This memoir of teenage villainy was occasioned by working on my music website, Around & Around. I was in the middle of writing the MGM article, and looking at film soundtracks. The joy of the website is listening to music while you’re doing it, and the Mutiny on The Bounty soundtrack LP brought back a flood of memories.
We were in the Sixth Form. Games were still compulsory, and irritating if you weren’t in a team. Cricket was my favpourite sport, but I’d been banned from any cricket whatsoever for life, for saying ‘Fuck off!’ when given a second wide bowl by the deputy headmaster. I used to play every evening, and it was instinctive for games on Redhill Common. I was sent off, while my fellows protested, ‘You don’t get sent off in cricket, sir!’
‘You do now,’ he replied. It was a detention too. And it definitely was a skilful off-break, not a wide either. Our team discussed it at length.
So, the alternative was cross-country. This appealed to the smokers, as they would sit under a bush at the side of the golf course and puff away the afternoon calmly. I didn’t smoke.
As my friend Richard was a keen long-distance swimmer, the three of us as pals opted for swimming. We were in an inept teenage band together. We discovered that swimming was unsupervised. You just rode your bikes to Stokewood Road Swimming Baths, and that was it. You didn’t need to go back to school afterwards. We were on trust.
It only took two weeks to realize that we didn’t need to go. We left school at lunchtime and cycled to Richard’s house. No one was in. His dad had a retirement job as accountant for a hotel, and had a considerable array of spirits and liquors. We would sample an inch from each and get mildly pissed. Richard would tire of playing his extensive collection of The Shadows, and invariably put on the Mutiny on The Bounty soundtrack music LP which he truly loved. We learned to love it too, though in a haze of alcohol. The memory is bitter sweet. We started primary school together. We had tea at each other’s houses once a week, we lived 200 yards apart. He had a TV, we didn’t. I was at his wedding. I spoke at his funeral.
They call it bunking off now. In those days it was called truancy. If you were out in the school day in school uniform, say to go to the dentist, invariably a policeman would stop you and ask why. In the sixth form I had a few visits to the barber in the school day when the headmaster would order me to go out and get it cut and I was usually stopped.
It didn’t take long before the other swimmers hit on a better ruse. They would go to the new and then very cool bowling alley in the town centre instead. It was a sport after all. We soon joined them. About a dozen of us. The word got out to the sixth form at the girls grammar school – the schools were separated by a playing field with a low hedge in the middle patrolled by teachers on both sides. I can’t think they were allowed to go to the swimming baths at the same time, but perhaps the two schools had done a discount deal. A dozen girls joined us. Duly rolling up their skirts at the waistband just as we removed our school ties.
We had a pleasant few weeks. We should have guessed that the baths were charging per head and announced that no one ever turned up. There we were when the headmaster of our school, and the headmistress of the girls school arrived together. At least I was ten-pin bowling at the time. Others were holding hands or even snogging. At least half were smoking. From memory, the punishment failed to differentiate the smokers and snoggers from the rest of us. We opted for softball, which we could play in view of the teachers supervising cricket.
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