Chris Evans - It’s Not What You Think

*This is a magic pastry that takes 15 minutes from bagged to baked, all brown and crusty. None of this resting it in the fridge for four hours wrapped in cellophane nonsense. Again, any attempt by me to get the recipe for this fell on conveniently deaf ears.

10 First desk

9 First school friend

8 First sports team not selected for

7 First hardest kid

6 First sportiest kid

5 First weird kid

4 First smelly kid

3 First mean teacher

2 First test

1 First exam

One of the unavoidable dividers in school(there are many, most of them unfair and upsetting) is the school test—you know, marks out of twenty. I always did OK in these but imagine if you were one of the kids who couldn’t get out of single figures—poor souls. And then the teacher reads out all the results, just in case anyone might not quite have grasped just how dense you are.

Tests were bad enough but then along came another phenomenon—the ‘exam’. Exactly when does a test become an exam? They must be different, I suppose, because they have different names. The thing is, for the first few years nobody tells you—or even gives you warning of their existence. You spend years having tests, spelling tests, maths tests, all sorts of tests and then one day the teacher says, ‘And in a few weeks’ time you will be having your first exam. ’

Exam! Hang on a minute, what are you talking about exam? What the blinkin’ bloomin’ whatsit is an exam? Whatever it is, it sounds scary and it must be—otherwise why are we being warned about it several ‘weeks’ in advance like the potential of a nuclear strike? Kids don’t do several weeks in advance. I remember thinking, ‘Crikey, this must be really something.’

Even the word exam sounds big and dangerous. Test is a far more flighty word, a far more friendly word—test is light and trips off the tongue. Whereas exam is a deep and heavy word, its gravitas forcing your voice to go down when you say it: EX—AM.

It’s a word that resonates in your head, like the hammer clanging in a bell—E X A M A A M A M A M A M.

‘This is not a test, it’s an exam!’

This phrase brought on another first for me—nerves. Early childhood is relatively free of nerves. What is there to be nervous about? Your job is to be a kid, no problem there, all you have to do is get up every morning, be fairly well behaved and go to bed again the next night. Nerves, I have deduced, all have one thing in common, they are generally brought on by ‘expectation’.

Ah now, expectation, a dreaded thing if ever there was one. Expectation—similar to exams—suddenly turns up on the scene out of nowhere, coming into play and throwing up a whole host of other factors that previously did not exist. Expectation for me was a direct result of the past performances of my elder brother and sister—David and Diane. They were both pretty much top of the class, especially my big sis; I was from the same family and therefore I would be ‘expected’ to continue this tradition of achievement.

All the above could be encapsulated in the ominous…

ELEVEN PLUS ENTRANCE EXAM (dramatic music here)

Fortunately I passed my Eleven Plus with flying colours, which meant for now at least I had fulfilled my expectations: I had overcome my peer pressure, avoided any kind of judgement that might have befallen me and in the process unknowingly scratched the first hairs on the back of those troublesome beasts that go by the names of pride and ego.

As a result of my recent success I was now qualified and officially brainy enough to attend the grandest of all grammar schools for the duration of the next five long years—or at least that’s what was supposed to happen.

I was happy to accept the fact that it was now time to hop on the bus with the big boys, but not before Karen with the big boobies had taken me and a few other pals over to the park for a final farewell and a benevolent insight into why those big boys from the senior schools were already knocking on her door.

Why is it some people are just set apart right from the start? Karen was in a different class to the rest of the girls—not literally, of course, but generally, she was the first girl of my age to show any signs of sexiness and everyone knew it. All the girls wanted to be in her gang and all the boys just wanted to be…well, you know. But Karen didn’t have a gang—she was a one-woman show and the only audience she was interested in was that of the male species. She was confidence personified. Even those girls who claimed not to be intrigued by Karen’s ‘powers’ had to admit they wanted to know what it was like to be her and to know what she knew, which, compared to the rest of us, was pretty much everything.

I remember seeing Karen a few years later when she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She looked like a bloody supermodel. I have no idea what’s happened to her since but I hope she’s happy. She certainly deserves to be—goodness knows she spread enough happiness around herself.

10 Their names

9 Their hair

8 Their clothes

7 Their shoes

6 Their moustaches

5 Their cars

4 Their bags

3 The way they walk

2 The way they breathe

1 Their obsession with punishment

My grammar school was a boys-only,stand-up-when-a-teacher-comes-in-the-class, kind of establishment with all pupils having to pass the aforementioned Eleven Plus entry examination to get in.

Though now a subject of much controversy, the streaming system did undoubtedly work—for the clever kids at least. As a result no one in any of our classes was really that ‘thick’; consequently learning was relatively swift and even.

While most of the teachers at my last school had been grey by comparison, most of the teachers at this new school were ‘colourful’, to say the least. This was an old-style school with old-style values and as excellent as the standard of education and learning was—the standard of discipline was formidable.

Good order was kept almost exclusively by the use of fear and violence; and boy did it work. Almost all the teachers were happy, actually more than happy, to dish out physical punishment. At the time it was the norm, but looking back now, it was highly questionable behaviour at best, more likely criminal. It’s hard to believe that in all the time I was there not a single dad turned up to give one of the masters a good thump.

Almost all the teachers took great pride in their choice of weapon to beat us with, all feeling a perverted need to continue their academic theme.

Our chemistry teacher would beat us with a length of Bunsen burner rubber tubing, Normally brown, his length had blackened with age—apparently he’d had it for years. At first we didn’t believe it was real: we thought it was just a ruse told to us by the older boys to frighten the life out of us freshers, but one day we pushed our teacher too far and discovered we were wrong, the notorious whip did indeed exist.

This particular master was nicknamed after a cartoon character. We even had a song about him, sung to the juggling tune they use at circuses:

Here comes Sir with his Bunsen burner, Better watch out ’cos he’s a learner.