‘Appy ever after?

… a tale of smouldering passions, jealousy, blood and spilt milk

‘Love’ was very special stuff, maybe a little magical, championed by Sunday school’s  Jesus & cinema’s Disney: love of animals, love of kindness, love of truth, love of life. Love of Smarties. But Walt Disney dropped in the added wild ingredient of Romantic Love, under the influence of which his heroines Cinderella and Snow White abruptly abandoned their carefree feral gumption on account of coy encounters with rich floppy haired men in tights. Within a few musical chord changes, the rags and the sadness and the baddies melted away, and the inevitable big spangly frocks appeared. Then, after a bit of a dance, and a smattering of bluebirds and wedding bells, they pranced off on a white horse to somewhere called Happily Ever After. A compelling sales pitch, in that any fear or misery would be thoroughly dispelled forever, though it seemed to herald an untimely end to the joy of just larking about with imaginary animal chums.

Fortunately, at North Road infants school, there was no imminent threat of a spoilsport Prince Charming. All the boys were straight out of the Beano’s Bash Street lineage, with more than a hint of archetypes.

There was Roger Barker: pimply, plump & pasty, he always wore a tight fair-isle tank top that made him look like an overstuffed cushion attached to rubbery legs with droopy socks. His favourite hobbies were his grab & slobber version of kiss chase, hopefully followed by doctors and nurses behind the air raid shelter. He liked to show everyone his willy at every opportunity. Avoidance of Roger contributed strongly to my becoming a silver medallist sprinter. He was the School Bully and Pervert.

Colin Gray, on the other hand, was always impeccable in appropriate shades of grey, with a buttoned waistcoat, a blazer with elbow patches and gleaming sandals. He was shy and intense, with deeply inset eyes, his dark hair never flinching from its crisp pink parting. We were all in awe of his artistic ability, for he could really, really draw things like horses and bicycles whilst we still struggled to depict our mums and dads. He was the Dark Horse.

Henry Lee was gangly, like a stringless puppet, with dangerously pointy knees and elbows. With stiff, ginger hair like thick cut marmalade, prodigious ears, and wide pink and blue eyes, he was hard to ignore. His ever-eager approaches were always heralded by the loose jangly buckles on his over-sized sandals, and a pungent aura of wee. He was The Inescapable.

Dean Walker was petite, and charmingly dishevelled. His ill-fitting clothes were frayed and patched, but he always smelled of soap. He had no proper shoes - only frayed black elastic-sided plimsolls such as we all wore only for PE sessions. A thick mess of shiny brown hair mostly obscured his kindly but worried eyes. He was one of twelve from an estate on the ‘other side’ of town - shy and ostracised, but bright and quirky, quick to smile. Softly spoken, he had the most mellifluous Cockney accent. He sometimes had his pet mouse, ‘Arry, in his pocket, and once a cross stag beetle in a matchbox. He was my Secret Pash.

 In the fifties, all kids had perennial hardy knees, regardless of weather. Tights were yet to be invented for non-princes, so girls wore skirts and socks, and boys wore short trousers until secondary school. You could tell a lot about other kids from their knees. Roger’s were purple plump and lumpy; Colin’s were pink and shiny; Henry’s were white and knobbly and pointed inwards; Dean’s were forever scabby and grubby - just like mine, on account of endless forensic exploration of hedges and alleys in search of nature’s secrets.

We sat in double desks, allocated by the brittle Miss Moon. These enforced couplings lasted all year, and spilled out of the classroom onto the pavements whenever we left the premises. Miss Moon would blow the whistle that she always wore around her neck and bark “form a crocodile!” In response to this surreal command, Henry’s bony hand would creep out and grasp mine in a sticky vice-like grip, for the duration of the expedition. Colin was reluctantly paired with my wriggly sports pal Valerie; Roger was happily united with Jessie, the maternally bossy half of the Waite twins. It was she who would co-ordinate his under-desk willy displays with a special cough that would precipitate a mass dropping of pencils and rubbers for sniggery retrieval. Her twin sister Sarah, thin as a snake and of a brittle disposition, was sulkily attached to poor Dean. She would have been the ideal deskmate for Henry, as I for Dean and his occasional mouse, but these unhappy unions were set in stone for what seemed like forever.

Then came one significant playtime, when Dean revealed his inner hero as he sprang with clenched fists between me and big Roger, to intercept a slobber ambush at the water fountain. After a brief but triumphant scuffle, he proudly led me off to see the huge furry caterpillars he had discovered in the school hedge. I rewarded him with half of my toffee chewbar. It began to feel like I might have found my first soulmate, with the bonus thrill of the occasional bashful eye contact. That night I lay awake practising my favourite glottalstop words from our dalliance: ‘orrible, nuffink, ‘Arry the marse, and ‘airy ca’erpeer’. Next morning I matchboxed my best chrysalis, the one that wriggled when prodded, to impress him at playtime.

A major part of classroom procedure was Miss Moon’s monthly appointment of monitors with Significant Responsibilities. These ranged from blackboard monitor to dinner, window, bell, ink, nature table, and milk monitors. All carried a strong mission sense of post-war duty, and an opportunity to prove our worthiness, and prepare us for the responsibilities and challenges of the world outside. Being a milk monitor meant leaving the classroom with your desk spouse ten minutes before morning break to prepare the distribution of the daily free milk. This took place at the end of a long gloomy corridor lit by small panelled windows. One monitor would grab the sacred pokey gadget to punch holes in the aluminium caps of the rows of small bottles, whilst the other would slide in the waxed paper straws, ready for the thirsty horde keen to drink up fast and get out to play.

Dean and Sarah were thus employed on the last day of term, as we all poured out of the classroom. The corridor bore the usual rancid smell of stale spilt milk with the ever-present top-note of wee, and all around, the growing cacophony of impatient slurping and gurgling. This was no Disney scenario, but on this particular morning, a shaft of sunlight fell through the smeary windows onto the dear face of Dean looking up at me as he placed the final straw at the end of the corridor. He beckoned me to join him, eager to tell of the big white furry moff he’d spotted by the school gate. Our heads leaned close together as we drank, eager to begin our moff ‘unt. The paper straws always became flat and soggy before their task was complete, and as their suction diminished, our cheeks sank in deeply as we pulled in vain. It was thus, locustlike, that our four brown eyes met, and for a moment my tiny heart fluttered as time stood still. But the spell was instantly shattered by a resounding crash as a small fist broke through the nearest pane of glass. In the ensuing slow motion sequence, shards of glass tumbled around our feet, and small children screamed, as blood began to spurt from the slender wrist that feebly hovered inches from Dean’s face. On the other side of the smeary windows, the inscrutable face of Colin.

There was a sudden flurry of teachers and whistles and first aid boxes, and lashings of Dettol and mops and buckets as we were all shoo’d out to the playground. It transpired that Colin had been incubating a secret crush on me, and on his way back from the toilets in the yard, had observed the threat of an unworthy rival through the window, and he’d just snapped.

The rest of the day became a blur of teachered distractions, and then suddenly it was the end of term. Walt Disney would have engineered a better ending, but this was real life, in which, apart from a lingering connection through Nelly the nit, I never saw Dean Walker again. And he never saw my best chrysalis. His family shortly re-located to another borough on the arrival of the thirteenth little Walker. It seems we were destined to remain in eternal suspended animation, though he sometimes springs to mind when I come across a really special moff.