Learning? It’s a walk in the park

A hot, still day in Middlesbrough in early July 1970, the junior school summer term running down like an unplugged fan. Coming up soon would be the 11-plus, although we didn’t know it then and wouldn’t know it until the morning before the exam. All we knew or cared that fragrant, baking month was that soon we’d be free for six weeks.

I think the teachers felt the same way. They were dilatory and listless, indulgent of our misbehaviour, the usual insistence upon discipline melting away in the heat. Why bother? That’s what the teachers must have thought. Why cram anything more into them with the holidays coming up? That month we’d already been let loose to play football at times when we were meant to be doing other stuff.

There was a demob atmosphere and even the dinner ladies seemed weighed down by the heat, ladling out the rabbit stew and mash, or battered spam fritters with a bored weariness.