Just to prove I wasn’t imagining my first best friend, here’s a photo of me and Jimmy on the balcony at the back of the house I lived in across the road from him. His family was a bit better off than ours at the time what with him having a record player, actual records to play on it, a train set to die for and chicken for Sunday dinner. Just to make it worse he even had better hair then me as well. I wasn’t jealous though. Alright, maybe just a bit.
Jimmy was also quite a good gymnast. That’s his arse flying through the air in the middle of the photograph above as he and his fellow athletes perform the dreaded flying leaf. You can just make out the sadist in charge that was our PE teacher to the extreme left. Note that in order not to end up in court on a manslaughter charge he has positioned a couple of other members of the gym club on the ground to make sure they prevent any of the flying pupils from smashing skull first onto the hard floor below. As for the so-called “catchers”, the kid at the back couldn’t catch a cold let alone a teenage boy in full flight whilst the one on the far right looks like he’s just discovered religion.
Here’s our class in a music lesson learning the dreaded recorder with me sat closest to the camera. The music teacher is obviously so enamoured of our performance that she’s even set up a tape recorder to catch us in full swing. I hated the instrument to be honest but if I’d known how popular it was going to be once “Kung Fu” started on TV a few years later I would have concentrated harder. Yes, I know kick-ass Grasshopper Caine played a flute and not a recorder but I’m tone deaf and can’t tell the difference.
This is the program for my first sports day at Hartsdown school. The pupils were separated into four ‘houses’ in order to create some element of competition. I can’t remember the house names apart from Alexander, the one I was in. I lost every track event I took part in. Whoever said “it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts” obviously had both paddles out of the water.
Above is the report for my first academic year at secondary school, this and my other reports having recently been discovered inscribed on a tablet in a field on the edge of Margate, that’s how old they are. If you look closely towards the bottom you can see that I was absent fifty-four out of seventy-five days just for that first term alone. Just think, if they’d graded truancy I’d have got an A plus.
And where was I for most of those fifty-four days you might ask. The answer is this now-derelict and decommissioned piece of Margate history formerly known as the Westbrook Bay public shit house which amazingly is still standing. The boarded-up door in the middle was the gentlemen’s entrance, so to speak, and the ladies the one to the right. I actually spent more days in this architectural monstrosity of a building than I did for two out of the three terms of my first year at secondary school. However, if you want to know exactly what I got up to in order to entertain myself whilst there then you’ll have to buy the book. I know. There’s always a catch.
On a happier note it’s wonderful when life unexpectedly throws a surprise your way. I happened to wander into Woolworths in Margate High Street one day, maybe one of those days when school didn’t appeal to me, and to my amazement they were selling leftover cinema brochures for about two shillings and sixpence each. I bought the two as shown above then immediately rendered them worthless by pinning both of them to my bedroom wall with a thumbtack.
Drop by next week to check out my thoughts on some of the films released in 1964 as well as details of my unrequited and totally impossible love for a beautiful dumb blonde.
Steve Mayhew 