Until I was ten I attended Wiveliscombe Primary School, where country dancing, singing and maypole dancing made up a strong part of the curriculum. I was a spotty, skinny kid and hated every second of those activities. I seemed to spend an awful lot of time fighting in the playground with a pair of really rough, tough kids who, because I didn’t have a strong Somerset accent, thought I was a bit of a snob and needed teaching a lesson. Luckily, I was a tough little bugger and seldom lost my fights. And apart from being ridiculed by the Headmaster for not knowing how long a jet liner took to travel to America the only other outstanding memory I have of my time at Wiwy School was when, in the milk break one autumn day, I placed a dozen shiny brown chestnuts on the potbellied stove in the corner of the classroom. I had spent the previous Sunday knocking them out of the trees by the reservoir with a stick with the intention of roasting them and eating them before class started again. Unfortunately I forgot, and halfway through a writing exercise, where only the scratching of nibs on paper disturbed the heavy silence, the chestnuts suddenly exploded like a burst of machine-gun fire. The teacher was panic-stricken. After she regained her composure and restored order after the pandemonium that my intended snack had caused, I, of course, spent the rest of the lesson with my hands on my head, standing in the corner. She was, of course, convinced that I had done it deliberately.
But on the whole, with the exception of a very slight incident when a couple of other lads and I somehow got caught shoplifting, nicking Mars bars from Mrs Vickery’s corner store, which resulted in a sound thrashing, a suspension of pocket money and no play for a week, I had a happy and trouble-free time.
In their wisdom, my parents took a dramatic decision on my higher education. A decision which later I was, unjustly as it turned out, to criticise and complain bitterly about.
My sister Brenda was a very bright child and passed her eleven-plus with ease and gained a scholarship to Bishop Fox’s Grammar School in Taunton. However, for some months before I was due to sit my eleven-plus, I had been very ill with some mysterious stomach upset, and for weeks the only food I was allowed to eat, something which I love now but hated then, was natural Bulgarian yoghurt. My parents thought my chances of passing the eleven-plus were slim, if not nonexistent, so they arranged for me to sit the Common Entrance exam at Wellington School, a small, independent, public school. Happily, I passed and was given an assisted place, although this did mean my mother and father both taking on part-time jobs over and above their regular employment to earn enough money to pay the fees.
Hitherto, I had been fairly popular with my peer group, but from the first day when I stood at the bus stop in my thick, short-trousered grey suit, grey socks, black shoes, pale blue cap, school tie and satchel, my standing with the lads changed dramatically and terminally. My first day at school was a nightmare of mixed emotions. I had not previously encountered middle-class boys, I had no understanding of the difference between day boys and boarders, but above all, the fact that I had to wear chunky, moulded-soled Tuff shoes, whereas the other lads all had highly polished Oxford shoes, made an impression upon me which influences me to this day. I have to have the best shoes I can possibly afford.
I can recall nothing of the first couple of terms. The pressure of education and the variety of subjects, especially Chemistry, Physics, Maths and Latin, left me hopelessly bewildered. But then I settled down and I can say, with my hand on my heart, that I proceeded to enjoy the next five and a half years. For me, schooldays truly were the happiest time of my life. The Reverend Lancaster, known behind his back as Burt, quickly realised that Form 4b in general and Floyd, K., in particular had absolutely no interest in or intention of learning Latin. I was gazing thoughtfully out of the window across the cricket square, dreaming about the weekend when I could go fishing again, when suddenly a metre ruler slapped onto my desk in front of me with a resounding ‘thwack’. I jumped, startled from my reverie. ‘Floyd,’ he said, ‘I’d have more success teaching the school cricket roller.’ However, he was a kind and humorous man, and our Latin lessons became quite good fun because he did the decent thing and gave up teaching us Latin and turned our lessons into mock trials, public debates or a general knowledge quiz.
My favourite subjects by far and away were English, taught to us by a brilliant man called Joe Storre, who we thought was great as he had suede chukka boots and a suede waistcoat, and History under the direction of ‘the Don’. Both these teachers could impart information with an ease which was genuinely pleasurable. In these subjects, along with French and Art, I excelled, but for the rest I was a total dunce.
I joined the CCF and thoroughly enjoyed playing soldiers once a week, hated cricket and liked going to daily chapel. But the winter term was best because we played rugby twice a week, and although I never achieved any great success, I have a passion for the game to this day, and from the comfort of my armchair in front of the television set I am an expert on selection, tactics, and everything there is to know about rugby.
In six school Somerset summer holidays, it never rained and for six years the eight or nine weeks of freedom were positively magic.
The key to the joy of the long holidays was financial independence because my father insisted that once I was fourteen I should take on a holiday job. Although I had to contribute £3 10s a week to the family fund, it still left me the amazing sum of just over four pounds a week to spend on fishing tackle, an alloy-framed racing bike and the essential just-released rock and roll records.
It was easy to get a summer holiday job: our family was well thought of in the village. Before she married my grandfather, my grandmother had been in service with the local gentry and because of our parents’ insistence upon politeness, helpfulness and sense of duty, we had no problem finding ourselves work of various sorts.
One summer I had three jobs. At half past six in the morning I would sweep the pavement in front of the newsagent’s shop, put out the placards, unpack boxes and clean the shop until half past eight. Then I would walk the few yards home for breakfast before going round to the Bear Inn for another hour and a half to sweep the cellar, clean ashtrays and bottle up. Then, as the pub opened I was, of course, being underage, obliged to leave. I would walk across the square to the Red Lion Hotel where, during mornings and at lunchtime, I prepared vegetables or washed lettuces, scrubbed pots and plucked chickens and ducks. In the afternoons I weeded the vegetable garden, mowed lawns and generally tidied up.
After tea I would be on my bike with a Thermos flask and some sandwiches to the reservoir or river to fish until dusk. I didn’t work on Sundays, but there were family chores to do – depending on the time of year, picking watercress from the stream for Sunday sandwiches or getting up at dawn in the soft autumn mists to gather mushrooms or spend prickly hours picking blackberries for my mother’s jam or elderberries for my father’s homemade drinks, highly alcoholic and quite lethal. These were drunk only at Christmas.
During the harvest I would join my Uncle Ken, who in exchange for shooting and hunting rights, was obliged to help out a farmer friend every autumn. We would stook corn as the tractor, towing its binder, inexorably moved into the final square of corn in the centre of the field. When that square was no more than twenty yards across the fun began. We would stand back in a circle, clutching sticks, around the square like slips round an anxious batsman. Then we boys were sent in to drive out the rabbits and hares that had taken refuge there.
Some days I might get one or two, possibly three rabbits, one of which would go into one of my mother’s great rabbit stews; the other two Ken would sell to the butcher for five shillings and give me one and six. Happy days! Another bonus of working on the farm was that I was occasionally allowed to drive the Ferguson T20 tractor, with the corn from the harvest on board. Sadly, one day, disaster struck when I misjudged both the gradient and the angle of turn on the ramp to the granary and capsized six tons of corn, twisted the towing hitch and narrowly escaped serious injury. Anticipating a massive bollocking, I waited for help from the farmer, Mr Hawkins. All he said was: ‘Not drive tractor again, Keith!’
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