THE RANDLE REPORT

BEING INFANTILE (1953-7)

I look back upon my childish self as a stranger. Young ‘Dai bach’, as my mother liked to call him, although neither party was Welsh, was an ungainly creature in round, skin-coloured National Health glasses, one of whose lenses was rendered useless by a big square of Elastoplast - 1950s technology designed to inspire gumption in what was regarded as a ‘lazy eye’.

Neither the eye nor its possessor was much impressed, any more than by the protracted infliction of rubber underwear that was supposed to encourage nocturnal excursions to the perfectly civilised indoor toilet.

I can recall both parents being gratified when the child beat out the entirety of Eric Coates’ Dam Busters theme on his high chair, but his general combination of fearlessness and attendant tendency to be always broken and bleeding in some manner - especially about the head - was less winning and a clear disappointment to mother who found the more athletic and less frequently damaged children of the neighbours, especially those with ‘dark brown’ voices, to be more in the line of ‘real boys’

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Bobby Truscott was not without barked shins and knees, but was altogether a more shining example of the breed. He lived in number 62, the lower flat in the next block up from us. His mum was very jolly and Devonian and his dad always seemed to wear a flat hat. Mr Truscott went off to work on a bicycle and was skilled in the art of starting off on the left hand pedal and swinging his starboard leg over the then obligatory ‘top tube’ when already in motion. All proper workmen did that then but it seems to be a vanished art.

The top flat was occupied by the Leadbetters. They both seemed quite old to me by comparison with the other neighbours, though they had a daughter called Susan who was younger than we were.

I joined those from all over the estate of a similar vintage for an introductory day at Foxhole Infants’ School. We were each given a piece of paper and some wax crayons with which to do a drawing. The teacher was full of praise for my colourful representation of an unspecific quadruped all four of whose legs were on the same side. I found it a pleasing sensation at the time, though I now wonder if it wasn’t a marketing technique. Either way, a neighbour from the other end of Hoyles Road, Maurice Beer, took exception to my singling out and scribbled all over it, immediately the teacher had moved on

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The die was cast, however, and we were all soon trapped into the education system. Some of the boys had little green caps with a fox and a hole on them, but mostly people just wore their best clothes. I remember the girls mainly wearing tartan skirts and cardigans often done up only with the top button. I sported a green zip up jerkin.

We took it in turns to be ‘monitors’. As a milk monitor you were required to hand out the third of a pint glass bottles of free milk or orange juice and wash the silver foil lids in a washbasin at the back of the classroom ‘for the blind’. Another monitor would distribute books marked overnight by the teacher.

Fringed in the golden sunlight of memory, Jaqueline Baker, Ann Rowden, Eric Underwood, James Ravenscroft, David Pottinger, Celia Brown, Heather Coin, Esme Stevens, Graham Elswood, Stephen Raymond, Hilary Richards, Virginia Dunn, Maurice Beer, Jaqueline Maunder, Keith Tonkin, Jane Webber, Margaret Choke, Mike Weed, Barry and Susan Bickle, Pamela Hines, all running and shouting on the tarmac playground and daisy smudged grass during the joyous momentary relief from classroom drudgery.

Music in the mid-fifties took the form of a ‘percussion band’. We were each issued with anything from a xylophone to a triangle by way of castanets, tambourines and cymbals with which to make a god-awful noise to accompany something coaxed from the school piano. More mysteriously when I look back on it now, we also were given a go at conducting the resulting cacophony, actually learning the basics of the art at the age of six.

Somebody told Miss that I had been heard playing our home piano, so she offered me an opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. I launched into a rhythmically and harmonically suspect rendition of Rock Around the Clock to rapturous approval from the other inmates, but was offered no further such opportunities.

At Foxhole, I had my first serious injury when a bench upon which a number of us were sitting collapsed and took the skin off the back of my legs; I observed one of the worst accidents I was ever to see when  the gardener (Mr Towler?) cutting the grass on a bank during playtime slipped over and lost control of the school’s heavy Ransomes motor mower so it ran onto the playground and into the young legs of Pamela Hines; I saw dinner lady, Mrs French, stamp on an enormous misguided locust with her flat slip-on shoed foot; I learned the invaluable one times table, so have always afterward known how many ones make one; I learned how much fun girls could be by pursuing them with my friend Graham Elswood around the back of the prefab classrooms during playtimes; that the farmer had a wife and that along would come a chopper to chop off my head. Miss Buick showed us strange slide shows of Grimm goings on in German forests on her wonderful back projection screen, and I was not the only five year old to wet himself before being dismissed and having to walk home three-quarters of a mile along a muddy track and unpavemented roads in that condition.

The school day, even for five year olds, ended at four o’clock all year round in those days, and after a long afternoon, you were expected to stand for a final prayer and lift your chair onto your desk before being allowed to make a break for freedom.

For some period, a gang led by John Garrett used to wait for me at the top of Smallcombe Road and knock me about. I came to approach the place in terror. We were all five or six years old and our parents just thought this sort of thing toughened us up.

I might have waited until they gave up and went home, but I was even more terrified of Farmer Manicot’s dogs, which would hurtle across the field, slavering and barking, if you were too long in their jurisdiction.

One evening the gang was all in my face, haranguing and shoving, and I lost it finally and punched John squarely on the nose. ‘Now I’ve done it,’ I thought. But, his nose bleeding, his handkerchief (we all had one then) reddening, he put his arm around my shoulder and declared me all right.

It had all been part of some bizarre initiation ceremony. I had passed at last and would not be bothered again.

Not that this made my journey home any quicker.

The top part of Fernicombe Road, above the school entrance, was not surfaced in those days. It was mainly mud, with a certain amount of cinder mixed in. At the top, where it met the King’s Ash Road, was an enormous puddle that we had to edge our way around.

We had noticed that when the puddle overflowed the water took a certain course down the track, and worked out that by digging away with the heels of our expensively provided shiny school shoes we could create our own channels and guide the water wherever we wanted it to go. This engineering exercise with such ill-suited equipment was endlessly fascinating and occupied us for the best part of an hour each evening before we headed for hearth and home.

There was no telly to get back for and no homework. Later, I would be allowed to go round to David Wills’s house near the roundabout to watch children’s television (Whirlybirds, Bengo the pup, Tintin, and Sketch Club with Adrian Hill), but we were still sticking with the radio from Listen with Mother to the Flying Doctor - ‘Hang on to your braces, folks, we’re going down!’ and Journey Into Space.

Sketch Club with Adrian Hill.

As she would with all the many children she benefited during her life, Mother started early teaching me stuff. Walking had taken a while, but talking came easily. Not long before I was sent to Foxhole school, so she told me, I astonished her and my dad by reading the cover flashes from the Radio Times.

I wouldn’t dream of arguing with her a second time, but I’ve looked over some of the covers from that year and find it hard to believe that words like ‘Othello’, ‘Berkeley Square’ or ‘official organ’ tripped from me without an unsupportable quantity of tongue-sticking or face-pulling. I’d have been less challenged with the current issue.

Whatever the veracity of the claim, I had little trouble with Janet or even John, though they were rather priggish and unadventurous. I preferred Rupert, and was able - perhaps bothered is more to the point - to read the rhyming couplets and let someone else read out the prose from the bottom of the page. ‘Rupert’s chums were so perplexed to see the little bear so vexed.’ I also liked Honk & Tonk - a car and a tractor created by that same Reverend Awdry that gave us Thomas the Tank Engine - and the adventures of a pig called Toby Twirl. Richmal Crompton’s Just William came later, along with Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Men and Women, but it seems I missed out on many of the standard children’s favourites - Winnie the Pooh, Roald Dahl, etc., and never really got Anna Sewell or Biggles. Horses were things you fell off when shot, and aeroplanes were and remain a necessity, not nearly as interesting as cars.

My mother was a constant source of amazement. A year after making me go to school, she suddenly announced the impending arrival of a brother. This was information I was very unsure how to respond to. My dad and I were permitted by the matron-at-arms to see Mother in her starched bed at Paignton hospital. Everything was spotless white or that sort of municipal green they only use for hospitals, including and especially Mother, who also looked rather scrubbed.

The baby seemed all right, I suppose.