The Sound of Laughter (5 page)

They even shot a pigeon once with an air rifle, then left it on the steps of the convent in a Nike shoebox, and all because the nuns wouldn't play 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood at the school disco (well, it had been banned by Radio 1 at the time).

I shudder when I remember the awful things that we did. I sometimes think there must have been devilment in the air during the summer of '73. As some of these kids were evil. It's hardly surprising, though, when you consider that most of them were probably conceived to
Dark Side of the Moon.
And what chance did I stand? Gary Glitter was number one with 'The Leader of the Gang' the week I was born.

(That's freaky, I just looked down at the word count at the bottom of my computer screen and it was on 666. Jesus!)

But I have to be honest with you and tell you that despite all of their badness these mentalists were very, very funny. I was no angel myself and even though I wasn't in their league, I was still great friends with all of them. I've tried keeping in touch with some of them over the years by going on Friends Reunited, but I don't think they're allowed access to t'Internet in prison.

It has to be said: some of the disruptive behaviour and stunts were quite original at the time.

Like when we deliberately arrived early for an RE lesson just so we could draw a mural on the blackboard. Using coloured chalk, we painstakingly drew the image of an Arizona desert road heading off into the distance up the centre of the blackboard. We drew a cactus, a few people and finally we drew a huge articulated lorry
heading straight towards us. Then we flipped the blackboard over, took our seats and waited patiently for Sister Matic to arrive.

We were giggling with anticipation when eventually Sister turned in her seat and flipped the blackboard over revealing our mural. Then we'd take great delight in shouting,

'Sister, get out of the way quick, there's a truck coming.'

She always failed to see the humour in our pranks, even when we traced a full sized image of Pope John Paul II out of our RE book on to the blackboard. I thought she would have been made up sitting beside the Pope.

But disruptive behaviour almost always resulted in our being detained after the lesson for a talking-to and frig me, do nuns like to talk? I think
all
teachers do. They love the sound of their own voices, so much so that sometimes we could end up being detained for ages. So we came up with a sure-fire plan that would get us out of there fast. We used to fart on them. Seriously. We all used to push as hard as we could and eventually we'd create enough of an odour that they'd have no choice but to release us. It might seem a bit drastic on reflection but it worked a treat every time. Except for when Danny Thorncliffe followed through in Metalwork but
I don't really want to talk about that (well, not yet anyway).

Another stunt we pulled was in Chemistry with Sister O'Mercy. Again we turned up early for class and hid ourselves behind the big wooden benches in the science lab. The lesson began and Sister O'Mercy slowly got more and more concerned as to why her class was half empty. Ten minutes went by, she'd glanced at her Rolex and mumbled something in Latin and still we were hiding behind the benches, each of us in position, poised with our textbooks and pens in our hands ready.

Then eventually she turned to the blackboard for a few seconds and that's when we all popped up into our seats simultaneously. She turned back and freaked out. Where? How did they get in here so fast? And we just casually copied from the board as if we'd been there all the time.

Sister O'Mercy never turned up for Chemistry the following week. Apparently she packed her bag and jumped over the convent wall in the middle of the night. The last I heard she was scaling Ben Nevis dressed as Bugs Bunny for muscular dystrophy.

But, as I say, it wasn't just nuns that we had teaching us, we had humans too. One of my favourites was the French teacher, Miss Plum. We all turned our desks
around in her lesson once and then told her that she was at the wrong end of the classroom. It was a stand-off and as usual she burst into tears and went to get Mr Lawson. Of course, by the time they both returned we were back facing the right way. Bloody hell, we did some horrible things.

But the worst one I can think of is the time somebody (and I'm not saying who) dressed the school crucifix up for the end-of-year assembly. Whoever it was must have been planning it for a while. It was a highly skilled operation that took guts and incredible dexterity. How they managed it I'm still none the wiser but I'll never forget the looks of hysteria on the nuns' faces when the curtains rolled back revealing Jesus nailed to the cross wearing a woolly Bolton Wanderers hat and a purple body warmer. The prefects were wheeling the nuns out with oxygen masks. What I still can't figure out is how they got the body warmer over Jesus's outstretched arms without ripping it? I'm not suggesting that it was a miracle for one second.

But unbeknownst, to us, our carefree, fun-loving days were numbered, as over on the opposite side of town a rival Catholic secondary school called St Bernadette's was sinking slowly into the ground and in their infinite wisdom the local education authority had decided to merge that school with ours.

The reason for doing this was not because they'd found subsidence in the girls' toilets, it was because there was a more elaborate plan about to be unveiled that would hopefully put an end to this persistent disruptive behaviour once and for all, the plan mysteriously called Mode II.

We were all summoned into the assembly hall at the end of third year for an important discussion. There were a couple of blokes in suits from the education authority already in there and our headmistress, Sister Sledge, stood at her podium and told us that because we were a 'special' year (I took special to mean full of nutters) we were going to be presented with the unique opportunity of choosing one of two academic options.

Choice number one was simple: 'Just do your course-work and study hard for your all-important final exams.' OR (and this is when I half expected the stage to light up and turn into the set of a game show): 'You can choose Mode II, a revolutionary new option where there'll be no coursework and no exam. Instead you'll be given the opportunity to gain experience in some of the important things in life like Painting & Decorating, Car Maintenance and Gardening, to name but a few.'

But it didn't end there. In the pamphlet they provided
it said that 'you will be continually assessed by staff throughout the duration of Mode II and if your grades are sufficient you'll be awarded with a qualification equivalent to a GCSE'. 'So, why not do what's right for YOU and choose Mode II?' I think they fell down a bit on the tag line but other than that it sounded perfect for me and I couldn't wait to sign up.

But my parents had a different opinion.

'Gardening instead of exams? That can't be right,' my dad said as he studied the pamphlet during
The Disabled Krypton Factor.

Mum agreed with him. 'They just want to get rid of all the troublemakers,' and she was right. I knew that but I still fancied doing it.

'Not a chance,' my dad said. 'Fixing cars and decorating – what a load of crap. They're luring a bunch of idiots over to a school that's sinking and then letting them all sink . . . Now bugger off, will you, I'm trying to watch this bloke land the space shuttle with his feet!'

So I didn't do Mode II and my mum and dad were right. All the nutters signed up and like lambs to the slaughter they joined a sinking St Bernadette's. School wasn't the same any more. We still had a laugh but all the controversy had been sucked out of our lives.

I'd still see my old friends each night as they
dismounted their Mode II bus proudly wearing overalls stained with oil and silk emulsion. They seemed so grown up all of a sudden while we were doing boring coursework. Our jealousy didn't last long and I have to admit I was relieved a few months later when Danny Thorncliffe flipped his lid and took four nuns hostage with some turps and a Bunsen burner.

Mentally, the cheese had slid off Danny's cracker a long time ago. I remember saying that when I saw him trying to headbutt wasps in the convent gardens. But taking hostages was the final straw. When he blew up the science lab he made it on to the local TV news.

Danny was suspended but had the last laugh when he sued the education authority for damages and won. He reckoned the cuts he received to his face as a result of the blast ruined any chance he might have had of becoming a male model.

The last time we were all together was when the school was entered for a local design project. Every Thursday for a few weeks, Mode II students were invited back to our school (much to the nuns' disgust) and Mr India, the head of the Craft and Design department, put us into groups.

I was crap at Craft and Design. I'd only taken it as an option because I'd been a dab hand with Lego and because Mr India promised I could build my own
hovercraft and travel to school in it. I never got any further than dismantling my nana's Ewbank for parts. I ended up getting a U in my final exam and I think I only got that because I spelt my name right at the top of the paper.

Our task for this project was to design and build 'something' that could travel thirty feet – that was the brief. It could be any shape or size. It could be powered by any means. It just had to travel thirty feet across the assembly-hall floor, four weeks from that day, in front of our parents, some governors and possibly the Bishop, depending on whether or not he was back from the World Cup.

I was put into a group with some of my old friends from Mode II and it was great being in a lesson with them again. In fact, we were only together for five minutes before we set the fire alarm off. Danny Thorncliffe had just got out of the burns unit and we were teasing him by throwing lit matches at his bandages. Happy days.

The first thing we had to do was pick a name for our group. Mr India said that ideally it should have something to do with speed and dexterity. Everybody else chose names like 'Supersonic' and 'The Hurricanes'. After a deliberation of ten seconds we came up with 'The Very Fast'.

I have to confess we did nothing but piss about for three weeks. Every time we saw Mr India coming we'd each grab a pair of masonry goggles and stand round the lathe looking busy. But when I realised we only had three days until the competition and my mum had booked the day off work I began to panic. We had designed nothing.

Mr India gave everybody an appraisal and we hung our heads in shame when we saw what the other groups had come up with. 'The Speed Demons' had risen mightily to the challenge with their remote-controlled, jet-powered land cruiser. By incorporating the guts of a Dyson and over three hundred ball bearings that they'd 'found' in a skip behind MFI, they'd managed put the cast of
Robot Wars
to shame. Quite an achievement when you consider that
Robot Wars
would not be invented for another fifteen years.

I was personally very jealous when I saw what 'Red Rum and Co.' had come up with. It was just a bloody wooden ball, the clever sods. They'd sculpted it out of pine in the woodwork room and were planning to roll it down the hall. Everybody hates a smart-arse.

Eventually Mr India got round to our group and when he saw what we'd done (or rather what we hadn't done) he totally lost the plot. I felt bad because he was a gentle soul. He let the kids call him Pablo and played the
guitar whenever we had a power cut but now we'd let him down.

'I can't believe you've done nothing. You've had four weeks.'

We just shrugged pathetically. He kept repeating himself over and over. We even tried farting on him in an effort to make him stop but the poor bugger had inhaled so many toxic chemicals over the years that his sinuses were dead. Danny Thorncliffe, on the other hand, pushed a little too hard and followed through. What a stink. So there we were, stood in front of Mr India, with tears in our eyes. Luckily he mistook them for tears of regret and granted us a twenty-four-hour reprise.

That night after watching
Wacky Races
I had a dream. If we took a piece of wood about a foot long, drilled two holes in it and then threaded a couple of axles through the holes, then placed four wheels at the end of them, then (and here's the genius bit) we attached a powerful spring to the back, maybe, just maybe, if the laws of physics allowed, we could push the coiled spring up against a wall, hold it tightly and when we let it go, it would hopefully shoot forward . . . thirty feet? In theory anyway.

Well, it was just a dream but goddammit, that's all we had.

The contraption took about an hour to make, which was handy as it was now the presentation day. We needed a decent spring, though, for the back. Simon Birch (or Fingers as we called him) managed to come up with the goods. He never revealed where he got it from but I noticed the town hall clock had stopped working a few days later. Maybe it was just a coincidence that his dad worked as a security guard there.

Quickly we screwed the spring to the back of the wood and cleared a path in the metalwork room. Time
for the acid test. I pressed the vehicle against the wall, coiling the spring as tight as I could. I held my breath, counted to three and let rip. It shot forward all right, about four feet. We stared at it in silence until Danny Thorncliffe pulled out a cigarette, lit it calmly and said, 'We're fucked lads.'