20. On The Seventh Day

aka Religious Instruction

I don't remember much of the religious instruction that was forced upon me as a child, mainly because my father made me wear an Eton collar when attending Sunday school.

This was a large white collar so wide that the top nearly cut your ears off when you turned your head, and the bottom made dents in your shoulder blades, and was worn outside the coat lapels giving you the appearance of a walking wedding cake.
Enduring the mickey taking of my mates, without being able to take a swipe at them for fear of decapitating myself, fully occupied my mind, and I didn't absorb much of the ways of the Lord.

However I seem to remember that He made the earth and it's inhabitants in six days, and put His feet up on the seventh.

Now, whatever the boffins tell us about evolution and hereditary traits, they can't successfully explain why all God’s creatures have an irresistible urge to do something that is quite out of keeping with instinctive reason, and what's more, do it no matter what the consequence.

Why do lemmings suddenly march off and drown themselves in their thousands*, bats hang upside down to sleep when it's just as easy to sleep the right way up, eels travel all the way the the Sargasso sea and salmon battle their way up rapids to spawn, when both could quite comfortably have a bit of the other right where they were?

I think the answer is in the obvious explanation and that is that God was tired after all that hard graft and felt He was entitled to have a bit of fun. After all, it would be dead boring to watch all creatures great and small doing exactly what the were supposed to do for ever and ever, amen.

So, He put in the make up of every being, something stupid, something that would be so contrary to reason, that He would always be sure of having a giggle, when Songs of Praise on the Telly got on his nerves. Even He would get browned off being lauded all the time. Only human, ain't it ?

The naked ape, that's us, has two natural functions. One, to see how prolific he is when it comes to siring offspring, and two, to see how many nasty ways he can invent to destroy himself.

So God instilled an urge in him, to record all his noble efforts, so that posterity could read all about his struggles, the gag being, there won't be nobody to read it when he eventually succeeds in fulfilling his destiny.

Thus at some time or other we try our hand at keeping a diary. I had the urge to do it at the age of fourteen** and recorded the daily scene for a whole year. I came across it, amongst other relics of bygone days, when having a clear out of things you can't take with you. On reading through it, I thought that God must have been tired out on that seventh day, as this little joke on homo sapiens misfired a bit, because while keeping a diary was useless when it came to posterity, I got immense pleasure reading about times I had forgotten.

I was back in the days when school girls were all gymslips and pigtails and as sexy as suet pudding, when school uniforms were what your elder brother had grown out of plus new patches on the seat of the pants and elbows of the coat, when school meals were usually a paste sandwich clutched in the hand while you played football in the playground, when bits of blotting paper soaked in ink and darts made from broken pen-nibs flew thick and fast across the class room, and when the throwers of such missiles got two on each hand from Sir if caught.

Psychology hadn't been invented then, and Sir maintained a fair discipline at a very low cost. The price of a new cane, when the old one broke, or a swift thump on the unwary Herbert who didn't duck fast enough.

We weren't any the worse for it, as it was accepted that if you were mug enough to get caught then you got punished, no hard feelings on either side. Any homicidal feelings towards that rotten sod Sir, died by the time your fingers stopped tingling, anyway you were too busy holding your hands between your knees or sitting on them, to be able to do anything about it in the interim.

 

I read references to teachers I hadn't thought of since leaving school.

Old Gobbo, so named because he sprayed you with spit if he spoke to you any nearer than five feet away.

The Twickman, who's r's sounded like w's, who invariably prefaced his maths lesson with "I'm going to show you a mathematical twick".

Bogey, who continually picked his nose during the science talks, and what was worse, flicked it at you if he thought you were not paying attention.

Mr. King (History) was affectionately known as Dot and Carry one, because he walked that way. A smashed kneecap at Mons (World War 1) made his right leg stiff as a poker and he swung it in a semi-circle to get it along, but this affliction in no way impaired his ability to give you a swift boot up the arse if he caught you mocking him.

Mr. Ede was an excitable little Welshman whose accent was so broad, that my class, who struggled to learn French under him, are probably the only people who speak it with a Welsh accent.

Beaky Harrison, whose enormous schnozzola had a permanent drip when it was cold and which joined up to the end of the shag fags he smoked during his spell on duty at playtime.

Wat Tyler, a temporary teacher, took over when Dot and Carry was on the sick list, and told us that nothing of importance happened before the Great War and to our great delight, spent his history sessions telling us yarns of his own dubious adventures during that period. The Heads swiftly gave him the push when he found out about, but I think that Mr Tyler has something there as Wat Tyler 1914-1918 remains clear in my memory, whereas the life of Charles II which we weres supposed to have learned, is still a complete blank in spite of all Dot and Carry's efforts to cram it into us when he returned. 

Then there was Kreamy Lynch who was probably the original Brylcreem boy as he had thick black hair which he plastered so lavishly with brilliantine that it ran down his face and neck so much that he looked as if he had his head in a bird cage.

And our Art master, who, besides being very Bohemian in outlook and appearance, dwelt under the sobriquet of Camel dial, not because his face resembled a camels', but because we all thought it looked like the other end. 

These were but a few of the hard worked, underpaid band of dedicated tutors, who did their utmost to transform the sow's ear mob of urchins of the late twenties and early thirties into the silken purse citizens of the late thirties and early forties.  As I said, Sir was the guv'nor in these days, maybe because he had everything in his favour, like a dirty great cane and also the support of our fathers, who wore full of apt phrases, such as :-

"Spare the rod and spoil the child" and

"Children should be seen and not heard"

I don't know whether it was the true concept of correct moulding of character, but I don't think it was all that wrong, as later events proved.

Anyway, my diary, which I hope gave God the degree of relaxation He intended, certainly helped me in one respect, although I hadn't realised it until I remembered those Sirs of yesterday.

Our Headmaster was known as Rip Roaring Reg because of his habit of tearing off defaulters, in the loudest strip they’d ever heard in their young lives After reducing the quaking miscreant to a quivering jelly of nerves with the sheer volume of his voice, he would suddenly request, in a very mild tone, that the cane and book be brought to him please then after briskly slashing six of the best down, three on each hand, thanked the offender attending and dismissed him with a fog-horn roar, of "next".

He also taught us poetry. He was a Robbie Burns addict, and must have suffered agonies trying to teach and make us appreciate the indecipherable Burns lingo. I never did, but one tiny bit of his poetry has always stuck in my mind. 

"Oh wad the Lord some giftie gie us
tae see oorsels as ithers see us" ***

Well, I don't think many people are that gifted, certainly not me, but remembering those Sirs of way back I thought that perhaps I'd been granted a wee bitty of a giftie, as I seem to see ithers as a funny lot, or p'raps it's just my warped outlook.

Anyway, you need a bit of a laugh at times, as I think God did, on that seventh day.

Notes:

* An urban myth that became widespread after this behaviour was shown in the Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958. The animals in the film were not wild animals jumping off the cliff voluntarily, they were bought by the producers and pushed over the edge of the cliff. Nice work, Uncle Walt.


** That was 1930/31


** The final verse of "To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church", 1786, and is actually:

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!"