Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography by Danny Baker

his chair, he would conjure up a pitying smile and we were off. ‘Television? Television? That’s it for you helpless drones, isn’t it? Nothing exists if not for your “televisions”. Not Mum. Not Dad. Nothing. Just TV, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you what television is and what is its influence and ultimate purpose . . .’ Bingo. We were good now for at least ten minutes of low-wattage lecturing, by which time the bell signalling the end of the lesson would have sounded and homework would have been escaped once again.
    Then there was Mr Kaye. Oh, what a piece of work was Mr Kaye! He had spent some time in the US marines and like most of the masters he could be very physical with the kids – and by that I mean he’d hit you hard if you failed to belt up on cue. Of course, West Greenwich had no shortage of boys who, even if walloped by ex-Vietnam paratroopers, would fight back. In those instances Mr Kaye would use all his military training on the kid, who would wind up dazed and helpless on the deck, with Mr Kaye in combat stance, his foot hard across the insurgent’s throat. Sometimes, upon release, the boy might threaten, ‘I’ll get my dad up here after you,’ to which the teacher would calmly reply, ‘Good. I look forward to it – I’ll do that to him too.’ It would end there because everybody knew he was as good as his word.
    Appalling and traumatic? Today maybe. Then, a wild gleeful uproar would engulf the rest of the class as the one-sided tussle took place, most vocally from the friends of the victim, and the whole thing was looked on as the most tremendous hoot. By and large, all the kids liked Mr Kaye – he was a hard nut and we knew where we stood with him – even if it was under his boot heel.
    What I now find utterly unforgivable was the treatment of teachers by the boys. Two examples here – and I warn you, neither of them comes under the banner of knock-about youthful high jinks.
    Mr Thorpe was a rotund old Yorkshireman with a bald head and white moustache. He had been at the school for many years, garnering a reputation as a strict disciplinarian who wielded the cane pretty much non-stop. By the time I arrived at the school he was winding down into retirement, and had mellowed to such an extent that he was even calling a few of us by our Christian names. The hard nuts among us, learning of his past legend, went out of their way to make him a figure of fun. During lessons he would sit at his desk and distractedly smoke a pipe as we scribbled away into our workbooks, once placing a stick of chalk in the pipe’s bowl to see who noticed first. Having had this silly bit of business identified, he chuckled for minutes on end about it, saying, ‘Don’t mind me, boys, I’ll be getting out the road in a few months.’
    One morning, toward the end of term, his lesson included mention of a crystal radio set with its cat’s whisker. None of us knew what this was. Mr Thorpe seemed energized by this gap in our experience and after a few minutes excitedly explaining the antique radio process, told us that, the following day, he would bring in his mother’s old set which he still had by his bedside. This he did. The pleasure he felt in presenting the piece was obvious and after a short talk about it we were invited to form a queue and listen through some Bakelite headphones to the crackling reception. Many pronounced the reception to be tinny and terrible, which made him chuckle even more.
    ‘Well, that’s all we had years ago,’ he chortled. ‘It wasn’t all Top of the Pops and stereo then, you know. Mam and I thought this to be the miracle of the age!’ We all took our time pretending to marvel at his beloved relic, chiefly because, as with the Geography manoeuvre, this was eating up lesson time and there could be no homework as a result.
    When the bell sounded for the change of lesson, Mr Thorpe sat back beaming in his chair and delicately began replacing everything on the radio to a