The school reunion

I went through a spell of using the Friends Reunited website a few years ago and through this, I received an invitation  from Tony Malone to a school reunion he was organising for the year’s cohort of which  I was a member. I vaguely remembered him, it was a long time ago. It struck me as strange that I now knew his first name as, at school we were referred to by the teachers by surname only and we continued this amongst ourselves. I don’t know most of the first names of my peers even now.

                This invitation got me thinking about the teachers and fellow pupils from so long ago that I had not thought of for many years - life before memories. I attended Worthing Technical High School until I left on 4^th August 1962 and joined the Royal Navy on 7^th August, just three days later the same year. This was after a major row as my teachers and parents wanted me to stay on for the usual route of ‘A’ levels and university. I disagreed as I couldn’t wait to leave home and school and get out into the wide world. I had planned on joining the Royal Navy since I was about six. I was obsessed by the sea and read everything I could about it. I could soon name the different styles of bows and sterns and knew the name of every sail on a square rigged ship. I left school with one GCE, Maths, that I had taken a year early. I later got the results of passes in six more, after I had joined up.

                The irony was that, as soon as I joined, instead of going to sea as I had intended, I ended up spending six years doing an Artificer Apprenticeship with only the fifth year at sea in the Persian Gulf – from one classroom to another, the frying pan into the fire.

                This was the new style of vocational technical schools so we did the first three years together and then chose the Artisanship, Arts or Sciences for the last two years up to GCSE. I enjoyed wood and metalwork so wanted to be in the Artisan group but was persuaded to take the Sciences instead. This being 1960, the group consisted only of boys, ‘You can’t have girls doing science’! There were fifteen of us in our group and, while I got to know them very well, it also meant that I lost touch with my friends who had been through primary and secondary education with me. I was very sorry to slowly lose touch with my best friend, Jack, who I lost to the Arts stream as he wanted to be an architect.  He became a very successful architect and started and built up his own practice but, he sadly died in 2009. We kept in touch over the years with Christmas cards and the odd letter but I got to see him in 2006 when he and his wife had a holiday in Bath. They came to see us for a day and it was good to see him after so many years

                There were some real characters in our group, I suppose these days they would have been characterised as mad scientists and geeks – I was the only one who was normal, of course.

                Brooks was undoubtedly teacher’s pet as he soaked up the knowledge without any problem and could effortlessly regurgitate it in exams so inevitably coming top in all exams and tests etc. His favourite subject was maths and he left us all standing. What made it worse was that his parents were rich and so bought him one of those three wheeler bubble cars while he was still at school, it was one of those strange ones with the one passenger sitting behind the driver. It was called a Messerschmidt. The rest of us could only run to second-hand bikes so we were very envious even though we didn’t show it, much.

                The teachers were very strict and all wore their academic gowns every day. Mr Bush took us for chemistry. He was fearsome and insisted on everything being ‘just so’. ‘There is only one way of doing things,’ he used to say. ‘That is my way, which is also the correct way.’  He had pet hates, one was the use of the word ‘amount’. ‘Do you mean mass or volume, boy?’ he thundered. ‘Amount means nothing, it has no units. If you want to describe a quantity to me, it must have units, preferably SI units of grammes or cc. Now, try again.’ By this time the poor student would be a red –faced, stuttering wreck, but the message got home. If you want to do science, you have to be precise. His other bête noir was describing something as a ’chemical’. ‘Everything is a chemical. Everything is made of atoms that are on the Periodic Table, they are all chemicals’.  I still think of this all these years later when people say there are too many chemicals in food. I am very tempted to agree and then say that, à la Bush, ’if you took all the chemicals out, you would have nothing left.’

 In spite of the rigor, I liked Mr Bush and enjoyed chemistry because, even at that age, I could see that he was driven by the enthusiasm for his subject, he just wanted to share the wonder of it all with us. I do laugh when today’s schoolchildren talk about health and safety as none of us had goggles, there was no fume cupboard, even when handling bromine, we used to play with mercury and float coins on it, on wooden trays. At the end of each term, Mr Bush used to play tricks with reagents. This might be pouring sulphuric acid onto sugar and seeing the resulting, writhing black snake or mixing two clear liquids and making a rich dark blue solution and then making the colour disappear with the addition of another clear liquid.  After enjoying all this magic, we of course, had to write the equation of the reaction and then get told off if we got it wrong.

                Hubble was the quiet one who always appeared to be rather stupid and gave wacky, way out answers to the teacher’s questions. On one famous occasion, when asked a fairly simple question and getting it hopelessly wrong, albeit in a funny way, the exasperated teacher asked, ‘How on earth did you get to this school Hubble?’ Hubble answered artlessly, ‘By bicycle, Sir.’ This question and the response was all around the school by lunchtime. Hubble was not stupid at all, he always got good marks in exams.            

                Miss Davis took us for Maths. We did Ordinary, Applied and Additional Maths as three subjects and some days we spent all day on maths. I really struggled with this until we started differential calculus and I could see the beauty of it and it all seemed to make sense. Then we did ballistics and Newton’s equations of motion and I really enjoyed all that as I could see some future applications of that in my secret dream to go to sea with the Navy. She was really the favourite teacher of our group as she seemed to be easy going, but in reality she knew how everyone was doing and managed to get us through the exams with little trouble.

                Monnery was the typical nerd. He just worked and worked and understood everything. He was in great demand to explain the parts that no one else understood. He was friendly, not standoffish, like Brooks, so he was very popular in spite of being the class swot.

                Mr Baxter took us for Physics. He was a geography teacher but as there was a shortage of physics teachers in the school, he would have to do. He was honest with us in saying that he was only a day ahead of us with the learning before teaching us and sometimes we would have to learn together. It all worked though as there was an overlap with some of the maths we were already learning. Sometimes he got stuck and we would have to help him out.

                                Cooper was probably in our group by mistake. He was a big lad and an athlete. He could just about cope with the science and maths but his real joy was to get out on the field during PE and join in some game or other.

Of course we couldn’t just do science and maths, we also had to learn a language. We thought anything that wasn’t science was a bit of a waste of time – we were all rapidly becoming embryo lab rats. I chose French as I thought it would be the easiest. Mr Martens got the unenviable task of trying to teach us French. He was Flemish. He spoke English very well but his teaching method didn’t suit us. We were scientists, we inquired, checked and challenged! In French, we had to listen to Mr Martens, accept what he said and learn regular verbs by repeating the conjugations in time with the tapping of his wedding ring against a desk top. We didn’t like him, or his subject, or his country, very much.

*

‘Wake up. Richard,’ said the nurse,’ it’s time for your medication, I’ll help you sit up.’

                The ghosts from more than fifty years in the past slowly faded as they walked off into their futures and out of my life. I didn’t want to see them as old men or hear about the ones that had died so I never did go to that school reunion. I think of Jack most days – a conflict between all the happy adventures we had growing up together and remembering him before he died as a sick man with a wife and four children he would soon be leaving.

 I still think of them all as enthusiastic teachers and bright young boys, looking forward to their lives. I think it is better that way.

Alien

Jared left the party that was busily transferring from the lounge to the kitchen for drink top-ups and nibbles. He walked through the open patio doors out into the warm velvet evening with the cooling zephyrs whispering as they gathered up and shook the dust from the curtains. He lifted his eyes to the blackness of the night sky and focused on the disc of Venus rising over the horizon to the West. He was strangely drawn to Venus but couldn’t really understand why. He was vaguely interested in astrology and cosmology but not more so than most of his peers so he could find no reason or anything special about Venus to explain it. It had been the subject of much ribald banter from his best mate, Joe, when he had mentioned it so now he kept it quiet and just looked at her when he had a few quiet moments to himself, as now.

                Joe came up and tapped him on the shoulder, he was always the life and soul of any gathering he was at. ‘Come in and join the fun instead of moping out here by yourself,’ he said.

                ‘OK,’ said Jared, ‘I wasn’t moping, I was just relaxing away from the crowd for a minute.’

                ‘Whatever, get this down you, ‘said Joe, thrusting a glass full of suspicious liquid into Jared’s reluctant grasp.               

Jared slowly followed Joe towards the noise of the throng inside He wasn’t very good at parties and hadn’t wanted to come until Joe had persuaded him. He always felt like an outsider, an observer, never really part of the crowd, just like Colin Wilson, not part of the mainstream, a little bit different. He didn’t manage to lose himself in the enjoyment of the moment, he thought of himself as a Bristolian, ‘sleeping with one eye open.’

*

They had grown up together and got on well because they liked the same things, football mainly. They supported the same team, Bristol Rovers, and lived close to each other in South Street, Bristol. They were nearly inseparable, so much so that everyone called them ‘the JJ twins’ as no one really knew which was which.

Once they had both saved up enough to buy a bike each, they could set off on expeditions of adventure, across the River Avon by the old railway bridge now carrying the cycle path, through Victoria Park and the tunnels of the Cumberland Basin road system and out into the glorious country of the Ashton Court Estate – now owned by Bristol Council and so open to all. They both enjoyed these trips as they could play in the woods, look at the herd in the deer park, run up and down the grassy slopes and race each other as they swooped down the steep grass slopes on their bikes and then get an ice cream, if they were flush with cash, from the van, parked by the side of the car park. They then often lay in the grass while licking their 99’s telling each other what they were going to do with their lives. Joe was going to join the Royal Navy and travel to all those exotic places he had heard about while Jed didn’t have any idea of what he wanted to do, he just wanted to find out more about the world – and Venus, but he kept that part to himself, he was a little weary of his peers saying he was obsessed with Venus. He was secretly certain that a different destiny awaited him, different to anything that Earth could provide.

*

One day they cycled to the end of Beggar Bush lane, intent on getting as far as the old quarry that they had heard about. Their intention was to explore the quarry and then return home via Brunel’s suspension bridge. They knew that if they got off their bikes and walked across, it would be free. They hid their bikes in the hedge and then, after crawling carefully through the wire fence, they clambered down the quarry benches, past the signs that stated, This is a dangerous quarry, not a playground. KEEP OUT. They were young so, of course, nothing would happen to them. They had the carefree feeling that they would live forever. It was easy climbing down the benches as vegetation had taken hold on the rock faces, giving hand holds on the way down. They were soon on the quarry floor and could see into the tunnel that went under the road to where the old crushing and coating plant has once produced the material for surfacing the nearby M5. They wandered around for a while, exulting in the freedom to be in a space that was once under many metres of solid rock and where a very rare sample of Rhodocrosite had been found by the Russell Society.

They tired of exploring after a while and sat in the sun to unpack their rucksacks to plunder the plastic boxes of marmite sandwiches and swig from the plastic bottles of fizzy drinks. They had a rest for a while and then climbed up the benches to emerge at the road where their bikes had been stashed. They cycled back along the road, past the traffic lights and were soon at the Western abutment of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. They dismounted to save the cost of the toll and to look at the magnificent view down along the Avon Gorge. It was a Wednesday so there were very few people around and almost no traffic. The Samaritan’s free phone was unused – no one was keen to kill themselves on a sunny spring afternoon when the birds were singing.

*

‘I want to explain something to you,’ said Joe.

                ‘Wassat?’ asked Jed, not really interested in talking, his eyes were on a group of jackdaws circling in the rising air currents near the cliffs, probably looking for likely nest sites.

                ‘Please listen to me, it is very important,’ said Joe. ‘I am not what I seem, I am an alien.’

                ‘OK,’ said Jed, going along with the joke. ‘Prove it to me then.’

Joe climbed up on to the parapet wall and started to climb over the anti-suicide wires.

                ‘Stop,’ said Jed, I believe you’

                ‘No, you don’t, you are just saying that to get me down. You have to really believe me.’ He climbed down the other side, the outside, of the suicide wires and stepped out into space. He stood there on a column of seventy five metres of fresh air, the tide was in.

Jed looked at him with his mouth open, ‘Wha, wha, what are you standing on?’

                ‘Nothing but air,’ said Joe. Now do you believe me while I tell you a story?’

                ‘Well, yes,’ said Jed, but will you please come this side of the wall and sit down with me before you start, you know I have no head for heights.’

Joe climbed over the parapet wall again and then sat down with Jed on the kerb.

*

‘It’s a long story but it goes like this. I am a member of the Space Guard. There are about three hundred and fifty of us around the world and I just happen to be here in Bristol. The reason I have to tell you about it is that I know that you have been having visions and a strange attraction to Venus. This is because our communication net with our area headquarters on Venus has been leaking a little and infecting you. We had to hide our office in the methane clouds on Venus because you humans are getting to know Mars and so we would likely be noticed.

                Our job is to see if you survive the predictable crises that life goes through on any planet and to see if we can learn any lessons by watching you cope with them. We have monitored the near extinctions through history that would have sterilised most planets but there was always just enough life left to repopulate – sometimes in greatly different forms as evolution filled the available niches. The recent wars and famines have decimated the human race but you struggled through. You got through the nuclear age without starting an atomic war and now you are facing climate change as you burn the Earth’s stores of hydrocarbons. The leakage of the communication between Earth and Venus was responsible for the Internet being developed by the way.’

                ‘OK, so say I accept that all this is true, where do you come from?’ asked Jed ‘what is the answer to climate change?’

                ‘I cannot tell you where I come from and also cannot tell you the answers, we are watching you to see if you think of different ones. There would be no point as you could not comprehend the data but let us just say that I come from a long way away in space and time.  Fermi got his paradox wrong. There are many trillions of us from billions of galaxies and the second part is not true only because you haven’t been able to see us – except for the occasional error in communications such as happened to you. We have been checking your race through your development and think that, should you survive the coming challenges, you should be ready to join the human family in about three hundred years of your time.

                Now I have to blank all your memories of this, and your obsession with Venus, so that we can both continue with our lives where we left off.’

                ‘Will you at least give me an hour to think about all this before you do that and will you answer all my questions?’

                ‘OK,’ said Joe. There’s no harm in that.’

They spent the next hour with Jed asking and getting the answers to all sorts of questions, including nuclear fusion, climate change and if the laws of physics as understood, we correct. He even asked if ‘42’ was the real answer to everything. He also got the answer to the puzzle of the unified field theory.

*

Jared stepped outside the party for a moment to get a breath of fresh air. He idly glanced up at the clear night sky and wondered if there were other people out there and if he would ever see one of them. He didn’t think so.

                His friend Joe, called him in to the kitchen to join him in a beer.