Chapter 5: Year 11 Begins

The start of my Form V year (Year 11) shouldn’t have involved any shocks, but it did. On our first morning back at school, we were directed back to Room 11, our old Homeroom, to find that it was still our homeroom, and that Mr Smythe was still our homeroom teacher and still had us for English. He didn’t beat about the bush.

“Good morning gentlemen! If you look around you will see that there are no new faces. You lot are the survivors! Congratulations! Your elders and betters” – He grinned sardonically – “have determined that all of you are the crem della crem intellectually, so no matter how miserably you perform in other areas of your lives, you all have the potential to go far academically. All of you have the intellectual capacity to get National Scholarships. Most of you won’t!” He paused. “This year is a winnowing process. It will determine who has the grit, the concentration, the focus, and the ability to handle pressure to survive the demands, and who hasn’t.”

Duncan Hamilton was top in pretty much everything, and risked a question. “What happens to the survivors and to the others sir?”

Mr Smythe laughed. “The survivors go into the Scholarship Sixth, most get National Scholarships, and go on to have academic or diplomatic careers, the rest go into the non scholarship swamp, go on to university, get degrees, and enter the professions.”

Hamilton pushed his luck. “What happened to you sir?”

There was a collective intake of breath, and the room got very tense for a few seconds, but Mr Smythe laughed again. “Shershay la fum.” He looked round the room. “Booze, parties, chasing girls. I chased one until she caught me, and we went overseas together.”

For a second or two, he looked quite sad, before collecting himself and giving us the bad news. “You can expect homework in all your six core subjects every week night, and the odd extra assignment. That’s around twenty hours a week. You will be tested in most subjects once a week. You will sit School Certificate in all six subjects next November, and about fifteen of you will be selected for the Scholarship Sixth on the basis of your results. We will rank you on the basis of your top four. Most years, the cutoff is between three fifteen and three twenty total marks for four subjects.

Hamilton pushed it further. “So there’s an incentive to concentrate on our best four and let the other two slide. What happens then sir?”

Mr Smythe laughed again. “You’re right. It’s what’s called a ‘perverse incentive’. But we provide a counter incentive. If you slack off, the weekly tests will show that, and we will either beat you half to death, or worse! We might even banish you to the non scholarship swamp, where your life course will be set towards academic mediocrity, and in the very worst case you might even be reduced to teaching in a secondary school.”

He got his laugh, and sent us off to Chemistry.

Aapi and I talked at lunchtime. Pauline had told him about our interaction over spermicide and his sperm. He wasn’t too delighted about me tasting his spunk, but brightened when I reminded him that any time either of us were going to put semen inside her it would be mixed with Gynomin and neither of us were going to lick her under those circumstances.

“Nothing personal, but there’s no way I want to taste your spunk!” His body tensed and he shuddered slightly, and I made a mental note that there might well be more to this story, but this was neither the time nor place to enquire, and we trotted off to maths.

Our maths teacher this year was Mr Nicholls. Large, loud, and with a five o’clock shadow from ten in the morning. He was a formidable presence even without the metre rule he always carried in the classroom and when walking round the school. About the only time he appeared without it was during Assembly and when he was coaching the First XV. We got straight into some Trig. I hoped Robyn knew at least something about cyclic quadrilaterals.

She did, and by the end of the Monday study group, so did Aapi and I. Aapi had had a ‘rest’ with Alison. Their relationship had developed, and Alison mentioned shyly that she was nearly ready to ‘do it’ with him. They made no announcement when they emerged from my room, but I didn’t care. I could be with Pauline after study group without any concern for ‘sloppy seconds’ and we could lick and suck to our hearts content before inserting Gynomin for a vigorous game of hide the sausage. We did, and completely lost track of time, emerging happily to find that Frank had got tired of waiting for me to cook dinner, and had started prepping the meal. Pauline was going to be late home for her own tea. Frank gave me the option of taking over our meal, or taking Pauline home in his van. Difficult choice!

‘Within the week’ (as Frank Zappa was to say ten years later), Frank and Emma had employed a manager for Mary’s World, and had cut a deal to supervise, staff and run the establishment on Friday nights with members of the study group. Beth, the new manager, was to deal with all the administration and ordering, and was responsible for staffing and operations on all the other nights. She was a ‘friend of a friend’ of Emma’s, and although we didn’t have a lot to do with her, she seemed nice. It didn’t take too long for the new regime to bed in, and for work at Mary’s World every Friday night after study group to become part of our routine.

Everyone came straight from school, studied for a couple of hours, and then got changed and went straight to the coffee bar to start prep for the evening. I wound up with everyone’s clothes stored in my room. Girls sure seem to need lot of clothes, and my room was pretty small, so a couple of weeks into the new term, Emma presented us with a hanging rack on castors and Aapi and I constructed some shelving for stuff that could be folded. All good.

A few weeks into the term, Cricket started again, and I was hoping to be promoted to the First Cricket XI, but wasn’t.

The coach of the ‘firsts’ was ‘Inky’ Clayton, a crusty old bastard who was close to ten years past the official age of retirement, but who had become something of a fixture on the school staff. He had been coach of the First Cricket XI since the 1940s, and even though it was widely recognised that his ideas and methods were somewhat old fashioned, the school valued tradition very highly, and he ‘owned’ the position.

He also took us for History, and I suspected (and still suspect, more than fifty years later), that he disliked or disapproved of me. At the time, I had no idea why, but I now think he intuited my distaste for all things macho and military, based on my experience of how badly the war had clearly damaged my father.

‘Inky’ Clayton was still a military man, although he was no longer inky. Major J.L. Clayton, DSO MC DCM MA(Hons) still had a full head of hair, but it was now snow white. He had volunteered as a private at the start of WWI, been decorated for bravery and risen through the ranks, collecting further ‘gongs’ and a pronounced limp for various feats of valour, and finished the war as a Major. He was strong on the ‘military virtues’, and now, as an old man, he was easily distracted during class. An apparently innocent question would sometimes set him off on a fifteen minute rave on the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, the fall of the Roman Empire, the immorality of the Tudor Courts, or whatever else was on his mind at the time. In those days New Zealand history wasn’t considered particularly important.

I didn’t care much about any of those topics. I was much more interested in why he didn’t want a left arm spinner who could also bat, but I never plucked up the courage to ask him. About half way through the first term, that question became moot. ‘Inky’ collapsed during a staff meeting and was taken to hospital, where he died the next day. The Turks and later the Germans had failed to kill him, but a heart attack got him in the end. There was a special assembly with a funeral service, we got a new History teacher, and Mr Smythe was promoted to coach the First XI. He did want a left arm spinner who could also bat.

I went up to the ‘firsts’ with him. That led (indirectly), to what Frank called my first ‘extramarital adventure’. Extramarital was of course a misnomer. Even though Pauline and I usually spent Friday nights together after our shift at Mary’s World, and even though we would often get together at other times, we were officially ‘friends who fuck’ rather than boyfriend/girlfriend, and we were a very long way from any formal arrangement. We didn’t even have any agreement to tell each other if we went with someone else. Someone else turned out to be Maureen Farrell.

Chick Farrell had preceded me to the ‘firsts’, opening the batting for the team from the start of the year. He was in the ‘C’ stream academically, and we had no classes together, so although we greeted each other when we passed in moving around the school, we had very little contact. There was no reason for me to know he had a younger sister, at least until Grandad dropped me off at St Thomas’ in the rarefied atmosphere of my first First XI game. She had come to watch.

I didn’t notice her at first. We won the toss and elected to bat, and even though I was batting well down the order, I was concentrating on the game. My head was very full of observations of the way the ball was moving in the air and off the pitch, and making mental notes of the capabilities of the bowlers and fielders. I was very keen to justify the confidence that Mr Smythe had placed in me.

Our openers were untroubled by St Thomas’ quick bowlers. The pitch was hard, with a dependable even bounce, and Chick and our other opener put on forty odd before the first bowlers tired and were relieved. One of their replacements proved a lot more demanding. He bowled significantly slower, but was able to use the seam of the ball to make it swing sideways through the air, and sometimes to move sideways off the pitch as well.

Initially, his control was crap, and Chick dispatched his first three balls to the boundary, bringing up our fifty in the process. The fourth ball of the over was a beauty. It was pitched on exactly the right length – too far up to play back to, and not far enough up to drive, so however it moved, Chick was going to play it from the crease. It swung in towards his legs, and he followed its line, but it seamed away when it pitched so he played inside it, and it took the top of his off stump. Bowled for thirty seven! One down for fifty four!