Death Valley is in Arizona and we had a one at school. Ours was simply a patch of grass between two pit heaps. All major disputes were settled there. If an argument started in the school yard the end result was usually a trip to Death Valley, along with hordes of us rag-arses following behind. Each contestant had their own contingent of fans screaming encouragement. It was a great occasion, (as long as one wasn’t involved), because a lot of pride was at stake. A good percentage of the fights consisted of two intense and worried-looking kids trying to kid on that they were cool. Before the fight started, they were reminded that there would be no kicking, no getting hold of each other, no biting and no weapons.
The ‘fight’ usually ended up with the two simply causing a draught, waving their arms about like they had seen Rocky Marciana do on British Pathe News. After a few, half-hearted smacks on gobs they would shake hands with relief. The next day they would tell their mates, something like, “Bloody good job ah never lost me heed....Ah would have killed him.”
The really serious fights were born out of sheer hatred and were very rare - two fit young men tearing into each other like vicious dogs.
Bullying is a mind-destroying disease. It saps the human condition. It takes away identities and can effect people the rest of their lives. It is always ready to raise its ugly head at work or play. Of all the human sins, I believe that, to pick on the weak or defenceless is beyond contempt, and worse when the bully takes a sadistic delight in doing it. I also learned that bullies are the ultimate cowards and the very fact that they are bullies betrays their weakness. So it was, and still is, the ultimate pleasure to witness a bully being brought to ground.
It started in the playground, in the dinner break. The bully had a small mouthpiece in the shape of a squeaky-voiced toe rag, who usually chose the bully’s victims. We tried to avoid them like mature boils.
The squeaky little mouthpiece, who sat on his master’s shoulder, gave him suggestions to who should be hurt every day. The trick was to get the little twat on his own and let him know that he didn’t have the monopoly on big-boned friends, but they still managed to find plenty of other kids whom they could practice there sadistic fantasies on.
The bully was about a funny as a hole in a lifeboat. The only buggers who laughed with him were those who kissed his arse; afraid of causing any form of displeasure. We kept out of his way. He would look at us, not quite knowing why we weren’t afraid, like the others. Puzzled why we seemed to be enjoying life, instead of trying to hound and destroy. Tomma and me had the same sense of madcap humour and would sail close to the wind.
The bully thought he could play football, simply because his arse lickers told him he could.
When playing football his favourite trick was to shoulder someone on the school wall. Many a shoulder was badly bruised and sometimes collar-bones were shattered. Football was a bit too energetic for Tomma and me so we contented ourselves with a gentle game of ‘Chucks.’
Ken, on the other end was of average height, thin, wiry, fast and strong with reserves of energy. He was one of the heroes of the school team. He had a dry sense of humour, which revealed his intelligence. He seemed to take everything in his stride. His ready smile made him popular among his classmates.
As we played chucks, we heard the thundering of boots clattering over the tarmac as they kicked an old leather ball up and down the yard. Then all of the sudden, the screaming and cursing stopped and a hush descended. Kids were making a circle. I stood to see what was going on. When I looked down at Tomma, I caught him trying to cheat. At Chucks! Ya daresn’t blink.
We joined the throng; straining to see what the bother was. In the middle of the crowd we saw that Ken was squaring up to the bully. Apparently Bully Boy tried to shoulder Ken on to the wall, but Ken, being fleet of foot wasn’t where he was supposed to be and Dickhead had joined the wall instead. I noticed that the bully’s lip was capable of holding a cup and saucer and his lug was bleeding. He lunged at Ken. Ken just sidestepped him. The bully lashed out. He was slower than air mail from Mars and just missed the teacher who had come to see what was going on.
“Whats the trouble,” he queried.
Tomma couldn’t resist, “The wall jumped out and hit him sir.”
“Shut up Danby....Well?”
“Hit the wall sir,” the bully sulked.
“Head all right, boy?”
“Yes sir.”
“Right then, it’s nearly time to go in, so break it up.”
Tomma nudged my ribs, “He might be able to do his two times table now.”
“Shurrup, he might hear ya,” I whispered.
They still eyed each other like two boxers.
“See ya after,” the bully snarled.
“Anytime ya like,” Ken snarled back.
The bully filled his lungs and blew himself up like a puffer fish. He stood over Ken, his red face only about half an inch off Ken’s,
“Down Death Valley....after school!”
We all sucked air. Death Valley!
I observed Ken’s features. There wasn’t a trace of emotion in his unflickering cold grey eyes. The bully, who had done well to string more than five words together, stormed off with his cronies trailing behind, muttering obscenities.
“Bloody great. We’ll gan doon and get a good place,” Tomma said.
Death Valley! I looked up at the sky. At least they would have canny weather. We all hoped that the teacher would not make them shake hands or owt because it would be great disappointment all round.
All the school was talking about the fight. To tell the truth we never gave Ken much of a chance. Even his show of bravado had astounded everybody.
Death Valley was created by two heaps moving towards each other as the waste stone was dumped there by the local colliery. There was a twenty yard circle of grass left. It was about two hundred yards from the school.
We clock-watched all afternoon. I secretly hoped that it wouldn’t end with both shaking hands and calling it off. I mean all that built-up and tension for nowt?
The bell went at last and we ran down to the heaps with the others. The two were already in the circle.
As soon as the bully reached Ken he started to point his finger at his chest. Whatever was said went unheard from the ridge. All of the sudden the bully snaked a right hand out at Ken, who ducked. In frustration, the bully tried to grab hold of Ken, but Ken wasn’t in the place where he was supposed to be. The bully became red-faced, camouflaging his acne. He was out of puff. Ken, on the other hand, walked round the bully with his bony fists in the boxer stance. The bully seemed to get a second wind and he lunged again. His eyes kept glancing up at his mates as he realised he was being humiliated. In a desperate effort he grabbed hold of Ken and threw him to the ground. We feared the worst till an unofficial referee shouted,
“Ow lad: No fuck’n wrestl’n.”
After a brief struggle, Ken broke free and smacked the bully in the gob, shuffling his dominoes. The bully was gasping for breath. After wafting air about he stopped and croaked, “Ah’ll fuck’n kill ya!”
Ken jawed him at will. The big target in front of him was unmissable. The bully’s face started to resemble Van Gogh’s pallet in his, ‘off his bogey’ period. After doing such a rotten job at ‘killing’ our Ken, the bully broke off. He scrambled back up the pit heap leaving our hero staring after him in disbelief
On reaching the top the bully forced his way through the crowd, not even bothering to sign autographs. He stormed off home, never to bully again, and the little buggers who were his friends, deserted him on realising that he would not be able to protect them any more. Ken is still daft and witty. Still has the same smile on his face, still hiding a heart as big as a lion.
Long, boring winter nights sent us to the local picture house where we would watch the most awful bloody movies. As a diversion we would crawl under the seats in the dark. I can remember seeing the chewing gum stuck to the undersides of the seats. Some bits had been there that long they were nearly fossilized.
We use to howl at the cheaply made ‘B’ pictures. They must have cost about ten bob to make because they were so bad. Cowboy films were fed to us regularly and we became so used to seeing the same ones that we began to pinpoint all the mistakes; like the times when cowboys would ride as if their horse’s arse was on fire, pursued by the sheriff, who doubled as the barman and the blacksmith. One scene would show the baddie with a checked shirt on. He would gallop behind a rock then, when a different camera angle was used, would be seen wearing a plain shirt; no doubt shaved and his ‘tache trimmed.
(So much for continuity).
Once, when watching an old black and white serial of Superman, we noticed that when he changed into his outfit and dived out of the window he would change into a cartoon form then fly over the skyscrapers. Young as we were, we used to laugh at their crude efforts at special effects.
We nearly went into a kink one night when he did another ‘swallow dive’ out of the window from the fourth floor after saying, “Don’t worry Lois, I’ll be OK.”
A wag out of the audience shouted, “He’ll not be if some bugger’s move the mattress.”
Back in the colliery rows there was only the radio, which sat on the small table in the corner of the kitchen. I can still see mam sitting in her pinny and headscarf, giggling quietly at ITMA. Tommy Handley was way beyond his time and I often wonder how he had managed to pursued the stuffy BBC to air his excellent comedy. The light music and the voices with plummy tones were alien to us in the rows. Those people might as well have come from Pluto.
Dad weighed them up one night when one said, over the airwaves, “Oh look Roddy, I’ve broken my nail! Be a darling Clarissa and lend me your nailfile.”
I can see Dad now, looking over the top of his glasses and saying with a sneer, “It’s work them buggers want.”
Who made those bloody daft films, where penguins would strut across the screen with monocles, spats, pinstriped suits and glasses of brandy in their work-shy fingers? It was like watching something from another world. Strange-talking beings who lived in a house you could swop Brandon for. Beings who were always dressed in their Sunday best, the women in long flowing dresses and the ‘men’ in their coat and tails, complete with threepenny bits between the cheeks of their arses.
At the time those ‘movies’ were being made, people, not far from the studios, were in a state of near starvation and lived in shanty towns around the capital, London.
The American film producers at least tried to portray the working man. On the other hand our public school wankers continued to turn out ‘jolly old hockey stick’ moronic drivel. It must have given Gracie Fields and George Formby the ultimate satisfaction to be able to penetrate the bejewelled upper crust. They crashed through that barrier because of their awesome talent; even then they had to be cast with shrilly little schoolgirls and pompous idiots. For all their inherited wealth and the rich mans bookie, The Stock Exchange, the upper crust could never produce from their ranks two Divas like our Gracie and George.
It really makes my hair stand on end when I see miners’ sons and daughters trying to emulate the middle class. Like God says, (Dennis Skinner): “Always remember where yer came from and stick to your own class.”
Mam came in with a mouthful of clothes pegs, “Get my purse and yer can go to the Co-op for me.”
Dad stood to his full five feet seven, “Aye, and after that tho can gan to the pit instead of me.”
Mam pushed me towards Dad, “Go on, give yer Dad a kiss.”
He bent. I kissed him on a stubbled jaw that hadn’t seen a razor for at least three days. As I walked up the street, he walked down to the railway line to catch the ‘tankie.’ He gave me a final wave as he climbed aboard, on what looked like cattle trucks. The tankie huffed and hissed, the wheels spinning before getting a grip on the polished lines.
In my child’s mind I thought that it must have been easy to work at the pit, because dad never seemed to be tired. I was too young to realise that he had been conditioned over forty odd years in the pits to work like a dog in workings that would make ordinary men wince. Although dad was around fifty, he had the body a young man of today would be proud of. Ten and a half stone with his light frame covered with solid muscle. No excess fat, with a stomach rippled and taut. His arms looked too long compared to his body, and his fingers were bent with holding a shovel for all those years. The blue scars on his back reminded him about the many scrapes he had with the black stuff. He would tell us that if you injured yourself on the coal face it wouldn’t turn sceptic, as it was virgin, not yet contaminated and if it did turn sceptic, the best dressing was a chew of tobacco.
The last week of the holidays flew over. None of us were mad-keen to return to our teachers and Mr Cane. As we trooped reluctantly into class we were closely observed by our teacher, Cuddy Mawson, through the top half of his bifocals.
It was our last year at school and we knew that Cuddy was sick and tired of trying to educate us. In his welcome back speech he seemed a little dejected, not the usual father figure we were used to. Although he used corporal punishment like the others we respected him. I think he realised that he was teaching miners’ sons and daughters who would no doubt get employment and only concentrated on teaching us the basics.
He knew I liked reading and would suggest I read the classics. When he read to us, he could make the text come to life. We would be on the Hispaniola or fighting the Normans alongside Ivanhoe.
As Cuddy addressed us I noticed Eddie, who was sitting in front of me, picking his nose, drawing out the contents with his fingernail and studying them like a curious mongrel; head on one side, with a quizzical stare. Mickey, who sat beside him, chased the nit his mother had missed the night before. It ran before his probing fingers, through the dark hairy undergrowth but the little parasite hid under a scab which had formed after Mick got in the way of a clemmy a week before. To the left and down I saw that Tom’s stockings were 70% darn and 30% original stocking. His pullover, which was shared with his other three brothers, was just about hanging on his back and looked like chain mail.
“Gray!”
I nearly leapt out of my snake belt, “Yes sir!”
“Are you still with us, Gray?”
“Yes sir”
“What was I talking about then?”
I knew it was maths day so I guessed, “The table’s sir.”
“What tables? Coffee tables? Kitchen tables? Dining room tables?”
I glanced around, looking for any sort of help. All I saw was smirking faces, waiting for me to put my newly-studded boot into my gob again.
Cuddy put me out of my misery, “Try and keep up with the game Gray...Right, now, just imagine that you could actually do improper fractions. Apart from being the greatest miracle since the discovery the Oxo cube and sliced bread or even the parting of the Red Sea, it would really make me very happy indeed. Nay, ecstatic! Spell ecstatic Richardson.”
“Er....E....E....E.”
“What you are trying to say Richardson is, ‘Eeeeh, I can’t spell it sir.’....Am I correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“Now, about these improper fractions.....”
I sat at the back with my mate Tomma, (well-thought out tactical positions) and listened to him waffle on, over and over again on how to master the simple improper fraction.
Using his half a billiard cue as a baton (it used to double up as a cane) he pointed at the blackboard in slow motion, every now and then asking if we had understood so far. We all tried to look as serious as possible as we stared at the chalk marks and nod our heads; although not too vigorously because Cuddy might have thought that we actually knew what he was talking about.
At last with both hands grasping the cue behind his back, in the no-threat position, and with eyebrows nearly touching his forelock he said the dreaded words,
“Right now, anyone like to have a go?”
At that moment a pack of dogs could have come in and urinated on our legs. We were so still that we must have looked like photograph. We knew that any slight twitch from any one of us would have given him the sign that he or she was volunteering.
His magnified eyes scanned us through the top half of his bifocals. He still held the cue behind his back. He leaned forward, smiling, with tobacco-stained dentures,
“Anybody?”
Compared to us, the stones at Stonehenge were doing the Polly Glide. Cuddy held his stance like a statue,
“Well? Anybody?”
The cue appeared. This was it. We knew he was about to choose and he did so by waving the cue back and forth over the heads of his captive flock. There was no escape. We tried to make ourselves as small as possible. None of us was breathing. (Please not me. Please not me.)
The cue stopped. We craned our necks to see who the chosen one was.
“Right Mr Brown, will you show us how to do it?”
Billy’s chair juddered backwards as he stood, “Me sir?”
Cuddy nodded, “You sir!”
Cuddy’s smile widened. This term was going to be a milestone in his career. He would show them buggers in the staff room. He could hear them, ‘Four C doing improper fractions?’ then confidently hearing himself answer, ‘No bother!’
“This way, boy. Brand new stick of chalk. Take your time.”
Billy reached the blackboard and picked up the chalk as if it was a poisonous snake. He looked up at Cuddy, wishing that a big hole would open up and swallow him. Cuddy looked down and hoped that Billy wasn’t wishing that a big hole would open up and swallow him.
Cuddy pointed to the blackboard, “Carry on lad.”
Billy’s brow resembled a neatly ploughed field. The chalk hovered over the sum like a hesitant falcon.
Cuddy goaded him on, “Go on lad, I know you can do it.”
At last, the chalk made contact with the blackboard. We leaned forward and stopped breathing. You could have heard an earwig walk across blotting paper.
We all stared at the strange symbol.
The cloud of doubt passed over Cuddy’s face when he found that Billy had only succeeded in drawing an impression of an unravelled ball of wool. He rested the tip of the chalk on his bottom lip. A dark shadow enveloped Billy. It was Cuddy.
“Let’s see what we’ve done, shall we?...Now, what’s this?”
He studied the meaningless abstract for a moment.
“It means absolutely nothing....Does it Brown?”
Billy hardly dare shake his head.
“Do you know why I bothered to turn up today boy? Why didn’t I just feign illness like you lot do and go and have a game of billiards instead, or go and place my head on the railway line. I might have caught the 9.15 from Durham.”
Cuddy groaned a long drawn-out sigh. His shoulders sagged. He shut his eyes for a good minute, his eyelids flickering in sheer frustration. When he opened them he found himself staring at our pieces of chewing gum stuck to the ceiling. When he looked down at Billy he found him tenderly replacing the chalk in the groove at the bottom of the blackboard. He sprayed Billy with spittle from about two inches away from his face when he loudly whispered,
“Get back to your seat, immediately, boy.”
Billy’s arse touched down at....iately.
We sat in silence as Cuddy placed his hands on the wall atlas for support. With one hand on the west coast of the USA and the other covering Japan, he seemed to be mumbling some kind of prayer.
After a while he picked up his cue and hopefully asked, “Can anyone do this simple sum?”
Our blank faces gave him the answer. He might as well have waited for a roomful of monkeys to write: War and Peace.
Cuddy’s body stiffened then galvanized into action. He stormed to the book cupboard and nearly wrenched the door off its hinges. He realised that his little band of head scratchers wouldn’t be splitting the atom that day.
He decided to read to us instead, and soon we were back in Sherwood Forest where the sun always shone and the only thing improper was ... Robin Hood’s cod piece.
© Ron Gray, 2008
