Category: school dinners

Culture after-school club

Published on by mickyrichards19574 Comments

I was eleven, and starting secondary school in 1968, when I discovered that culture was something other than what my Nan had in her larder (she didn’t have a fridge in her Balham flat and nearly beat Alexander Fleming into discovering penicillin on an old slice of Mother’s Pride).

My mother did have books; invariably by Jean Plaidy.  For years, when my mother would talk about her books, I would half-listen and think Geoffrey Plantagenet was her driving instructor.

Having learned to play the violin at school (it got me off maths – to this day I’m not very numerate, but can play Baa, Baa, Black Sheep on any four-stringed instrument) I was invited to join the school orchestra.

We were to play the overture to Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg.  I’d enjoyed a few episodes of Hart to Hart, but didn’t know he’d written operas. 

Because I could sing, I was also in the school choir.  At a school concert once we had to sing Vaughan Williams’ Orpheus with his lute.  As we’d never learned about medieval instruments, as near-teenagers, we thought this was a euphemism.  I’m surprised my mother allowed me to sing it as I was never allowed to walk the streets with her with my hands in my pockets.

I don’t know much about lutes, but I know what I like.

Down with (big) skool

Published on by mickyrichards19574 Comments

In September 1968, 56-years ago, I started big school.

I wore long trousers for the first time – I worried about chafing until well into the 3rd year; got given homework which was slightly more complex than drawing a cat and then colouring it in; I established the cane wasn’t something sugar grew on.

In the first year I played a sport with an odd-shaped ball in mud which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Somme.  I would stand, looking out, with horribly blurred vision, as I had bad eyesight, wondering if I’d ever been clean again?

I attended lessons I’d never done before.   I went into a science lab.  Surely, with 90 boys from Balham and Tooting, and with all those Bunsen Burners just waiting to ignite, one of us was a potential pyromaniac?  Since 1968 I don’t think I’ve ever used trigonometry – mainly as I have little interest in trigs.

I survived by being good at cricket, singing and by making the slightly rougher boys in my class laugh.   

Although, staying in your class until 4.10 was tough- it felt like it was nearly tomorrow!

And where had all the girls gone?

Cum on feel the himz

Published on by mickyrichards19572 Comments

During my primary school assemblies in the sixties we would often sing, “Morning has broken”.

In 1971, when I was fourteen, the hymn we would sing, sitting cross-legged in the school hall, came on the radio: sung by Cat Stevens.

In the early seventies I regularly bought Sounds magazine – it had all the words of the current hits in.   I would try and sing these songs, but, having been trained to sing in a church choir, they came out all wrong; I made “Maggie May” sound like it was part of Verdi’s Requiem.  

Each week I would spend most of my pocket money buying singles from the record shops on Balham High Road. 

If Cat Stevens could make a popular hymn famous, imagine what other stars of 1971 might have also done?

We might have had Slade’s version of “All things bright and beautiful” (spelled wrongly, obviously); T Rex singing “Lord of the dance” or have Dawn’s rendition of “We plough the fields and scatter”.

The reverse has rarely happened as you don’t often hear “Chirpy, chirpy, cheep, cheep” being sung in many churches – unless it’s “Bring your pet to church day”.

Outnumbered

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

“It’s five to five; it’s Crackerjack”.

Any of us who have gone to work, and learned very quickly not to get on the empty smoking carriage of the Tube train as it pulled into Balham Station, would have been reliant on specific times and timings; we’d have been aware that nine o’clock was very important, but not half as important as five o’clock.

For me, at my secondary school, ten past four was the best time; the time the final bell rang, announcing the end of the school day. 

You had five minutes before the school the other side of our rugby pitch and their electrified fence, had their own bell rang.  Five minutes to leg it to the sanctuary of the bus stop, before your cap was either nicked, knocked off or made into a gag or, from some of the more creative boys, a doily.

Nearly fifty-years on since I left school for the last time, 4.10 pm still has a magic ring about it.  A sense of relief.  A time when I decided, shall I play football, perfect my leg-break or conjugate a few Latin verbs?  

TV, aside from just Crackerjack, taught you the time and numbers.  Six-Five Special taught you how to count backwards, as did 3,2,1; Beverly Hills 90210 introduced very big numbers; Blake’s 7 catered to the less numerate; Patrick McGoohan was determined not to help at all.

Although I can’t remember when News At Ten was on.

Not very hungry caterpillar

Published on by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

Even though I only lived feet away from my Balham primary school, my mother thought it best I attended school dinners.  I lasted one day.

I remember sitting down on a mashed potato-ingrained table and chair.

What I’d not anticipated – never having had it at home – was caterpillar – in the salad.   Lettuce, yes; tomato, yes; the odd spring onion. 

Never a caterpillar. 

We did live on the fourth floor of our flats, so I assumed, as I sat staring at said caterpillar moving slowly over a slice of beetroot, they weren’t capable of climbing up 100-feet of brickwork?

I’d never seen mashed (this was a masterpiece of overstatement) potato like it.  The original King Edward they used was more mashed.  And why was it grey?  Had they used grey butter? Lurpak had grey packaging, perhaps they’d used that?

But it was the sponge pudding which was the pièce de resistance, as we like to say in Balham.  If you wanted the quickest way to dehydrate, the sponge pudding offered this.   Adding the chocolate sauce would have had Lady Isobel Barnett not knowing which clue to give the listeners!

When asked, after I’d arrived home, what I’d had for my school dinner, I said Roast Swan, as I dreaded my mum ordering hundreds of caterpillars to make me feel like home.

I’m still waiting to fully digest the sponge pudding.