School in the swinging sixties
If you are over forty-five you might remember this. It probably was not much different in the psychedelic seventies. If you are younger, then all I can say is that your childhood was insipid, bland and plain wishy-washy - you lucky swines. Oldfilibuster remembers the dark days of the "nasher basher" and believes that today's kids wouldn't hack it.
Take a sample cross-section of primary school kids from Dublin and put them in a time machine with the dial set to – let’s say 1968 – they would more than likely crash land back to 2016 reeling like H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller and displaying the severest symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Indeed, if Matthew Arnold had travelled forward one-hundred-and-twenty-five years he would have rightly wondered why the Enlightenment had not yet reached the Irish classroom of 1968.
So, I suggest you observe the little tykes in a South Dublin suburb near you – their skinny, tanned legs clambouring into or climbing out of four-wheel drives; wearing precision tailored uniforms that would pass muster with both a five star general and the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. They make even the most gormless kid look smart. Back in 1968 we wore our ‘coloured clothes’ to the ‘nasher basher.’ Your sense of self-esteem depended solely on the fashion sense of your mammy and any aul ones who wielded a comb and scissors in the local hairdressers.
In 1968 every day was a depraved hair day. The solution was the same for everyone – the hair band – shove it out of the way and stay in denial. It did show off your terrified little face though – just look at the stock 1960’s ‘nasher basher’ photos - your arms folded across the wooden desk and a frenzied smile on your little, chubby cheeks, strangely out of sync though with your petrified, staring eyes – certainly nothing akin to the look of confident sophistication in school photos today, where all the kids look like they are on a fashion shoot for Runway magazine.
If you showed 1968 kids a modern lunchbox they would not have recognised the contents. They would have stared wide-eyed at hummus and carrot sticks, bruschetta and olives. Where, they would wonder, is the banana sandwich in the Johnson Mooney and O’Brien wrapper? Spongy apples and the odd Club Milk or packet of Tayto have long since been replaced with mango slices, blueberries and rice cakes – brain food, apparently. The culinary landscape has shifted radically since the 1960’s. It has transpired that the drink of choice for 1968 kids – red lemonade – was found to contain a few too many of the wrong type of chemicals. And how would you explain bottled water to the 1968 kid? Especially if it did not contain an equal measure of psychedelic orange squash – now that was the stuff to give your teeth their marching orders. Sure what with those steak and kidney pies in the tin, instant mashed potatoes and reconstituted curries, it’s a wonder anyone over the age of forty-five is remotely healthy or intelligent. It explains a lot about the baby boomers in Dail Eireann.
Anyway, I digress – back to school we go. The contents of a 2016 multi-coloured backpack would have served an entire school in 1968. I find myself lingering far too long in school supply stores salivating over the displays and retrospectively desiring ownership of sparkly gel pens, highlighters and multi-coloured academic ‘organisers’. This is why their bags are so heavy today and why ours were so light back then. But which is worse? The guilt of owning too much stationary or the psychological burden of ever-present fear – and that brings me nicely to the ‘evil one.’
Frumpy apparel and nondescript hair melt into insignificance when we remember what was waiting for us at the school gate. Don’t be fooled by the smile on her face. That was whipped out for the parents, the school inspector and the parish priest. The ‘evil one’ never ran out of valid reasons for biffing you with her stout cane.
The other teachers were only a half-step further up the pedagogical and sensitivity ladder than the ‘evil one’. They were living templates of Macbeth’s witch friends – more hags on a blasted heath than that lovely teacher in Little House on the Prairie. Unlike Miss Jean Brodie, they well past their prime. They biffed us with rulers if we couldn’t do mental arithmetic like automatons. They frothed at the mouth before biffing us with rulers if we couldn’t recite the Our Father in Irish. If you didn’t have a photographic memory, you were consigned to the dunces’ row. Creativity or imagination did not rank on the desirable list of skills. No, you would only survive relatively unscathed if you were adept at regurgitating arbitrary lists of ‘stuff’ like the whereabouts of sugar factories, rivers and mountains in Ireland. If you stood out in the wrong way you were ‘in for it’. Think Mr. M'Choakumchild rather than Mr. Chips. If you stood out in the right way you were paraded as a paradigm of perfection that every other unworthy snot-nose had to aspire to. This object was also known as the teacher’s pet, and one was kept in every classroom.
Ah but sure listen wasn’t it grand really? Just like the inmates of Colditz, we had our little survival techniques. There was never any shortage of willing volunteers to ‘flush the toilets’, pick up the litter in the school yard, or ‘mind the babies’. Anything was preferable to being in a room with Miss Trunchbull’s crueller sister.
©Copyright Berni Dwan 2014, 2015, 2016
Read a more poetic school experience on: http://www.oldfilibuster.com/memories-jolted-in-an-empty-doctorrsquos-waiting-room.html
If you are over forty-five you might remember this. It probably was not much different in the psychedelic seventies. If you are younger, then all I can say is that your childhood was insipid, bland and plain wishy-washy - you lucky swines. Oldfilibuster remembers the dark days of the "nasher basher" and believes that today's kids wouldn't hack it.
Take a sample cross-section of primary school kids from Dublin and put them in a time machine with the dial set to – let’s say 1968 – they would more than likely crash land back to 2016 reeling like H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller and displaying the severest symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Indeed, if Matthew Arnold had travelled forward one-hundred-and-twenty-five years he would have rightly wondered why the Enlightenment had not yet reached the Irish classroom of 1968.
So, I suggest you observe the little tykes in a South Dublin suburb near you – their skinny, tanned legs clambouring into or climbing out of four-wheel drives; wearing precision tailored uniforms that would pass muster with both a five star general and the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. They make even the most gormless kid look smart. Back in 1968 we wore our ‘coloured clothes’ to the ‘nasher basher.’ Your sense of self-esteem depended solely on the fashion sense of your mammy and any aul ones who wielded a comb and scissors in the local hairdressers.
In 1968 every day was a depraved hair day. The solution was the same for everyone – the hair band – shove it out of the way and stay in denial. It did show off your terrified little face though – just look at the stock 1960’s ‘nasher basher’ photos - your arms folded across the wooden desk and a frenzied smile on your little, chubby cheeks, strangely out of sync though with your petrified, staring eyes – certainly nothing akin to the look of confident sophistication in school photos today, where all the kids look like they are on a fashion shoot for Runway magazine.
If you showed 1968 kids a modern lunchbox they would not have recognised the contents. They would have stared wide-eyed at hummus and carrot sticks, bruschetta and olives. Where, they would wonder, is the banana sandwich in the Johnson Mooney and O’Brien wrapper? Spongy apples and the odd Club Milk or packet of Tayto have long since been replaced with mango slices, blueberries and rice cakes – brain food, apparently. The culinary landscape has shifted radically since the 1960’s. It has transpired that the drink of choice for 1968 kids – red lemonade – was found to contain a few too many of the wrong type of chemicals. And how would you explain bottled water to the 1968 kid? Especially if it did not contain an equal measure of psychedelic orange squash – now that was the stuff to give your teeth their marching orders. Sure what with those steak and kidney pies in the tin, instant mashed potatoes and reconstituted curries, it’s a wonder anyone over the age of forty-five is remotely healthy or intelligent. It explains a lot about the baby boomers in Dail Eireann.
Anyway, I digress – back to school we go. The contents of a 2016 multi-coloured backpack would have served an entire school in 1968. I find myself lingering far too long in school supply stores salivating over the displays and retrospectively desiring ownership of sparkly gel pens, highlighters and multi-coloured academic ‘organisers’. This is why their bags are so heavy today and why ours were so light back then. But which is worse? The guilt of owning too much stationary or the psychological burden of ever-present fear – and that brings me nicely to the ‘evil one.’
Frumpy apparel and nondescript hair melt into insignificance when we remember what was waiting for us at the school gate. Don’t be fooled by the smile on her face. That was whipped out for the parents, the school inspector and the parish priest. The ‘evil one’ never ran out of valid reasons for biffing you with her stout cane.
- Your dress was too short, or horror of horrors, sleeveless!
- You looked at her ‘in a funny way’
- You couldn’t remember your catechism
- Your little, shaking hand blotted your headline copybook
- You just happened to be near her when she was angry
The other teachers were only a half-step further up the pedagogical and sensitivity ladder than the ‘evil one’. They were living templates of Macbeth’s witch friends – more hags on a blasted heath than that lovely teacher in Little House on the Prairie. Unlike Miss Jean Brodie, they well past their prime. They biffed us with rulers if we couldn’t do mental arithmetic like automatons. They frothed at the mouth before biffing us with rulers if we couldn’t recite the Our Father in Irish. If you didn’t have a photographic memory, you were consigned to the dunces’ row. Creativity or imagination did not rank on the desirable list of skills. No, you would only survive relatively unscathed if you were adept at regurgitating arbitrary lists of ‘stuff’ like the whereabouts of sugar factories, rivers and mountains in Ireland. If you stood out in the wrong way you were ‘in for it’. Think Mr. M'Choakumchild rather than Mr. Chips. If you stood out in the right way you were paraded as a paradigm of perfection that every other unworthy snot-nose had to aspire to. This object was also known as the teacher’s pet, and one was kept in every classroom.
Ah but sure listen wasn’t it grand really? Just like the inmates of Colditz, we had our little survival techniques. There was never any shortage of willing volunteers to ‘flush the toilets’, pick up the litter in the school yard, or ‘mind the babies’. Anything was preferable to being in a room with Miss Trunchbull’s crueller sister.
©Copyright Berni Dwan 2014, 2015, 2016
Read a more poetic school experience on: http://www.oldfilibuster.com/memories-jolted-in-an-empty-doctorrsquos-waiting-room.html
