THE RANDLE REPORT

A taster from my forthcoming memoir: 

GRAMMAR SNOBS

The last days of Torquay Boys' Grammar School.

Thus we were styled by those afforded the jollity of going with established friends on to co-education at Secondary Modern or Comprehensive level.

If they only knew how unattractive was the proposition of walking alone at the age of ten into a completely alien institution with teachers out of Dickens and six hundred strangers, most of whom already knew each other from feeder schools at Chelston, Shiphay, Cuthbert Mayne, Ellacombe, Upton and beyond.

Many of these had done classics and geometry and equations and all sorts of things that hadn’t reached Paignton. A number had even been taught to record their thoughts in neat italics.

Some of us, on the other hand, were still wearing oversized shorts with our blazers, ties and caps. Our Mackintoshes made us look like refugees and our Bri-Nylon shirts stung our underarms.

Acton, Aggett, Brown, Cavaliere, Ellis, Grainger, Hirst, Houghton, Kay, Klemm, Madge, Mortimore, Oram, Perin, Perkins, Pike, Poblocki, Randle, Savva-White, Thomas, Waring, Whitehouse, Wilson, Worden, Wyman, Youll - we answered to our names when called by form master, ‘Chick’ Johnson, and even moved desk to sit in alphabetical order to be more easily told apart by the embodiment of the lesson of history, Gilbert Head-Rapson.

Mr Johnson taught us French by the phonetic method, a gentle procedure that none the less resulted in distressing and sometimes alarming cries, groans and grunts. Mr Head-Rapson favoured the methods of the Inquisition and instilled sufficient terror to keep utterances of any kind to a minimum.

The ritual initiation at Torquay grammar was a ducking in the school lavatories. Thanks to a kindly fifth former in a striped blazer, my own baptism was largely theoretical, just sufficient to count as a ‘done’.

Far more onerous was trial by ablution which required the boys to run naked through the ice cold showers attached to the Tech College gymnasium. Most of us had neither run, nor even been, naked in our lives, even in the presence of family members, and this grotesque procession would do little to foster body confidence, leaving one only with a deep distrust of the instigators and supervisors of such torture.

In that gym, in which we would later perform musically, we learned to climb ropes and bars, the meanings of sissy and namby-pamby and how to wreck yourself with a wooden horse. I had myself become quite proficient in the diagonal half-roll  by the time I achieved certainty that a future in gymnastics was not for me.

Running about in thick fog at Torre Valley or Shiphay added the rougher field sports to the scratch list and being struck by a cricket ball while the balance of my mind was with the netballers on the next pitch ended my fielding career when umpire Taffy Cannings diagnosed that I was definitely not not-out but in fact unconscious.

Forged parental letters did the rest and I and a few chums were soon indulging in altogether more cerebral sporting activities on Wednesday afternoons such as going down the Colony to see ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’ for the umpteenth time. ‘Ooh, Jamie!’

Adrienne Posta as Runny Linda.

Still, in the end and against the odds, my classmates in Form 1B would become Keith, Allan, Phil, Denzil, Bob, Ian G, Reg, John, Max, Carl, Henry, Nicky, Bob, Andy, Tony, Howard, Mike, Constantino, Andy T, Tony W, Ian W, Rob W, Paul and Bob Y. I would make many other good friends before I moved on and even settled down to an uneasy truce with the place and its masters.