Listening - Pounds, Shillings and Pence

 “You were not listening!”  Mrs S raged, dark eyes blazing with hatred. I shook, whimpered and cried as she smacked me hard, many times, across the back of my legs with her wooden ruler. I was only seven and a half, fairly new to this school and Mrs S terrified me. I felt the eyes of a class full of seven and eight year olds upon me, staring at my distress. Tears streamed my face, my legs were stinging and I didn’t dare to move until Mrs S dismissed me.

My crime? The inability to do the ‘money’ sums. Pounds, shillings and pence sums were beyond me. I hadn’t done this at my old school. I tried to tell Mrs S. She never listened to me. She wasn’t going to help me. Did she believe that if she smacked me hard enough, I would magically be able to do this work?

My young life had completely changed. I had been a happy, confident little girl, doing well at  school with teachers I adored and a group of friends. I was uprooted, due to our family being in the licenced trade, and moved from all that was familiar to a different pub in a different town, this new school where I felt like an outsider, even at such a young age. I loved my new baby sister.  I was completely lost in all this new stuff.  Looking at life through my adult eyes, that’s a great deal for a seven and a half year old child to cope with. I don’t remember any intervention, apart from my Nanna Hetty suggesting to my mother that she ought to speak to Mrs S or have me change schools. I’d been having nightmares about Mrs S while I was staying with my grandparents during a school holiday, and told Nanna Hetty about my miseries. Nanna Hetty was my paternal grandmother. I adored her, just as I did my maternal one. Grown-ups can have their differences and my mother would have taken Nanna Hetty’s  views as interference. I was stuck. Dad was getting the pub sorted, under new management, and Mum had to get into a routine with the new baby and me, but I didn’t know where I fitted in. They told me just to do my best at school, but I already was. I did listen to Mrs S, but I didn’t understand and was too scared to say so.

Family friends came to visit one day and brought with them a girl a bit older than me. I don’t know who she was and I can’t even remember her name, but that day, she was my guardian angel. We were playing together. I overcame my shyness and asked if she could do pounds, shillings and pence sums. Yes, she could, and would she teach me? Yes, she would, and she did. Slowly, explaining everything, she taught me so well, I was bursting with confidence at my new ability and for once, I wasn’t dreading school.

Two things happened in my favour, though years apart. Twelve months after this move, we were off again to pastures new and I was leaving this dreadful school and Mrs S and the teacher I had after her.  A feeling of belonging never occurred there for me. The other big thing was Decimalisation. Hooray! It might have been just for me.

Perhaps it was fate, perhaps it was setting my demons to rest, but many years later, I found myself working in the same school I had hated, sometimes in the same classroom that used to be mine, where Mrs S smacked my legs. Mrs S had passed away long since, or she’d be about a hundred and thirty years old. My favourite job in my entire working life is the years I spent there. It is a happy school with confident children and teachers who go the extra mile to care for them. Corporal punishment is a thing of the past, thank goodness.

My poem, in Haiku,

I was listening
But I failed to understand
And ended up scared.

She filled me with fear.
She was a witch with dark eyes
And a darker heart.

Hard, wooden ruler
Across the back of my legs.
I still didn’t learn

But I had nightmares
Caused by my raging teacher
Who would not help me

When I was seven,
A shy, new girl, feeling lost
And so unhappy.

Pounds, shillings and pence,
I just couldn’t calculate
And sobbed in distress.

PMW 2021


Thank for reading, Pam x

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Nonsense - Self-Isolation

I listened, properly. I was perched on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward, hanging on to his every word. It was important that I didn’t miss anything and that I fully understood.  It wasn’t long before I felt frustrated, “Spit it out, man, stop bumbling.” Then annoyed, “For goodness* sake, Boris.” Soon I was angry, mainly with myself for waiting most of the day ‘for enlightenment’ only to find myself wading through a sea of verbal nonsense from someone struggling to string a proper sentence together. Anyway, nothing has changed for me and I will continue to self-isolate.

Lockdown is no problem to me in so far as I love being at home. I am safe here, not stuck here. As well as doing the things I enjoy, I have taken the opportunity to spring-clean and sort out. I kept putting off doing the little room. This is the upstairs box room, which was the nursery for our children. It became the computer room, going back a bit, when monitors and processors were massive. Add a desk, chair and a printer, and one person could comfortably work in there. Later, it became the study. New desk, lap-top, wireless printer and walls lined with book cases which soon got filled. Our eldest grandson calls it our library. He likes to have a bedtime story from my children’s collection when he sleeps over. This little room has also become a dumping ground for things that are in the way but still wanted and not to be confined to the attic or the shed, well, not yet.

I made a space for myself by chucking a few things out that shouldn’t have been in there then got started on sorting out my writing. Exercise books, notepads, scribblings. Unfinished poems, opening paragraphs, some completed stuff. A couple of rejection letters, kept to keep me grounded. Plenty, and I mean a lot, of written nonsense, some made it to the bin, but a few items showing a glimmer of promise, might be worth picking up again. Published work, a thin folder, but one of which I’m proud and has a self-awarded gold star. My work-in-progress novel which hasn’t seen much progress lately. I didn’t dare to start reading that otherwise nothing else would get sorted out. It isn’t nonsense, though, it needs work. I spent two afternoons just on my writting stuff and I discovered that there’s a flicker of hope on some of those hand-written pages. I have rejection letters but I also have lots of positive feed-back and encouragement, enough to tell me to push myself out there while I still can. And with nothing to lose, I must.

So self-isolation continues. The news is scary, the outside world is too scary for me. I don’t support Boris or his party but I have to pay attention, however cross he makes me feel. I won’t return to work to mix with the public before I can see my family, that’s nonsense. I think it is too soon to lift restrictions but I was disappointed at his lack of clarification. I didn’t expect him to be specific, because he isn’t, but I hoped to hear something that I could safely interpret to mean it would be fine to have my grandchildren round and see family members, even briefly. They are worth the wait.

Here’s Spike Milligan,

Scorflufus

By a well-known National Health Victim No. 3908631

There are many diseases,

That strike people’s kneeses,

Scorflufus! Is one by name.

It comes from the East

Packed in bladders of yeast

So the Chinese must take half the blame.

There’s a case in the files

Of Sir Barrington-Pyles,

While hunting a fox one day

Shot up in the air

And remained hanging there!

While the hairs on his socks turned grey!

Aye! Scorflufus had struck!

At man, beast and duck.

And the knees of the world went Bong!

Some knees went Ping!

Other knees turned to string

From Balham to old Hong Kong.

Should you hold your life dear,

Then the remedy’s clear,

If you’re offered some yeast – don’t eat it!

Turn the offer down flat –

Don your travelling hat –

Put an egg in your boot – and beat it!

Spike Milligan  (1918 – 2002)

*Choose your own word here – mine wasn’t ‘goodness’.

Thanks for reading, take care and keep safe, Pam x

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