An education

As I promised - or threatened - in my previous blog, not having much in the way of new material, I’m forced back upon personal recollection for subject matter. And so it is today, a few days after my birthday. I’ve been looking through some old photographs, and came across one of the statue of Sir John Betjeman. Here it is, the poet laureate who saved St Pancras from the vandals, commemorated in situ, very rightly so, beneath the vast arched roof, although looking uncannily like a little lost bear who survived the journey from darkest Peru - only to be discovered in the wrong railway station. 

 “I wonder if the Browns have been able to find any marmalade anywhere”

Hilariously, very late in life, interviewed somewhere in Cornwall, the good Sir John was asked if he had any regrets. He replied that he hadn’t had enough sex. Somehow one felt that wasn’t the expected answer, splendid though it was. Enough sex? He should have been so lucky, going to Marlborough College and all that; he should have tried going to my school. But perhaps he was thinking about his life in general, rather than early concerns of a curricular nature.

Anyway, it got me reminiscing about one particular afternoon that I may have (only) slightly misremembered. One of the dubious benefits of attending a boys-only school was an adolescence spared the unpleasantries associated with the slightest awareness of the opposite, er, you know, er, the opposite. Until, that is, one dark afternoon in the depths of the Swinging Sixties, one dark enough to hide most of the embarrassment for all concerned, when the powers that be decreed we should be shown a couple of films of an, er, educational nature. In a very dark room. 

As I say, maybe there are some errors in my memory, but what I recall is as follows. The first film was American (so it was really a movie, wow, with the potential for moving parts), and concerned an American teenage boy. At the risk of cheap accusations of rhyming slang we’ll call him Hank, a young lad who had a major problem concerning, well, you know.  His girl friend, called Cindy Lou, shall we say, lived on the next block. As far as we could tell the two of them had never actually met, but that’s obviously not the point, is it. First thing in the morning Hank would phone Cindy Lou and say “Hi honey, my acne is no better”, and she would reply “oh you poor honey, you really must take more showers”. He would then do so, and around midday he would call Cindy Lou again to report that his facial blemishes still showed no sign of improvement. “Oh you poor honey” she would purr, while her mother hovered in the background,  all gingham, cupcakes and ‘I Love Lucy’. In the evening, following several more showers, the cutaneous manifestations of teenage hormone storm would be worse than ever. “You must take another shower, honey”. 

As the narrator implied, growing up and facing problems of, er, you know, can be, as it were, you know, hard. There’s nothing worse than acne – except perhaps being called Hank and living in Zanesville, Ohio.

Luckily, my friends and I all lived in sensible places, and none of us had names like Hank, or girl friends, or acne, or showers, or phones.  Phones? You must be joking. Next to the local shops there was the phone, a disgusting red kiosk housing a contraption into which one could insert pennies when instructed to “press button B”. However, such facilities were only to be used for reporting the deaths of close relatives and were certainly not intended for frivolous purposes like giving status reports on facial dermatitis. And they could only be used if one was wearing a tie and standing up straight. We were, after all, British. Nobody had showers. We had a bath once a week - assuming we’d remembered to buy some paraffin, Esso Blue or Aladdin Pink, naturally - to help unfreeze the bathroom. Thus we were spared one of the major problems of, er, you know, although we did start to form an unhappy idea of what it must be like to be American, an idea that, in retrospect, was perhaps not entirely accurate. Mind you, look at the mess they’re in now. What a shower.

Be that as it may, the second film was British, had been produced by James Watt, directed by Joseph Bazalgette, and sponsored by I. K. Brunel to the considerable tune of thirteen shillings and sixpence.  Its title was “A Reliable Guide for the Growing Boy”, and it presented the anatomy and physiology of the male urogenital system as an elaborate construction of tubes, pumps, conveyor belts, condensers, trunnions, valves, boilers, the roof of the aforementioned poet-containing St Pancras Station, cantilevers, Archimedes screws (does he?  what does that mean?), pistons, pulleys, and locomotive turntables. Everything highly efficient, obeying the laws of conservation of matter and of energy, Boyle’s Law too, nothing wasted, not one drop, and all Made in England and very clean. No bad language or unnecessary filth.

At the end of the film the master in charge vanished through a hole in the floor and the lights came on.

Phew, that was a relief, we blinked. So now we knew. More than a relief, it was an education.