily. The medical profession of the day seemed to take the screams of the patient as a suitable punishment for 'courtin Mary-Jane on Ilkley Moor baht at'. This sounded like my kind of job.

Fortunately, my immense medical knowledge was never tested in practice: it just gave me a hang for arguing with any doctor who had the misfortune to have to treat me, which caused me some problems in my later life.

Growing up

I made it through primary and junior school to the age of eleven without serious setbacks. One day I sat the 'eleven-plus' exam. No one told me anything about this exam or how crucial it would be for my future life; I can't remember being prepared for it in any way, I just wandered into school one morning and that was it. Afterwards, no one gave me a result apart from 'passed', thus, gormless as ever, that autumn in 1958 I was packed off to the big school, the Boys' Grammar School. It was another world, separated from my home by a forty-minute bus ride. After six years of female primary school teachers, the maleness of the new school was a shock.

There were some very decrepit heads of departments who had been too old to be Second World War warriors and who were now waiting out the time to their retirement. They taught the older classes, who caused them no upset. Then there was a middle rank who had done their bit against the Germans in one way or another. Then finally there were a very few young men who had missed the war but who had been caught up in two years of National Service. The school was not militaristic as such, it had just adopted the power model of the military – that you should fear your superior more than you feared the enemy. Start off tough and then relax if you wanted.

Looking back I am astonished at the amount of casual violence we pupils endured without complaint. It was behaviour which was considered to be quite normal: pieces of chalk thrown at you, in moments of real anger a board rubber or a book. Some teachers went to their classes with gym pumps at the ready. I have to confess that after a few years of this, I too had learned hair-trigger, intemperate reactions to helpless inferiors. It took me several years to unlearn them. Our family dog in particular suffered badly under my ignorant tyranny, the memory of which still shames me to this day.

Our religious studies master was an ocean-going sadist. Stumble over a word or two in a passage from the Sermon on the Mount or the lineage of Jesus down from King David and a beating would follow.

One mathematics teacher, who was famed for getting even thickos through their exams, preferred a chair leg. Another maths teacher, a one-eyed former missionary, a reverend doctor, never struck me directly, he just got the Headmaster to do it for him.

On a few occasions I was beaten with a cane by the Headmaster (a lay preacher!) for some transgression or other – probably forgetting homework. The teaching staff could whack you with whatever came to hand, but only the Head used a cane. He had about five in an umbrella stand next to the chair over which the victim had to bend. Every time I was there I wondered about the calculus of pain behind this selection, but thought it wiser not to ask him.

Once, from the middle of a rugby scrum, some idiot shouted out the first name of the Head of Sport: 'Gilbert!'. Gilbert stopped the game, gave us a lecture on the damage such lèse-majesté had done to his standing in the community. When the miscreant did not step forward, he beat the lot of us. The hard rain fell on the just and unjust.

When I reflect on this violence now, it occurs to me that my chief tormenters were all declared Christians: my headmaster the lay-preacher, the religious studies teacher, the one-eyed former missionary, the upstanding Gilbert.

The staff were not all thugs. A young chemistry teacher particularly impressed me. He had been in the army for some time and had boxed for his regiment. His face bore the traces of each fight: eyebrows battered away, ears that a cauliflower would be ashamed of, wrecked nose and his mouth a lipless slit which never really smiled. No one ever caused trouble in his class. He was utterly calm – perhaps that is what getting repeatedly battered does for you. He never raised his voice. When asked a question he would pause for a few seconds, gaze in the distance, then return to Earth to deliver the answer.

In particular, 'lancing the boil' reminded me of our elderly Head of English. He only had a few years more to serve before he could retire. like the rest of the General Staff of seniors. As many men in their fifties and sixties were at that time, he was intellectually agile but physically decrepit. The retirement age was set at sixty-five in the cold calculation that most men wouldn't last much longer. Both my father and mother only lived into their low sixties.

He had a boil on his neck, just on the top edge of his collar. He didn't seem ever to get it treated – it formed and grew, a red, angry thing, to the size of half an egg and then retreated again in a six-month rhythm. If it burst it was given a criss-cross Band-aid dressing.

Like Job, he bore his boil with stoicism. It must have tortured him. He never laughed or smiled, which under the circumstances was only to be expected. Being a natural authority figure, he had no trouble with discipline in class, his one hobby-horse was that his pupils should write out corrections to their written work – and corrections of corrections, and so on until perfection had been achieved, however many detentions it took.

One surprising thing about him still stands out though. We read our way through the major Shakespeare plays in class, each of us taking a role. Where a buffoon was called for, he would always take this part. This crumpled, pained man would transform before our eyes into the clowns and idiots of Shakespeare. He turned in wonderful performances. I still to this day remember him hamming up the role of the pompous fart Malvolio in 'Twelfth Night': 'M.O.A.I. doth sway my life'.

A few of the younger teachers often showed a human side when the General Staff was not looking. Our biology teacher made us specialise in something. My speciality was Bryophyta (mosses). He took us out to somewhere remote in the Dales, somewhere where we could spend the morning collecting and documenting according to our specialism. Driving rain and whistling wind were also educational.

Then back into the Land Rover to his cottage for a lunch of bread, cheese and pickles, followed by long discussions through the afternoon on this and that – important questions such as whether, for example, Jelly Roll Morton's 'Doctor Jazz' was at the apex of New Orleans Jazz:

'Doctor Jazz'. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Recorded in the Webster Hotel, Chicago, 16 December 1926. The musicians in this session were jazz royalty: c Kid Ory, tb Omer Simeon, cl Johnny St. Cyr, bj, g John Lindsay, sb Andrew Hilaire). That's a wrap, one single take, no post editing, peerless talent, which has left all subsequent covers in the dust. The piece was written by Joe 'King' Oliver in 1926.

Beside the important topic of jazz, there was a lot to talk about: only a few years before, Francis Crick and James Watson had discovered the double-helix. Plate tectonics and continental drift had become hot topics. These were two discoveries that within a few years dramatically changed human understanding. All this a bunch of sixteen year-olds in a cottage on the edges of Wuthering Heights chewed over with their buttered crumpets around a blazing fire. 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!'

Another young influence was an English teacher. He was formidably knowledgable and shockingly bright. His stature and speech mannerisms were John Cleese with a face reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling. His lessons were dynamic, taxing and never dull. We only caught him out once: it was one 15th of October. We were studying Henry V. He swept in, black gown floating, declaiming that 'Today is called the feast of Crispian'. He quite genuinely did not realise that it was in fact the Feast of Crispian that very day. Thus did we all learn.

What I only found out much later was that the deep red Labour council in the town had been planning since before I even attended the school to build a new comprehensive school on a greenfield site on the edge of the town, abolish the Boys' Grammar and the Girls' Grammar just up the road and merge them. This happened shortly after I had left. The old guard of senior teachers had all retired and with them the army culture of flying chalk, board rubbers, gym slippers and caning was gone, unsustainable with girls in the class and females in the staff room.

Sex. It had to be in there somewhere

My abiding memory of my post-pubertal days was a state of permanent randiness ('Moth is called over mountain / The bull runs blind on the sword, naturans'©EzraPound). My girlfriends were a chaste lot – even the heavy petters just left you with pains in your parts. Why did I only ever meet 'nice' girls? Among my comrades in school, embroidered tales of conquests would be exchanged, but they were all braggadocio, signifying nothing. No sensible Yorkshire lass would risk anything for any of us lot, and with at least four layers of stout wooolen undies she was safe from anything.

No sisters and seven years in a boys-only school taught me nothing about dealing with these strange creatures, girls, when the opportunity finally arose. For that you have to meet a good lass who considers you worth redeeming and spends a lot of time and effort knocking the boys' school out of you. I was lucky.

In my last year I was pedalling past the village shop when I saw a young woman struggling to fit her purchases into her bike-basket. Quite innocently, I asked her if she needed help. I took some packets of this and that and put them in my bike-basket. Side by side we cycled over to her flat. She was the new French Assistant at the Girls' Grammar School – so all those solitary hours of reading nineteenth century French poets paid off ('Mais non, Rrreechaarrr: foouurr-mil-yonte'). I also discovered that there are many important things that a man should know that are not to be found in medical textbooks.

The tale doesn't end there, but that's all I am telling you. Needless to say, there were many cycle tours around the Yorkshire Dales we shared that summer. Then she returned home and I left to pursue my studies, my mother having abandoned her dream of a doctor in the house. But then, making the best of a bad job as usual, she was cheered by the realisation that I would be no longer under her feet and all the medical books could go back to the secondhand shop, whence they had come.