A memorial to suffering

A few days ago in our local cemetery I tried, and failed, to find the grave of a teacher at my old junior school. Despite my failure at identifying the exact plot I’m pretty confident, however, and very happy, that he’s six feet under, somewhere in the vicinity. It’s just that I couldn’t definitively locate him.

We’ll call him Old L. He wasn’t particularly old, mid-forties I should guess, at the time I had to endure him, nor is the descriptor ‘Old’ a mark of cosy familiarity. Few people in my life have I loathed or feared more. A “face like thunder” was his norm (on good days he had a slight facial resemblance to Tony Hancock at his most lugubrious), with an habitual expression of contempt for his pupils, a bitingly sarcastic Welsh accent, and a well developed appetite for doling out punishment. I’ve never heard anyone else say “well done” so sarcastically, even if he occasionally meant it. He was an ogre and, as my dad would have said, a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

Old L’s pedagogic forté  was plastic work. Proper schools had woodwork or metalwork, but my school so very typically had plastic work. I suspect the headmaster, let’s call him Mr A - a man with eyes too close together and a personality that could pass as a psychopathic parody of Captain Mainwaring, always busily strutting about barking ridiculous commands - perceived plastics as the future, as leading edge technology. He would want to be trendy, even though the word hadn’t come into vogue; the Sixties having not quite got going in the manner we like to remember them. If you know where to look you can find Mr A on the internet, described as a “strict disciplinarian”  and “rather scary”– and we’re not talking specialised contact sites either, just the reminiscences of former pupils.

Plastic work with Old L took place on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. I used to dread these days, and during the lunchtimes beforehand I would be hardly able to eat, counting the minutes. For the best part of a year it became my personal nightmare.

The objective, ostensibly, was to produce supposedly useful articles out of perspex (aka Plexiglas or polymerised methyl methacrylate). My first production was a key ring, a small rectangular piece of sickly pale green opaque perspex, smoothed at the corners, and with a hole drilled through towards one end. Considered retrospectively and in the most positive light, it was all rather Festival of Britain in appearance, and  the exercise was, as far as it went, a success. I would happily have made another key ring, several key rings, in fact, but the annoying thing about teachers is that they always want to go on to something else, don’t they, something cleverer and more ambitious. They’re never satisfied, are they. Old L was no exception.

So it was that for the rest of the year my sole output was a single ashtray, made from translucent orange perspex. Approximately three inches square it was made in two sections, a bottom part which was simply a square of plastic chamfered at the corners, and a top part. The top part was far more ingenious, more hi tech. It consisted primarily of a hole, with two shallow grooves (readily made with the convex backside of a file), on  opposite corners, upon which to place smouldering cigarettes, and again with rounded corners to match those of the base. This large central hole in the top part was made by initially scoring its circumference on the surface, I forget how, drilling a few holes at random and then joining them together with cuts from a fretsaw - so that a central jagged part fell out - and then filing the rough edges until a smooth circle was obtained.

I soon learned that the smell of perspex powder, especially when hot from the friction of a file, is not pleasant. I’m also sure I inhaled plenty of perspex dust in those gung-ho pre-Health and Safety days, and I’ve a strong suspicion that the long term consequences of such inhalation are unknown to medical science. Perhaps one day someone will cut me open, find me full of bright orange micro-pellets, and deem me to be a danger to marine ecology.

The crucially worrying thing was that the two sections of the ashtray had to be perfect before Old L would grant permission for them to be glued together with some special acrylic glue. The last stage before inspection was therefore a meticulous polishing, and since I was too afraid to seek permission I spent a lot of time polishing. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t go and see Old L because I should have passed that stage ages before; other boys were now making really clever things like tea trays. If anyone asked, and Old L fortunately didn’t, I was already on my second ashtray or maybe my third. If anyone wanted to know, I really liked ashtrays and had lots of relatives who were exceptionally heavy smokers.

I did entirely unnecessary polishing for most of an entire term, and never has time passed more slowly and more fearfully. The speed of time approached asymptotically to zero; at this rate, I could live for ever. It was interminable; if only I could have obtained some kind of zen enlightenment from this experience, but all I felt was fear and loathing, while I polished away with the liquid Brasso or the Dura-Glit pads. The latter came in yellow and blue tins and should have been pleasantly addictive, sniffable and hallucinogenic, but the circumstances denied such escape routes. Fear spreads to associated artefacts.  

Eventually I seized the moment – carpe diem as they say in Latin, which translates accurately into English as a crappy day to beat all crappy days – and glued the two halves together without seeking permission. I then hid the wretched thing and, somehow, life moved on.

At the end of term I took the ashtray home, for my father to use, since around that time he was smoking cigarettes in modest quantities. He was given the honour of inaugurating my masterpiece, and performed a convincing pretence of being duly thrilled and ecstatic at the opportunity. My mother also looked on with eager anticipation. What actually happened next, was, it has to be said, a bit of a surprise to us all. At the first hint of hot cigarette – at the sort of distance we would now associate with contactless transactions – a few fiery particles of ash fell onto the ashtray, causing local bubbling and melting of the perspex. Immediately, it was all too apparent what was going to happen should the ceremony proceed further - my year’s torment would mutate into a molten orange blob.

Luckily my father valued artistry over practicality, and longevity over spectacle. He sharply withdrew the smouldering ciggie. Having saved the day, or at least the ashtray, it seemed only right that the unusable item should be preserved – not as a reminder of the sadistic idiocy of Old L – but as a memorial to pointless suffering, and it was given a proud position on the window sill in our front room. For many years it existed quietly thus. You’ll be happy, I’m sure, to know that it has survived the intervening  six decades, and can finally enjoy its moment of glory. Here it is: