September

Blessed, blessed September with its cooler mornings, darker evenings, new shoes, new notebooks, lunch boxes packed with goodies. I can still recall the precise shade of blue that was my own: I'm pretty sure it was of a Victoria Plum design, or similar. Do you know of Victoria Plum? I rather identified with her, a creature preferred the company of badgers to people and had unruly dark hair like me. Not that keen on her dresses though: I liked dungarees back then. And green wellies with frog faces on them, and yellow raincoats. Neither of which I owned. I grew too tall, too fast for fancy things.

Sometimes, the lunch box would contain the lemon curd sandwiches Dad would have made as a treat rather than the standard cheese or, if times were flush, ham. Sometimes there would be a piece of homemade cake, or a penguin bar. If it was a mint or orange club, my day was made; if it was a wagon wheel, my day was ruined. There was always a piece of fruit (never a banana because, bleh) that generally enjoyed a day trip to school before being stealthily returned to the fruit bowl when I got home. Except for satsumas. Satsumas, I would eat by the bucketful.

Dad generally made the lunch boxes up because he was doing his own. His would contain two rounds of sandwiches - one for second breakfast as man cannot live on cornflakes for longer than 3 hours when doing physical work - a wagon wheel, a banana and other fruit, and a packet of crisps. This was the 80s: no one was packing hummus, couscous or anything remotely looking like a salad. The closest was Mum with her four Ryvita, fat-free cottage cheese and sad little bundle of grapes, sitting in a piece of tupperware, waiting for her allocated lunch hour and valiantly resisting the office biscuits. Diet culture has a lot to answer for in our family.

If I am honest (and why not be here), new shoes, new books and lunch box aside, I was not a fan of school. Too many other children, too many ways to behave 'properly' that I had not been given the memo about. I did not have the right shoes, hair, personality, to fit easily in. Too many rules, too many teachers. A school uniform that seemed designed to be extra scratchy/fussy/chilly. Too much maths, not nearly enough reading. Teachers who liked to point out your mistakes in front of others. Teachers who had no time, no time, no time. If I was not bored, I was humiliated and trying to find the right way to behave.

I never really found the answers.

Things that I was interested in - tiny creatures trapped in rocks, what the patterns in the skies meant, who had put up those standing stones, who had walked those paths before, different gods, how many different words there were for rain - they weren't on the curriculum in my small-town primary school in the 1980s. I was supposed to learn things like how to measure a cube or the boiling point of x-y-z without ever being told why that might be important. I was supposed to read about boring Jack and insipid Jill, out loud, to my bored teacher despite knowing that, at home, Rat and Mole and Badger were about to raid Toad Hall and reclaim it from the weasels. I was supposed to draw and create in the prescribed method, using the prescribed materials. "Don't colour it like that! Haven't you learned to stay in the lines yet?"

My favourite teacher, I remember her red hair vividly, used to create imaginary creatures when it was her turn to lead the assembly. Weaving whole worlds and biologies out of things she had made from cotton wool and pipe cleaners, the headmaster whispering furiously in the back, very much against the development of our imaginations. I once gave her a lump of fools gold, pyrite, as a token of my devotion. She made me add a bad final line on my poem, costing me the competition and teaching me a valuable lesson.

Always leave before the final line gets written...

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