TUESDAYS AS A KID IN SCHOOL...

 Tuesdays As A Kid In School…

I remember when mum’s Monday washing-line sagged,

So stretched at its anchoring points.

Slack, a drooping wire,

Heavy with sodden garments, dank and dire.

Well, that was how my mood dropped on Tuesdays…

The Geography lesson and fear acute.

Slasher Lazenbury relishing being cruel.

A forty-minute dictatorial brute.

The gloomy cellars and the fearsome 1960s gruel...

The languishing, acrid basement stank of glue, boiled,

So etched in my shivering memory.

Scab Ward, salivating anew.

The double-period of weekly woodwork due.

The doom of metalwork during next term’s Tuesdays...

The weekday from the depths of misery.

The fear, the loosening of bowels,

The timidity,

The Tuesday purgatory.

The terror, the releasing of bowels,

The incapability...

The barbarity,

The Tuesday inevitability,

The nausea, the twisting of bowels,

The futility...

Pete Ray

ME, SECOND FROM RIGHT, FRONT ROW, FINALLY IN LONG TROUSERS WHICH HAD BEEN HANDED DOWN BY MY COUSIN STEVE HESLOP...

 

Year 7 in underground rooms, woodwork or metalwork with creepy teacher ‘Scab’ Ward, plus the dining-room with its glue-reeking gloom, also in the school’s basement.

I was a dysfunctional left-hander, attempting to use right-handed tools and constantly wondering why I was unable to construct items which looked neat…

Geography was on the same day with an evil, clueless bully of a teacher, ‘Slasher’ Lazenbury.

LAZENBURY IS SECOND FROM THE LEFT ON THE ROW OF 'MASTERS'...

Tuesday brought fear, my heart sinking like mum’s tired washing line…

And Tuesday 13th was the one day I truly dreaded at my secondary school.

I still feel it now.

I do. I really do…

YEAH, I HEAR YOU...
"SHORT TROUSERS, CAP & SATCHEL?" 
YEAH, I WAS NEARLY 12 WHEN THIS IMAGE WAS TAKEN, FIRST DAY AT KING EDWARD'S GRAMMAR SCHOOL ASTON, IN BIRMINGHAM...