h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School

My Cockney father sold some of the new houses he had built, and decided to pay for me to go to a grammar school in place of the elementary school I then attended. Eventually, the time came for me to start at my new school. I was looking forward to leaving Margaret Road School behind, and renewing my old friendship with Tom, as I waited at East Barnet War Memorial for the bus that would take me to begin my studies at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School for Boys. Looking back now, however, the erratic and disturbing recollections I carry with me of the next three years engender no nostalgia. It was not to prove a very rewarding, let alone joyful phase of my life.
I began badly. Expecting to take up my relationship with Tim Crotchett where we left it when we parted a year earlier, I latched onto him as soon as our bus arrived at the school, twenty minutes or so before class was due to start. After dutifully, if rather coldly, showing me round the playground, and pointing out the various buildings, he politely requested me to 'Stop following me around!' The shock had been worse than the hardest blow. Of course, he was not to be blamed for feeling ashamed of me, and anyway, he was a popular sort of lad, and had by this time made other friends.
Now, seated in the five-hundred-year-old school hall for my first lesson, I found myself a little cockney boy among the sons of gentlemen. Even my new off-the-shelf school-clothes, selected to allow plenty of room for growth, stood out like a sore thumb among the others' neatly tailored suits. Mr. Murray, my new Irish form master and the maths teacher, was tall, broad, and handsome; he also doubled up as the sports master. I was the only new boy, as I was starting in the middle of the school year.
'What's your name boy?'
'Leslie Leonard Baynes, Sir.'
'Ha ha! Bines is it? I'll remember that - and we don't bother with Christian names here.' Titter titter from the class. He was as good as his word, and would draw another titter from the other boys every time he had the excuse to use my name with its cockney diphthong. He had plenty of opportunity to take the mickey; the other pupils had all been at the school for more than a year, and compared with them, I knew virtually nothing. I have a mental block as far as the teachings of that master are concerned.
We had our first break after an hour or so, and, taking a leaf out of Murray's book, a gang of boys attempted to rag me in the playground. Margaret Road, however, had taught me things not to be learned in Queen Elizabeth's; I got my back up against the wall, and after the first assault they contented themselves with forming a half-circle round me and sticking to names. The only damage was to my psyche.
Not all the teachers were cruel like Murray of course, and even he probably did not fully realise what he was doing. I was, however, plunged straight into learning French and Latin, having been taught no rudiments of English grammar, as anticipated by our language masters and the text books. Neither of my parents had received the kind of education necessary to help me with my homework, as must have been the case with most, if not all of the other boys. Both had left school at the age of twelve.
Father was brilliant at arithmetic, but being self-taught he could only provide answers sans workings-out, which was of no use at all. In fact, his contempt for my best efforts left me with a psychological dread of figures that stayed with me for twenty years.
Some of our teachers were kind but incompetent. Take stout Mr. Whittington for instance (or 'Dicky' as he was called), our music teacher. He played the organ in one of the great London churches, and presided over our school choir; he also drank strong waters, the fumes from which he was wont to share with us generously, as he leaned over our desks. It was a habit of his to have a favourite boy in each class; when he discovered that I had a reasonable singing voice, he made me his favourite - in spite of my accent. Although he clearly wasn't a snob, he was hopeless as a teacher; not one of us learned a note of music! All we did assimilate were the names of one or two of the great composers, and a few national ballads.
'Uncle', or Mr. Collier, to give him his proper name, was in his dotage; he was also our art master. Although we had an art lesson once a week for the three years that I was at the school, it was not until I was eighteen years of age that I found I had some small gift in that direction, when an Australian artist came to live next door to us, and showed me the elementary principles of drawing; I grasped them immediately. As young children, we had never been given drawing materials, and encouraged to scribble, as modern children are, almost from birth, so at eighteen I literally had to learn to put pencil to paper, and start again from scratch.
Uncle's method of teaching was to issue each of us with a pencil and book of blank sheets of cartridge paper, put the object we were to draw on the table, and then drop off to sleep, with head on arms and long grey moustache dangling over them. On the first day of term we would all make an effort and produce some sort of sketch. Uncle would wake up in time to come round and give us some marks; (it had to be pretty awful to get below seven out of ten; he probably could not see). Each lesson after that, we used to rub out the score and present the same drawing again.
The art class was held in one of a range of wooden classrooms, originally intended as a temporary measure; but that had been long before. Once Uncle had dropped off to sleep, his in-built alarm would not wake him until it was time to mark our drawings; no matter how much noise we made, he would sleep on. And the din we raised while playing violent games instead of pursuing the gentle art of drawing made the life of Mr. (Frosty) Winter, trying to teach history effectively in the next room, a perfect misery. He would often barge in and put a stop to the horseplay - for a few minutes at the most.
Another similarly inefficient disciplinarian was 'Judy' (Mr. Judson), our Latin master, who was also old, querulous and ineffective. He had long since given up trying to stuff knowledge into his pupils' heads, and these days was more than content if he could maintain peace and quiet. The back row of his classroom was occupied by sixth-formers; now that they had discovered they needed Latin to matriculate, they were having to do a cram course, to make up for the years that they had wasted earlier (as we were wasting ours now). Because, in fact, when we should have been learning, we were swapping 'Gems' and 'Magnets' and reading them under cover of our desks. Although we had to do homework, we mostly cribbed this from the one or two swats in the class.
A year or so later, a new young red-headed master arrived to take over from 'Cod' Gardener as our form-master; his name was Harrison, and he was keen. The first time he took the form, he gave us something to do to keep us quiet, while he browsed through our last term's marks. He was conscientious, also. Suddenly, he burst out, 'How is it you're all so good at Art and Latin?' A titter went round the class, and he looked up angrily, wanting to know what was funny about that.
We all quickly looked down at our work again, and after a moment or two he carried on with his perusal of our efforts. He lifted his head a few minutes later; 'There's something jolly fishy here - only two of you got over 20% in your Latin exam! I'm going to have to look into this!' We heard no more of that, however; I expect he soon heard in the masters' common room how Judy and Uncle were a bit of a joke.
Miss Simms was a dear, and my favourite teacher. Small and slightly built, she was middle-aged, and a chain-smoker. She took us for RI (Religious Instruction) and Nature-study; it just happened that these were the only subjects where I knew more than most of the other boys. In addition, and incredibly - she seemed to like me. I remember one Founder's Day, when my father was hardly talking to me because of my less than excellent reports, Miss Simms insisted on my introducing her. In front of me, she said, 'Oh Mr. Baynes, you must be very proud of your son!' I give him credit for the fact that he at least managed to work up a sickly grin, if he could not bring himself to speak.
Opposite her classroom, across the corridor, was the domain of Miss Buxton, or 'Bucky', who taught religion to the older boys. She could not have differed more from our Miss Simms, since she was a fat and savage old witch, with dewlaps and brown fangs that showed when she snarled, which was often. I remember on that first day, when Tim Crotchett showed me round, he had pointed out her classroom with; 'That's Bucky's room; she's an old cow!' It was the first time I'd heard that particular expression. Her raised voice, and the whack of her cane, could be heard in our classroom, and our teacher would lift her eyes resignedly. I only had to put up with her once, and that was when Miss Simms was off sick. She had retired by the time I moved on. Her main interpretation of The Scriptures seemed to be that it was her task to get hell over quickly for us, while we were young.
'Pick' was our French master, his real name - Coulson. He had a habit of thrusting his long pick-axe like nose into a boy's face, and suddenly rasping out an unexpected question. I had not learned any French, as had the others, and I disliked our master at first sight; what is more, I am sure the feeling was mutual. I had no intention of letting the horrible man see he could put the wind up me, and he was as determined to do just that. In fact, I needed no scaring into providing the wrong answers that supplied his sadistic delight, so received far more than my share of 'impots'. Thus, when I was not doing homework in the evenings, I was usually writing out lines for Pick. He liked to be clever; for instance if one put up a hand and asked 'Please, sir, can I go to the lavatory? he would invariably reply; 'I don't know, boy!' Then it would be necessary to raise one's hand again, rephrase the question, and ask; 'Please, sir, may I, etc.'
I found it impossible to absorb information from this man; my whole being rebelled against him. At the end of my first year under Pick, I came No 28 out of the thirty boys in the form. Yet, when I was in my twenties, I found I had a natural gift for languages, and taught myself to speak fluent Dutch in three months, with the aid only of a Dutch and an English New Testament, and, initially, someone to explain the rules of pronunciation (regular, in Dutch). I also learned to read French well enough to enjoy French literature, which I now read regularly.
As it happened, I was not the only new boy to enter the school that term; Mr. Jenkins, the headmaster, was also a newcomer. He was a dapper little chap, whose main object in life seemed to be to turn out boys fit to become part of the upper crust of society. He took us for one lesson a week in the science lecture hall, and at first I found it difficult to follow his slowly drawled Oxford accent; it could not have been in greater contrast to my father's swift Cockney dialect. He talked to us about general things like economics, politics, and careers. I recall his pompous manner, as he once told us, 'Don't be envious of those leaving school at sixteen; you may now think they're going off to earn big money, but they'll be stuck in some tin-pot job for the rest of their lives. Stay on and matriculate; then pass on to Oxford, and you will really be able to climb to the top.' If he had known he was wasting his time on a boy who would be leaving at fourteen, I expect he would have kicked me out there and then. Nevertheless, he proved to be a good head, and I believe that later he was able to raise the school from the depths into which it had sunk.
That first year, I had hot lunches at school. We had these meals in the Old School Hall, with the masters sitting up at a table on the raised daïs in front of us, and drinking red wine. Mr. Jenkins would first grace in Latin before we could sit and began to eat; he gabbled it so fast that I never did learn the words, in spite of hearing them every day.
This hall was the only remaining part of the original Tudor school, and it had a tower at each end with a spiral staircase inside each; the doors in the bottom of them were only about five feet high, so I guess men were shorter in the days it was built.
Jenkins was no fool, and as I indicated earlier, was a conscientious and capable head, remaining at the school, I am told, for the remainder of his working life. I believe he gradually cut out the dead wood, eventually to produce an efficient unit. After I had been at the school for a year he must have noticed, or been told, that I was rather like a fish out of water, and as the scholarship boys were kept in a separate class then, I was transferred to form 2a, to be with them. I am not really quite sure though, whether the move was made in my interests, or to prevent me from further polluting the gentlemen's sons! In the event, although I felt more at home with these boys from my own class. As they were the cream of the area's elementary school brains, however, and had received special coaching, I was far from being a king among beggars.
Mrs. Mais, wife of the school caretaker, cooked the school meals, and very good they were. The food was served up by her husband, the school caretaker 'Curly' Mais, an ex-military man; he was very strict on discipline, and he would clip our ears if he heard us use his nickname; but he was without malice, and I think we were all quite fond of him. After the first year, my parents decided that school meals were too expensive, and thereafter I took a packed lunch; I had my dinner heated up on a plate, over a saucepan of boiling water, when I arrived home in the evening, as the rest of the family had their hot meal at one o’clock.
Mr. Gardener (Cod), my new form master, was really a nice old boy; but he was old, and unable to maintain discipline, although he did try. He took us for English, and whenever a difficult or embarrassing word cropped up in our literature, one after another of the ‘funny men’ of the form would act the innocent and pose questions that Cod was not prepared to answer; so he would try and talk round them. He'd explode in fury when he tumbled to the fact that he was being taken for a ride. I was always particularly well-behaved in his class, because he lived in York Road (where we built on the wine-bibber's garden), and was a customer of Father's.
PT (physical torture) was inflicted upon us by ex-Sergeant Major Mepham in the drill shed, an open-fronted, dusty, earth-floored building beside the fives court, as far away from the classrooms as it was possible to put it; nevertheless his penetrating 'Knees be-e-e-e-e-nd, ra-a-a-a-ise,' and 'Left right left right left . . . left . . . left' would drift in through the windows of most of the classrooms on the two days a week that he was in attendance. In fine weather we would exercise in the pebble-strewn playground, which also had a dusty base; it was a dirty job doing PT.

Queen Elizabeth the first had reputedly opened the school herself, and it had been a boarding school for the first few hundred years of its life. We were often entertained with anecdotes from the past, especially on Speech Days, when the speaker, usually at a loss for something to say, would have delved into our history. One old chestnut that came out regularly was the story of The Ferrule. This was evidently an instrument of Tudor child-torture that was originally standard equipment in the school. It apparently worked after the following manner: after their first year, it seems that the pupils were only allowed to converse in Latin. The first one to be heard using a word of his mother tongue by a master or prefect would be handed The Ferrule, which was some sort of rod that could easily be concealed. The recipient could pass it on to anyone whom he himself heard departing from the straight and narrow path of Latin virtuosity; and so on, until, at close of the school day, the one who finished up carrying the thing got belted with it; a sort of penal musical chairs I suppose.
I would not have thought this idea would have been very conducive to 'the old school tie, fair play, cricket,' and stuff like that. I wonder though, could it have any applications in modern times? The forces? Houses of Parliament? United Nations? European Parliament? The mind begins to boggle.
The benches in the Old Hall must have been very nearly the original ones. Each of them held about eight pupils, as I remember, and the back-rest of each was attached to the seat by a heavy cast-iron hinge at each end, so that it could be swung over to the front to form a table at meal times, and a desk when there was writing to be done. The old oak had been so deeply carved with thousands of names over the years, that there was not a smooth place on any of them. This Tudor red brick hall, with its octagonal tower at each end, stood just inside our entrance gates at the top of Barnet Hill, in Wood Street, almost opposite the Parish Church, where I sang in the school choir on Founders' Days; this was not far from the tram terminus.
The playground behind the hall was not very big, and the middle of it was taken up by an ancient fenced-off mulberry tree, that was supposed to have been planted by Good Queen Bess herself. It was all patched up with iron bands, concrete fillings, and wooden struts, so that it looked as though it was on its last legs; in spite of this, it bore copious fruit each year, which turned the ground underneath it purple. Moreover, it was still alive a few years ago when I made a point of going to look for it, but to my older eyes it only looked a quarter of the size I remembered.
On the right of the playground was a large bleak two-storey Victorian building, that housed the majority of our classrooms. On the left was the lecture hall and science laboratory; then came the fives courts and drill shed. The temporary range of wooden buildings at the far end of the playground, where among others the art and history classrooms were situated, completed the teaching facilities. The Head's house was just inside the main gates on the left, and the kitchen, together with the caretaker's house, was on the right immediately behind the Old Hall.
The whole school had a run-down and tatty appearance (at least so it seemed to me), and not at all what I had expected the leading Grammar School in the area to look like. However, the fact that the school was to remove to modern new buildings a mile away a couple of years later, probably had something to do with that. The new school was opened by The Duke of Kent, who was unfortunately killed during the war. The old school was turned into a museum after the move; then, somewhat later, the site was redeveloped as a college, although the old hall with its towers was retained, and is still there.