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CHRIS RICHARDS

GLAISDALE SCHOOL 5

HOW IT WAS, 1973 - 1978

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It was 1975, and the famous Bay City Rollers seemed to be taking over the world, and Bilborough in particular. Fronted by teen idol Les McKeown, the band wore half-mast flares with tartan trim, looked cool and strummed their Fender guitars. Alan Longmuir, the bass player was left-handed and played his right handed instrument upside-down. 'Bye bye baby baby guuuudbye' they sang in nasty Scottish accents, and when buck-toothed Stuart Wood (or 'Woooey' as Les called him) spoke, we couldn't understand a word. Some of the lads at Glaisdale bastardised 'Shang A Lang' to 'Shag A Slag' and sang along to the disgust of younger sisters who were trying to watch the series on telly in teatime living rooms. Lead guitarist Eric Faulkner had eyes like Paul McCartney and the regulation feather-ferret haircut. Later on in the 1980s, bands like Aztec Camera, Ultravox and Eurythymics would popularise Scottish-accent singing. Midge Ure, however, had already fronted Slik by 1976, with the singles 'Requiem' and Forever and Ever'.

Sometime around 1977, it was time for the traditional sex education classes, which mainly consisted of a nurse proudly displaying her plastic models of cut-away male and female anatomy, plastic babies, and the her famous thumb, onto which she rolled a rubber johnny or Durex. The lesson was full of flushed faces and long silences, and when the bell rang at 3.50pm we were away down the corridor, singing along to the Bowie hit 'Space Oddity' - 'Ground control to Major Thumb - Take your protein pills and put your condom on'.

One assembly morning Aram stood on the podium and gulped hard before clearing his throat and lowering his head. We wondered if the school was about to close, or whether World War 3 had started somewhere in a distant corner of the world. In a broken voice he began a speech about bullying and its far-reaching effects. It seemed that a quiet lad in the year below me called 'Teddy Edwards' had commited suicide after a spate of bullying. The whole assembly hall was a wall of silence. I was lucky and had got through being bullied with a spell of truancy, got put 'on report' and had surfaced in the 4th year pretty unscathed. But it was not perhaps Teddy that really suffered, but his parents, brothers and sisters who really felt the anguish and hurt, and are still feeling it now, two decades down the line.

Paul Taylor was one of the star Glaisdale football and cricket players. He would get up on the podium at assembly time and deliver a football 'match report' to rival anything from 'Grandstand'. His dad was always a bit of an icon because he wore a sheepskin coat, drove a Rover 3500, and provided the Taylor family with a big house at Annan Court, Aspley. Once, Paul was playing football on the school field, and one of his team got brought down in the penalty area. He ran up to Mr Short shouting not for a penalty but 'Pelanty, Pelanty', and we all collapsed with laughter, choking and holding our stomachs.

GREEN FINGERS

My dad Harry Richards (above) was always a keen gardener and a fan of TV's 'Percy Throwup' and Clacks Farm. We had no space to grow vegetables in the cramped Radford backyard at Pine Street. However, when we moved to 31 Ainsley Road in 1965, Dad started the second 'Dig For Victory' campaign and and planted tomatoes, runner beans, carrots, potatoes, onions and radishes. These he often exchanged for items of clothing from girls on the estate who tealeafed them from local factories, therefore keeping the cost of living down.

Dad was 41 years old and Mum 39 when I was born, and unlike most schoolmates' parents, Harry had served in the Second World War. As an only child, I later found out that Dad had been married before and that I had two half brothers, the eldest twenty years my senior.

In the early 1990s, our food bill was as little as £10 a week. Often, jacket potatoes would be cooked under the fire grate, wrapped in turkey foil, and during the power strikes of the 1970s, the coal fire was a good place to warm up tins of soup, illuminated by the light of a 100w bulb, with a shade made of tin foil, powered by a car battery.

Brasier the history master was close to retirement age when we got there, and had ill-fitting dentures which made each sibilant sound come out as a whistle. His elderly head was a great target for our teenage peashooters to take aim at, and his speciality was showing slides. However, each slide of Hadrians Wall or Durham Cathedral had his wife smiling from the centre of it. Harry and 'Noddy' Matthews the Maths teacher used to travel round looking at steam engines and other mechanical devices. Sadly, the last I heard was that Brasier had suffered a nervous breakdown and retired from the teaching profession altogether.

In 1972 the New Seekers had sung 'We'd Like To Teach the World to Sing' but in the playground at Glaisdale 3 years later, the trick was to threaten a youth called Breward and got a free can of Coke. Breward was tall and gangly, wore jamjar specs and was submissive to the extreme. Lads would go up to him and say 'Can of Coke Breward - tomorrow or else' and the next day he would meekly oblige, unbuckling his grey haversack and handing over the familiar red cans of cadged soft drink to his tormentors.

It was the blistering hot summer of 1976 when Brotherhood of Man won the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Save Your Kisses for Me' a catchy corny ditty which had a silly 'thumbs in pockets' dance and ended with the sugar-sweet line 'even though you're only 3'. Knocking on the door of Derek Cousins' house at 126 Western Boulevard, I heard the sound of Derek playing his new electric guitar. Brother Mark and himself had been treated to these as Christmas presents. This was the first electric model I had played, a Jedson, and I felt liberated as I pumped a few Chuck Berry licks through the blowfly speakers of the tiny 10 watt Zenta amplifier. After Derek and Mark had demonstrated the 'Save Your Kisses' dance, somehow we ended up in the garden, with the Toynton brothers, from a few doors up. Suddenly, infantile screams came from the kids slide in the corner. Derek's younger brother was stuck at the top, with his pet dog on his back, going at it 'doggy style', its pink tongue flapping like a piece of ham. A small stone thrown by Neil Toynton stung me at the side of the neck, something flared up inside me and I began pitching rocks at the Cousins' caravan. This fine summers day ended with the two brothers being sent inside with belted arses and the other lads kicked out of his garden, with several caravan windows smashed and electric guitars confiscated for a while.

John Elson lived at the last house but two on Hollington Road before Tin Bridge, and had a passion for all things electrical. Like Kevin, one of the Eaton twins, who loved to broadcast his own radio station over the top of the frequency used by Radio Trent, Elson would bring in an customised ITT tape recorder to school, with Judge Dredd albums on Philips Compact Cassette. He had increased the speed of the recorder's motor so that: 'a C60 tape only lasts 7 minutes per side, but the quality is amazing!'

However, John screwed up badly in one of the exams, by bringing in a pocket radio with a personal earpiece, which he threaded up his blazer sleeve, to listen to Radio Trent during the exam. Halfway through, the earpiece jack plug popped out, resulting in the built-in speaker blasting out Manfred Mann's 'Blinded By the Light' at full volume. We all clutched red faces as Mr Dixon's even redder face glared at Elson the human jukebox and ordered him out of the exam hall.

Exams were nearly over for 1978, the sun was shining, and with the inevitable thought of college, work and our entire adult lives ahead of us, pens, pencil stubs and rulers were stuffed into blazers rapidly becoming too small, as we began the long walk back up Beechdale Road to the Ainsley Estate..

FERRIS WHEELS

1974 - and my Dad had told me that he had bought a secondhand bike off someone at Raleigh. Looking down Ainsley Road at 5pm, I saw a microscopic Dad turn the corner off Western Boulevard and start walking down the entry past Robert Shaw School, wheeling something with his right hand. As I raced up the road, it became clear that the bike was not a Chopper or a silver Puch like Carl Leonard's, but a small-wheel RSW 16. Desperately uncool with its small white wheels and blue/grey finish, it looked like something the vicar would ride to Sunday service. I took the first wobbly ride on the new bike and called for Tracy Ferris just past Selveys butchers. As she wheeled her bright orange Chopper out of the entry, this was the machine I wanted! However Tracey's bike had the T-bar gearshift, not the round knob, that if removed, left a metal rod that if slipped onto, could ruin your chances of fatherhood forever. Mark Robinson had already come a cropper when he rode his Chopper at full pelt down a hill on Wollaton Park and hit a tree stump, breaking both arms. Christmas was the best times for bikes though - when new machines would be ridden up Ainsley Road. Often kids would skid on the gravel, and limp back up the road screaming, with grazed kneecaps, ripped clothes and faces full of tears, their new paintwork scuffed and chipped, on the way back to hot Christmas-dinner houses in those council estate days.

Claire Axworthy lived up Woolsthorpe Close behind the TA Centre on Wigman Road just past Tin Bridge in the heart of community service codger land.. One thing she always used to bring to school was cold buttered toast in a plastic sandwich bag, which she sat eating at breaktimes. This was almost as revolutionary as Peter Nicholson bringing tuna fish sandwiches to school. 'What the 'ells bleddy tuna fish?' we spat in amazement, as he peeled open his sandwich box, nestled just next to his Torch geometry set, in a red case. In the 70s, of course, males and females were segregated into separate playgrounds, in case the hormones ran too high. In the late 1970s a band called 'Streetband' released a single actually called 'Toast' which featured lead singer Paul Young, later to become the spiky haired, blue-eyed gravel voiced 80s soul crooner of classics such as 'Love of the Common People', and 'Everytime You Go Away'. I wonder whether Claire still takes cold toast into her office for her break each day!

It was claimed that Andy (Drew) Armstrong used 36 coats of non-drip gloss paint on the flap of his 1975 'Colditz Climbing Club' haversack A piece of hardboard, rounded off at the edges, would be sawn off a large sheet somewhere in a shed in Bilborough, and placed inside the haversack to stop the school books from slopping around inside it. However, it would also add to the impact when the bag was swung round at fellow pupils in the playground! Alan Ridley's blue haversack remained in mint condition until at least the 5th year, in 1977, when the lettering 'Alan Ridley 4 Suzanne Pownall' appeared in Alan's best stencil lettering. But Ridley's haversack also contained pots of home-made jelly, which the younger pupil Glenn Howard laughed at. 'Fancy bringing jelly to school' he mocked as Alan relished the strawberry treat lovingly prepared by his mother. Wayne Merrin tells me that he lost his precious ragged 'Mez' haversack in the back of a works van during a house move!

all text ©2001 C W Richards

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