Tuesday 17th July 1984
Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.00. At school we sorted out our trays, then we emptied and gave in our files. At 12.00 I had dinner, then in the afternoon it was our Sports Competition.
Ozzie and I entered for the Wheelbarrow and came last, the Three legged race and came last, and I entered for the all fours and came third. At 3.15 I came home and started writing a fighting fantasy, then I had tea. Then I typed some more and at 6.40 I watched Star Trek.
At 7.30 I watched Little and large, and at 8.00 I went out. At 9.00 I watched Film buff of the year and at 9.30 I went to bed.
Aaaaaahhh… what a poignant reminder that our seven year stint at Levendale Primary School was finally coming to an end. Four days worth of teeny, junior education left to go, and already we were ‘sorting out our trays’, and ‘emptying and giving in our files’. The primary school equivalent of the tired, old football manager clearing his desk. It’s symbolic enough to feature in an Ingmar Bergman film, with Max Von Sydow playing Mr Millward. Truly, this was the end of an era.
Our ‘trays’ were the Levendale equivalent of the more traditional school lockers. Basically, everything we needed to keep safe at school was stored in our own personalised grey, plastic drawer… stacked up in towering columns, each with our name stuck to the front with sticky-backed plastic. Mine always contained, at any one time, the following…
1. A battered Doctor Who Target Novelisation, with an 84.7% chance of being written by Terrance Dicks.
2. A crinkled bag of aniseed balls, several of which had melted and become inextricably welded together, meaning they’d have to be eaten four at a time alongside a healthy portion of grubby, fingerprint-ridden paper.
3. Four Berol Notewriter pens, with red bodies and blue nibs. At least one of these would have leaked liberally over the cover of the Doctor Who paperback, rendering the author’s name as ‘Terrace Dick’
4. One Nuffield Mathematics Textbook (unopened)
5. My ‘file’. Not, thankfully, compiled by MI5 (that was in fourth year seniors) but a hardbacked ring binder covered with cartoon drawings of ‘Loonymen’ and containing pretty much all my schoolwork for the year, all neatly handwritten on A4 foolscap lined paper and filed away in an orderly fashion. We were told by Mrs Keasey that we could ‘keep anything you want to take home, bin the rest, and hand your empty files in to me when you’ve finished’.
In the spirit of reckless nihilism, I binned everything. Somebody stop me sobbing, please. I could have had six months worth of blog-related fun out of that bloody binder. 1984 was firmly in the pre-recycling age though, so my beloved stories, cartoons and aborted attempts to write Fighting Fantasy books are probably all still languishing at the bottom of a vast, noxious landfill site in the Far East. Along with forty million sticky Wham Bar wrappers and several hundred tonnes of discarded Spam Fritter from the same era.
And so if any proof were required that our work at Levendale was over, that was it. Our files had gone, our trays were empty. Walking around the ‘Upper Band’ area in these final few days felt like taking one last stroll around the family home before the last removal van pulls away and the new occupiers arrive. The smell of empty melancholy was everywhere, and the patter of Start-Rite trainers on the polished floor tiles seemed to echo to eternity and back.
Thankfully, we had the School Sports Day to occupy us. It was pointed out on this blog last week that these events were great for kids who were less adept at the more traditional, blokey school sports – yer football, cricket and rounders – because, let’s face it, a three-legged race pretty much levels the playing field for everyone. Unless you’re me and Ozzie, in which case it’s plain to see that we were just as bloody useless at the silly sports as we were at the proper stuff. I think we were overtaken by a stampeding herd of slugs towards the final stretch of the Wheelbarrow Race.
Oddly enough, my clearest memory of this day is sitting at the side of the school field as Ozzie asked me if I’d heard the latest Michael Jackson single, ‘Farewell My Summer Love’.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Is it any good?’
He proceeded to sing it for me in a breathy, high-pitched approximation of Jacko’s voice, prompting a passing Doug (who seemed to have somehow avoided taking part in any kind of sporting activity at all… I think Mr Hirst was just past caring by this stage) to comment that he sounded ‘like Fischer’s got hold of your knackers’. If that had been an event in the School Sports Day, then no doubt we’d have come last in that, as well.
Incidentally, around this time, I was inspired by Weird Al Yankovic’s brilliant Jacko spoof ‘Eat It’ to try my a hand a bit of my own satirical songwriting. Predictably, I also used ‘Beat It’ as the basis to come up with the following rather unfair ditty…
‘How come Levendale is the worst school around?
There ain’t one kid who likes it, I bet you a pound
At the end of just one day we’re banging our heads on the ground
Can’t stand it…
Can’t stand it…’
I managed to get a full lyric out of it, but that’s all I can remember. I’d like to point out that this was an entirely shameless early attempt to play to the crowd, as I’d thoroughly enjoyed my time at Levendale and have always looked back on the place and my time there with great affection. But hey – who cares about that when a few cheap, satirical shots set to a popular tune of the day would doubtless have my snotty-faced classmates rolling around the lino with laughter?
(I’m such a tart)
And, yay! If it’s Tuesday evening, and it’s BBC2, and it’s a point in human civilisation somewhere between 1977 and 1989 AD, then there’s a reasonable chance that a random episode of Star Trek will be showing. This week, it was the excitingly-titled ‘The Naked Time’, the famous Season 1 adventure in which Mr Sulu strips to his waist and takes to the Enterprise corridors wielding a sword…
This is also, fabulously, the episode in which Scottie actually DOES used the immortal line ‘Ye cannae change the laws o’ physics’, which I think resounded around the Levendale playgrounds during the, erm, three lunchtimes that we had left…
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
I’m going to use the comprehensive impression of your young psyche illustrated by these blog posts to authentically synthesise what your Fighting Fantasy book would be like. I’ll publish it under ‘AJ writing as Bob Fishcer (circa 1984)’. Unfinished of course.