Heard it in the Playground Page 2
Tomorrow, wait and see.
But not now, Nigel.
The nights belong to me!
Swimming Lessons
If we lived in the sea
Like eels or fish,
We would go to school
And have walking lessons.
We’d reach the beach,
And – nervous in the thin air –
Learn to stagger slowly
On the warm sand.
If we lived in the air
Like dragon-flies or birds,
We’d have our walking lessons
On the tops of hills,
The parapets of tall buildings.
We’d be seized by gravity,
Nervous of the lower depths
And scared of… unfalling.
If we lived in the earth
Like worms or moles,
We’d come to school by tunnel
In dark glasses,
Clump along like spacemen
On the planet’s shell;
Perplexed by the horizon
And the rush of blood to our feet.
The Assembly
Our Father, which art in Heaven,
We are coming to assembly
In pairs
Down the corridor – Sh!
We are here, Lord,
In the hall
In rows now – Stop that, Simon! –
Singing your Golden Oldies.
Cross-legged
On the wooden floor,
Squinting past pointed palms,
We ask You to deliver us
From splinters.
A pale-faced girl
Leaves early to be sick.
A red-faced infant
Scuttles off for a wee.
Mrs Gibbs complains about litter.
Eternal God – is that the time?
We collect our swimming badges,
Hand in our hymn-books
And leave – Sh!
Up the corridor
In pairs
Foreveraneveraneveraneveran –
Stop that, Simon!
Amen.
Bags I
Bags I the dummy
Bags I the cot
Bags I the rubber duck
That other baby’s got.
Bags I the cricket ball
Wickets and bat
Bags I the hamster
Bags I the cat.
Bags I the pop records
Hear the music throb
Bags I the A levels
Bags I the job.
Bags I the sweetheart
Lovers for life
Bags I the husband
Bags I the wife.
Bags I the savings
The mortgage and then
Bags I the baby –
Here we go again!
Bags I not the glasses
The nearly bald head
Bags under eyes
And the middle-aged spread.
Bags I the memories
How it all began
Bags I the grandpa
Bags I the gran.
Bags I the hearing-aid
Bags I the stick
Bags I the ending
Quiet and quick.
Goodbye world!
Goodbye me!
Bags I the coffin
RIP.
Billy McBone
Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which he mostly kept under his hat.
The teachers all thought
That he couldn’t be taught,
But Bill didn’t seem to mind that.
Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which the teachers had searched for for years.
Trying test after test,
They still never guessed
It was hidden between his ears.
Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which only his friends ever saw.
When the teacher said, ‘Bill,
Whereabouts is Brazil?’
He just shuffled and stared at the floor.
Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which he kept under lock and key.
While the teachers in vain
Tried to burgle his brain,
Bill’s thoughts were off wandering free.
Where’s Everybody?
In the cloakroom
Wet coats
Quietly steaming.
In the office
Dinner-money
Piled in pounds.
In the head’s room
Half a cup
Of cooling tea.
In the corridor
Cupboards
But no crowds.
In the hall
Abandoned
Apparatus.
In the classrooms
Unread books
And unpushed pencils.
In the infants
Lonely hamster
Wendy house to let;
Deserted Plasticine
Still waters
Silent sand.
In the meantime
In the playground…
A fire-drill.
Parents’ Evening
We’re waiting in the corridor,
My dad, my mum and me.
They’re sitting there and talking;
I’m nervous as can be.
I wonder what she’ll tell ’em.
I’ll say I’ve got a pain!
I wish I’d got my spellings right.
I wish I had a brain.
We’re waiting in the corridor,
My husband, son and me.
My son just stands there smiling;
I’m smiling, nervously.
I wonder what she’ll tell us.
I hope it’s not all bad.
He’s such a good boy, really;
But dozy – like his dad.
We’re waiting in the corridor,
My wife, my boy and me.
My wife’s as cool as cucumber;
I’m nervous as can be.
I hate these parents’ evenings.
The waiting makes me sick.
I feel just like a kid again
Who’s gonna get the stick.
I’m waiting in the classroom.
It’s nearly time to start.
I wish there was a way to stop
The pounding in my heart.
The parents in the corridor
Are chatting cheerfully;
And now I’ve got to face them,
And I’m nervous as can be.
The Infants Do an Assembly about Time
The infants
Do an assembly
About Time.
It has the past,
The present
And the future in it;
The seasons,
A digital watch,
And a six-year-old
Little old lady.
She gets her six-year-old
Family up
And directs them
Through the twenty-four hours
Of the day:
Out of bed
And – shortly after –
Back into it.
(Life does not stand still
In infant assemblies.)
The whole thing
Lasts for fifteen minutes.
Next week (space permitting):
Space.
Finishing Off
The teacher said:
Come here, Malcolm!
Look at the state of your book.
Stories and pictures unfinished
Wherever I look.
This model you started at Easter,
These plaster casts of your feet,
That graph of the local traffic –
All of them incomplete.
You’ve a half-baked pot in the kiln room
And a half-eaten cake in your drawer.
You don’t even finish the jokes you tell –
I really can’t take any more.
And Malcolm said
… very little.
He blinked and shuffled his feet.
The sentence he finally started
Remained incomplete.
He gazed for a time at the floorboards;
He stared for a while into space;
With an unlined, unwhiskered expression
On his unfinished face.
Hide-and-seek
When we play hide-and-seek
5–10-15–20
And I’m on
And my eyes are shut
25–30-35–40
And I’m counting
And it’s all quiet
Except for me
45–50-55–60
I sometimes think
(Just for a second)
65–70-75–80
Everyone’s gone!
And all I’ll find
Is an empty earth
85–90-95–100!
And just plain sky…
Coming-ready-or-not!
The Old Teacher
There was an old teacher
Who lived in a school,
Slept in the stock-cupboard as a rule,
With sheets of paper to make her bed
And a pillow of hymn-books
Under her head.
There was an old teacher
Who lived for years
In a Wendy house, or so it appears,
Eating the apples the children brought her,
And washing her face
In the goldfish water.
There was an old teacher
Who ended her days
Watching schools’ TV and children’s plays;
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Saving the strength she could just about muster,
To powder her nose
With the blackboard duster.
There was an old teacher
Who finally died
Reading Ginn (Level One), which she couldn’t abide.
The words on her tombstone said: TEN OUT OF TEN,
And her grave was the sandpit.
That’s all now. Amen.
The Boy Without a Name
I remember him clearly
And it was thirty years ago or more:
A boy without a name.
A friendless, silent boy,
His face blotched red and flaking raw,
His expression, infinitely sad.
Some kind of eczema
It was, I now suppose,
The rusty iron mask he wore.
But in those days we confidently swore
It was from playing near dustbins
And handling broken eggshells.
His hands, of course, and knees
Were similarly scabbed and cracked and dry.
The rest of him we never saw.
They said it wasn’t catching; still, we knew
And strained away from him along the corridor,
Sharing a ruler only under protest.
I remember the others: Brian Evans,
Trevor Darby, Dorothy Cutler.
And the teachers: Mrs Palmer, Mr Waugh.
I remember Albert, who collected buttons,
And Amos, frothing his milk up with a straw.
But his name, no, for it was never used.
I need a time-machine.
I must get back to nineteen fifty-four
And play with him, or talk, at least.
For now I often wake to see
His ordinary, haunting face, his flaw.
I hope his mother loved him.
Oh, children, don’t be crueller than you need.
The faces that you spit on or ignore
Will get you in the end.
Things I Have Been Doing Lately
Things I have been doing lately:
Pretending to go mad
Eating my own cheeks from the inside
Growing taller
Keeping a secret
Keeping a worm in a jar
Keeping a good dream going
Picking a scab on my elbow
Rolling the cat up in a rug
Blowing bubbles in my spit
Making myself dizzy
Holding my breath
Pressing my eyeballs so that I become temporarily blind
Being very nearly ten
Practising my signature…
Saving the best till last.
The Trial of Derek Drew
The charges
Derek Drew:
For leaving his reading book at home.
For scribbling his handwriting practice.
For swinging on the pegs in the cloakroom.
For sabotaging the girls’ skipping.
For doing disgusting things with his dinner.
Also charged
Mrs Alice Drew (née Alice Jukes):
For giving birth to Derek Drew.
Mr Dennis Drew:
For aiding and abetting Mrs Drew.
Mrs Muriel Drew and Mr Donald Drew:
For giving birth to Dennis Drew, etc.
Mrs Jane Jukes and Mr Paul Jukes:
For giving birth to Alice Jukes, etc.
Previous generations of the Drew and Jukes families:
For being born, etc., etc.
Witnesses
‘He’s always forgetting his book.’ Mrs Pine.
‘He can write neatly, if he wants to.’ Ditto.
‘I seen him on the pegs, Miss!’
‘And me!’ ‘And me!’ Friends of the accused.
‘He just kept jumpin’ in the rope!’ Eight third-year girls
In Miss Hodge’s class.
‘It was disgusting!’ Mrs Foot (dinner-lady).
For the defence
‘I was never in the cloakroom!’ Derek Drew.
Mitigating circumstances
This boy is ten years old.
He asks for 386 other charges to be taken into consideration.
‘He’s not like this at home,’ his mother says.
The verdict
Guilty.
The sentence
Life!
And do his handwriting again.
Songs
The music for three of these songs is traditional. ‘Leavers’ Song’ fits ‘Goodbye Old Paint’, as used in the film Shane, and also Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. ‘Mrs So-and-so’ fits a skipping rhyme, the title of which I forget, while ‘The Grumpy Teacher’ is, of course, ‘The Drunken Sailor’. The idea for ‘The Bell’ came from the title song of For Me and My Gal (Meyer/Leslie/Goetz), a Judy Garland/Gene Kelly musical from the 1940s. Finally, ‘The Mrs Butler Blues’ can be set to almost any made-up or borrowed bluesy tune the reader (singer) feels able to get his or her throat round. Happy singing!
The Grumpy Teacher
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher,
Early in the morning?
Hang her on a hook behind the classroom door.
Tie her up and leave her in the PE store.
Make her be with Derek Drew for evermore,
Early in the morning.
Please, Miss, we’re only joking,
Don’t mean to be provoking.
How come your ears are smoking?
Early in the morning.
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher,
Early in the morning?
Send him out to duty when the sleet is sleeting.
Keep him after school to take a parents’ meeting.
Stand him in the hall to watch the children eating,
Early in the morning.
Please, Sir, we’re only teasing,
Don’t mean to be displeasing.
Help – that’s our necks you’re squeezing!
Early in the morning.
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher?
What shall we do with the grumpy teacher,
Early in the morning?
Tickle her toes with a hairy creature.
Leave her in the jungle where the ants can reach her.
BRING HER BACK ALIVE TO BE A CLASSROOM TEACHER!
Early – in the – morning!
Mrs So-and-so
In the classroom
Sits a teacher,
Who she is we do not know.
Our own teacher’s
Feeling poorly,
We’ve got Mrs So-and-so.
Our own teacher’s
Firm but friendly,
Lets us play out in the snow.
Lets us dawdle
In the cloakroom,
Not like Mrs So-and-so.
Stop that pushing!
Stop that shoving!
Line up quietly in a row.
Somehow life
Is not the same with
Bossy Mrs So-and-so.
Our own teacher’s
Kind and clever –
Not a lot she doesn’t know.
Where’s the pencils?
What’s your name, dear?
Says this Mrs So-and-so.
Now at last
Our teacher’s better
And it’s time for her to go.
Funny thing is