Chris Evans - It’s Not What You Think

1 My packed lunch

School is in many ways the beginningof those shark-infested waters we call real life—when people, young innocent children in this instance, are hauled out of the utopia that is the family unit, hopefully full of love and warmth and protection, to be thrust instead into a whole other world where they are instantly told what they are and are not good at, who’s better than them and why they need to change immediately.

What a particularly stupid idea. Within days, the humiliation begins. There are sports team selections that you do or don’t make, the latter always being the case where I was concerned. Immediately you’re made to

feel like a loser and maybe, like me, then start to consider the rounders team as an option as long as it means you might get picked.

Then there’s the endless giving out of gold and silver stars and house points and merits and the ticks and the crosses and all manner of other things that start suddenly coming at you. All designed to let you know whether you are currently a chump or a champ—so many things that can cause a kid to become paralysed as the first pangs of the fear of failure begin to set in. How many self-help books have been written on the selfsame subject? Yet it’s something that’s bred into us almost from the word go. And how about the poor kids who never get a mention?

How often do we hear of a professional sportsman who suffers career-threatening dips in confidence because of a run of poor results? Think about the poor little kiddies peeing their pants waiting for the humiliation of another set of spelling test results.

Then there’s the social aspect of the pecking order, evident nowhere more than at lunchtime.

There’s the kids that go home for lunch—does this mean their parents love them more than yours love you?

The kids that bring packed lunches—does this mean their folks can’t afford school dinners?

The kids who receive free school dinners—surely this should be kept a secret?!

The kids who go back for seconds—is this the only meal of the day they’re getting?

The kids whose mum is a dinner lady and get extra chips as a result. (Not that we ever had chips at our school, not once—we had scooped mash that tasted strange, nothing resembling any other mash I’ve tasted before or since!)

For the record I was a packed-lunch child, not for any other reason than that I didn’t like school dinners. My packed lunch was without doubt the pinnacle of my school day, it truly was manna from heaven and the thought of it was one of the few things that kept me going through the interminable hours that made up my morning lessons. Cold toast was included for break, an item of fruit, a choccie bar, usually a Breakaway but sometimes a Kit-Kat, a Blue Riband or a Penguin, a flask of soup *and the unquestionable stars of the show: two pasties for lunch that Mum had cooked from frozen in the morning and then opened up so she could fill them with ketchup before resealing them again. Absolutely mouthwatering.

*My flask was always under great threat as we used our bags for goalposts when playing footy at break or lunchtime—during which, if the ball happened to hit the post (i.e. pile of bags) hard enough, this would be heralded with the sound of several flasks simultaneously smashing from within. The only thing left to do with a flask after such a catastrophe was use it as a maraca for the rest of the day before getting shouted at when you arrived home.

10 Chips and Tyne-brand tinned stewed steak with heaps of mint sauce and tinned peas

9 Bovril crisps dipped in tea or tomato soup

8 Ham on over-buttered floured baps from Greggs the bakers

7 Tinned toms and bacon with as many rounds of white bread and butter as it will stretch to—minimum five

6 Soggy tinned salmon sandwiches on white bread with white pepper and too much vinegar, hence the ‘soggy’

5 Meat and potato pie sandwiches with ketchup—making my mouth water now as I think about them

4 Beans on toast, plain and simple, no poncey Worcestershire sauce or anything lke that

3 Fish, chips and gravy—gravy on chips (it’s a Northern thing)

2 Dad’s gravy dip chip butties—sublime

1 Mum’s hotpot from the war, again, with added miracle margarine pastry*—there is no better thing to put in your mouth on planet Earth

When you’re a kid, there are hierarchies and lowerarchies(a word that doesn’t exist but common sense says it should) springing up everywhere you look. Who’s hanging out with whom in the sandpit? Who’s always at the top of the climbing frame? Who’s on their own in the corner of the playground?

The argument that all this is a good idea, I suppose, is that these are the situations that will help prepare children for similar environments they may encounter when they are re-released into the free world. Well, how about the fact that the future adult environments may only exist because of the creation of former childhood ones? Sure, it may have always been thus in the past, in caveman times, but shouldn’t we be doing something to change that now instead of perpetuating them—at least honour the worst kids with something if only to stop the tears. Awards for one, awards for all, that’s what I say. We’re all good at something; it’s up to the schools to prise out of us what that may be.

My infant/junior school was St Margaret’s—absolutely run of the mill. Old Victorian classrooms complete with ornate, rain-echoing verandas somehow linked clumsily to a new unimaginative square concrete building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed there by mistake.

From the off we had the good teachers and the bad teachers as most schools do, those that could and those that could not when it came to communicating. There was Mrs Clark, the old Ena Sharples battleaxe type who would scare the living daylights out of us—although I can’t remember exactly how. There was the glamorous Mrs Johnson who looked like she should have been on one of those ever so slightly risqué Top of The Pops album covers and there was Mrs Smith who always reminded me of Virginia Wade for some reason. But my favourite was a supply teacher we had called Mr Hillditch. He was born to teach and took us to the Robinson’s bread factory one afternoon where he used to work. When his two weeks of deputising came to an end I remember being genuinely sad that he was leaving. I even wrote him a song and stood up in class to sing it to him.

Mr Hilditch we think that thee Is no good at being referee.

The only thing you’re good at is baking bread Also we’d like to thank you For giving us such a lot to do Mr Hillditch we love you And good bye.

(I was also pretty pleased with the tune I came up with for this ditty—on the audio book I will give it plenty, don’t you worry.)

During breaks it was conkers, the climbing frame, a game of footy, or British bulldog, or you could, if you wanted, while away the hours clinging to the school fence, pretending to be a prisoner, dreaming of freedom and rueing the crime that put you inside. I did this quite a lot.

Prizegiving was one of the few highlights, as was sports day, mostly because it meant no lessons. Rarely did I feature in either of these annual events—from the first year it was obvious which three or four kids would rule the roost in both categories and after that the rest of us were demoted to mere bit-part players in the predictable soap opera of typical primary school education.