Seeing Things. Oliver Postgate
she demanded … ‘Well?’
‘Er, er … thankyouverymuch.’
‘I should think so too!’
I crept back to my place and that afternoon when I returned home I told Daisy that Mrs Springbottom had been a bit cross because she hadn’t written to thank her for getting me through the exam and that I had had to say a public thankyou on her behalf.
Daisy seemed a bit cross about this too, but the next morning she did give me a letter to take to Mrs Springbottom. I gave it to her at Assembly and directly it was over she ordered me to collect up my belongings and go home. There wasn’t room in my satchel for all my things so she grudgingly gave me a paper bag. Although it split as soon as I was out of the school I didn’t feel like going back to ask for another. I found a piece of string in the gutter and tied the things together with that.
I can see, now, that the change from a formal academic examination to a simple IQ test must have come as a terrible blow to the school, but even so I don’t see why they had to take it out on me – but then I don’t know what was in Daisy’s letter.
I had passed the exam and was offered a place at Woodhouse County Secondary School in North Finchley.
Woodhouse School was, I think, a quite ordinary middle-ofthe-road school, typical of England in the 1930s. It had a House system comprising four houses, Gordon, Livingstone, Nightingale and Scott, and its school motto was ‘Cheerfulness with Industry’. I was a lowly member of Scott House, which was of course the best.
In general we behaved respectfully to the teachers, held up a hand when we wished to speak, attended to what was being said and did our work. In due course I found that teachers could be cheeked and would usually take it in good part, providing one was careful to preserve respect, calling them ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’, and didn’t go on too long. All of them would, if approached courteously at an appropriate moment, be willing to give a careful answer to a seriously asked question, and be quite companionable about it, particularly if the question had to do with their subject.
Essentially there were two social orders in the school. The main one was the formal hierarchy, with the headmaster at the top, then the teachers and house-captains. Below them came the prefects, the school and finally us, the newcomers. There were recognized heroes in the hierarchy, mostly distinguished achievers in sport or music, whom we were expected to look up to. The other was the social life of the pupils, lived during unsupervised moments in the classrooms, in the playground, the cycle sheds and on the playing fields during the dinner-hour. As a school, Woodhouse was thought to be a bit ‘rough’, by which I mean that the coinage of our lives together seemed to be a sort of formalized thuggery, in which the most important thing was to be seen to be ‘tough’. Very occasionally there would be real fights between potential top persons in the class but for the rest of us it was a ritual by which we confirmed our position in the pack with small arm-twistings and shoves. Girls, as always, were different. They had a social hierarchy of their own from which boys were excluded, not that we would have wanted to have anything to do with girls anyway.
Of course with a complex institution like a school there were occasional failures of communication. It was as a result of one of these that I could be said to have dived for the House. One of the house-prefects came up to us in the field and said: ‘Any of you rabbits dive?’ So I, foolish but, as always, anxious to help, admitted that when I was on holiday I had once dived off some rocks.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re diving for the House,’ and went away.
I was proud, but only for a minute. When I read the list of awesome types of dives that I had been entered for I went, cap in hand, to the Head of House to tell him I couldn’t dive and that it was all a mistake. He told me not to be modest and that it was my duty to the House to do my best. I went to the Sports master but he was too busy to talk and directed me back to the Head of House. He again refused to hear that I couldn’t dive, told me not to be a ninny and said that they were all depending on me to put up a good show.
The Swimming Sports Day came. The diving was announced and duly took place. Six times I was called and six times I managed to find the courage to drop myself off the end of the board into the water, gaining for my House a total of nine points out of a possible sixty and for myself a red patch all down my front where my body had slapped the water. I was an object of ridicule and for most of my life I have been deeply ashamed of that disgrace. Only very recently have I been able to revise that view and look on the incident with something like pride. I had been ordered to dive for the House and I bloody did it. The fact that it was a complete fiasco was not my fault. I had told them it was going to be – and it was!
IV. Mocking Providence.
For me the spring of 1938 was full of excitement; I had been promised a brand-new full-size bike for my birthday. I had pored over the coloured catalogue of bicycles for hours and, with the expert advice of John and his friends, had eventually chosen a green Raleigh with half-drop handlebars, cable brakes and a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gear. It was priced at £5 19s 6d.
This was quite a large sum of money for Ray and Daisy to fork out but it was all part of a Grand Plan which they were hatching. We were to undertake a valedictory tour of France, on bicycles. Even for Ray and Daisy, this was an enterprising idea. They were not in the bloom of youth. Ray was ponderous and overweight. Daisy was in her late forties and rheumaticky. Neither of them was in the habit of taking exercise and neither of them had been on a bicycle for decades. But, with the war-clouds looming, they both felt that this might be the last time they would see their beloved France.
That was one serious reason for the trip. The other was that the franc stood at 1,750 to the pound, a rate of exchange that was not so much advantageous as mythically bountiful. A practical difficulty arose from the fact that our parents were very short of money at the time. Although once we had got to France the living would be very cheap, getting there was going to be expensive. So, obviously, bicycles were the logical choice.
Bicycles were obtained, saddlebags and panniers were bought. Our cousin, Peter Thurtle, and his wife-to-be, Kitty, joined the project and Daisy made divided skirts with box-pleats for her and Kitty to wear. Ray enrolled us all in the Cyclists’ Touring Club.
The start of the tour proper was a triumph worthy of Jacques Tati. We left the small hotel in La Ferte´ Alais, just south of Paris, and proceeded ‘en crocodile’ along a quiet wide road. At the edge of the town we came over a gentle hill and rolled down to a roundabout.
Ray, in the lead, put out his arm to signal his intent and rode steadily round the roundabout, to the left. John, knowing better, put his other arm out and rode steadily round it, to the right. I, confused, swung round and rode back towards the others, seeking instructions, but in vain. Kitty followed Ray to the left. Peter followed John to the right. Daisy jumped off and pushed her bike across the middle of the roundabout, shouting. I rode across behind her. The gendarme, his Gauloise hanging from his lip, stood with his hands on his hips observing the spectacle, but in the end chose not to comment.
That holiday has left me with the most glorious pictures. We rode along a set of stone bridges across a wide-spread river and in through the gates of a medieval town. Everything – the sun, the sky, the glittering of the leaves in the lines of trees, the lazy flat river rippling gently over gravel – was part of a fairy tale. Every roof, every dark shadow, every patch of sun-warmed stone in that town was full of glory and magic. I was drunk with amazement and delight and that night, when I went to bed filled with excellent dinner, I wished with all my heart that I could take the feeling of that place with me for the rest of my life.
A few years later I came across the work of Alfred Sisley. He too had seen Moret-sur-Loing and had spent much of his life painting the very scenes that I had taken in that day. When I saw his paintings I jumped for joy, not so much because they were great paintings but because, for me, they were like a magic snapshot album – each painting filled to overflowing with the light and essence of places that I had already seen and loved. In fact I found out later