Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Another thing that got us out of the house and out of my mother’s hair was the fact that we went to school! The following little stories and anecdotes about my life as a student happened around the same time as the previous ones. However, the boy that I was at school was a lot different from the boy who picked potatoes and looted abandoned buildings, and so on. 

I was a ‘free spirit when discovering the ‘secrets’ of the village, and roaming the fields and woods with my friends, brothers, and my faithful friend and dog, Laddie. Within the confines of the school, on the other hand, I became a ‘social animal’. Being a ‘wild animal’, I didn’t always take kindly to being ‘fenced in’. 

Location of Culcheth Primary School

I attended Culcheth Primary School from when we were still living at 3 York Avenue until we moved to 26 Hob Hey Lane.  I have tried to find some information on the Internet about the school without much success. 

The school was located in Warrington Road, where Culcheth Community Primary School is located today. I am unsure to what extent the present school includes the original buildings. The school I attended was built in the post-war period and had fairly modern architecture, similar to the present building of Culcheth Community Primary School; obviously new structures have been added.

We lived nearby, so I often walked to and from school. When living at 3 York Avenue, I often took a sort of shortcut along a dirt track before crossing Warrington Road. There, a ‘lollipop lady’ would help you cross the busy road in the morning and in the afternoon. They typically hold up a circular sign on a pole to stop the traffic. There was a small shop near that crossroads where you could buy a ‘lucky bag’. It was usually for 3d (3 pennies) with sweets and a ‘surprise’, such as a toy made in Hong Kong. It was often the same ‘surprise’, such as a miniature vinyl record of Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’.²¹²

The Adults in Culcheth

The school had 5 year levels, roughly from the ages of 6 to 11 years; I was about six years old when I started at Culcheth Primary School. The first year was taught by a Miss Cross. Ironically in a ‘Dahl-like’ (external link) fashion, she looked ‘cross’ due to a slightly furrowed brow, even if she wasn’t ‘cross’ at all. 

However, children are often affected by people’s appearances. She was fairly tall with black hair and had a longish oval-shaped face. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember much about her class, which suggests she was a nice teacher given how we  tend to remember the ‘nasty’ ones better. 

The following year level was taught by Miss Hazeldean. She definitely smiled more than Miss Cross did. She was smaller and had light brown wavy hair. Both Miss Cross and Miss Hazeldean were perhaps in their late twenties at that time. 

I remember that my next class with Mrs. Eyres’ was better than those in the previous two years. Mrs. Eyres was older than Miss Cross and Miss Hazeldean, probably about forty or fifty years old. She was smallish, very rotund, had a large head, and wore comical round glasses with thick lenses. Her style of dressing was also much more ‘old-fashioned’ than the clothes worn by the stylish Miss Cross and Miss Hazeldean. She just looked like what you would picture a teacher to look like.

The Sadists and Psychopaths

So far, Miss Cross, Miss Hazeldean, and Mrs. Eyres were all pretty ‘harmless’ as my first three teachers at Culcheth Primary School. On the other hand, my next two teachers, Mr. Parnell and Mrs. Bonse were what I would call ‘sadists’ in their different ways. 

Mr Parnell was my teacher right after Mrs Eyres. I was nine or ten years old then, and he may have been in his late forties with thinning black, brylcreemed hair, and a military-like pencil moustache. He was formal in both his dress and behaviour. He was strict, but he generally ‘liked’ children. 

I can remember Mr. Parnell told the rest of the class at the end of the term that I was the pupil that had advanced the most academically. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I tended to respond better to male teachers for some reason or other. 

The Smackdown

Mr. Parnell handled things – or me – differently. One day, I was messing around in the dining hall at dinner time creating a disturbance while the children were eating their school dinner. Mr. Parnell spotted me and called me over to the teachers’ dining table. Unlike the previous examples of escaping well-deserved punishments, I got unlucky this time. I was wearing shorts, leaving the back of my thighs bare. Summoning the strength he could muster – he had the physique of a sergeant major – he gave me one of the most painful smacks I can ever remember. I suppose he took pride in the fact that with his strength, he only needed to smack me once. 

Apart from this unsavoury situation, he seemed to be quite a good teacher. It seems like such psychotic behaviour on his part was perhaps just a natural threatening component of his teacher’s persona. It might seem peculiar that one can still retain such positive memories of an abusive teacher; however, the system of child abuse was so normalized in schools and homes during the 1950s and 1960s that it was the child who always felt that he or she was in the wrong. Thus, it never occurred to me at that time that they should not have been doing this.

Punishments at Home

It was often the custom in British families that the mother of the house was not the one who executed physical punishment; this was a job designated for the father. The mother would report wrongdoings to the father. He is now expected to ‘do his duty as the father’ by carrying out the necessary punishment. 

The punishment you got also depended on how this reporting was conveyed. The mother would use this so-called ‘reporting’ as a threat to the child like, “Just wait until your father gets home!” I didn’t realise this was perhaps so common in British /American homes until I saw an old American movie the other day. It was “Yankee Doodle Dandy”²¹³ on TCM (Turner Classic Movies). The father is given permission by the mother to spank the naughty son. Moreover, the whole thing is treated comically like it is the most natural thing in the world.

In other words, boys didn’t really ‘respect’ women in terms of punishment and fear. Of course I am ‘generalizing’ here. I had female and male teachers that taught me a lot without having to ‘terrorize’ me :-). In fact, one of my best teachers was my mild and friendly history teacher at the Isis School. Another one is my maths teacher, Mr. Morgan, who didn’t apply strict punishments. Mrs. Mulverhill at Barstable Grammar Schoo and Mr. Hayhoe were also excellent teachers (but this belongs to Part II of ‘Recollections’). 

²¹² “Be-Bop-a-Lula” is a rockabilly song first recorded in 1956 by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps.

²¹³https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Bl2rv70ys Accessed 30 September 2021.