Black Lion part 1
Black Lion part 2
Part 3 - Miniskirts, blueprints for disaster, the CCF parade is (almost) disrupted, and "hopefully it was all worth it", 1968-69 (extending into 1970)
Foreword:
Having completed this three-part tale it’s become increasingly clear to me that it seems to be more isolated incidents that have stuck in the mind over the years rather than anything specific to do with what was on the curriculum at any given time. Indeed, I unearthed my O and A level papers a while ago and would today have a great deal of difficulty with just about every question on all of them!
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One privilege of being in the sixth form was the free periods we had on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons - in my case also Mondays, as I’d packed up going to CCF. I started skiving off down town during several of these towards the end of 1968 (when I look back, I don’t know how I achieved this without being caught, although Mr. Jay seemed to be aware of what I was up to) and due to my unflagging interest in American West Coast rock and progressive music often found myself in Rumbelows record store in West Street. This had a better selection than Weston Hart and was also nearer the school - just opposite the end of Trinity Street. But besides the music there was another reason why I frequented the premises so often, namely a girl called Marianne. She was a good-looker with long blonde hair and a love of tight miniskirts who worked there and would often let me listen to the latest progressive releases on the shop’s headphones, as a result of which I’d sometimes buy one or two LPs, no doubt to the store owner’s delight. As she usually didn’t have much to do in the afternoon we’d often chat for years about music, school, our parents etc.; whenever a customer came in I’d disappear behind the record racks and ostensibly start studying the record sleeves. She must have thought me a bit round the bend though (I probably was too) when I asked her to order the latest underground record releases by the likes of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, etc. and she then saw the strange-looking sleeves when the records had arrived ..... As I was spending so much time in the shop I hardly had any time to do my homework in the library, so I always had to say to my parents that I had a lot to do at home, which seemed to impress them.
I was always a bit uncomfortable with
"females of the opposite sex", as girls always seemed to be referred to, apart
from chatting on a more general sort of level. However, one day at the
beginning of December I plucked up courage to ask Marianne whether she’d like
to come to the school dance with me just before Christmas. Although this kind
of activity - even anything to do with girls - was strictly frowned upon in
Black Lion circles, particularly by Chris (I thought he’d throw me off the
Editorial Board if he knew what was going on!), I’d got to quite like Marianne
and was pretty sure she liked me too. However, she told me that she was
already going with someone else. After that I hardly ever went to Rumbelows
again, and when I did I found that she was no longer working there ....
Another disaster occurred in late 1968 when a delegation from the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) turned up, giving presentations about what fantastic jobs there were on offer in the big world outside and talking to all of us in 6 "Tarts" Upper about our futures. It was clear to me that they were primarily interested in extending feelers in an attempt to cream off the best students as early as possible to launch them on brilliant careers in research into the optimum size of biscuits or something similar. But one poor fellow who talked to me drew a complete blank. Even at this relatively late stage of my stint at Price’s I still only had rather hazy ideas about what on earth I might do after leaving the place; I detested the idea of "working in industry" (I’d heard the expression often enough, but had no idea what it might mean), and was dead set on going to university for a few years, if only to postpone the ultimate decision. When I said that I was intending to study modern languages and then wait and see (possibly go to France or Germany to work) I think I completely threw him as he hadn’t been wised up on this kind of possibility. The rest of the morning I just sat around bored and rather embarrassed together with another fellow from my year called Seymour who was just as clueless as me as regards the future. At least we were able to mutually commiserate though .....
Even though I was a prefect by now, I still frequently used to get into trouble for turning up late for assembly in the mornings. This was mainly due to my living in Gosport; not only that, but my family had moved to Alverstoke in the meantime, i.e. even further away from Fareham than Brockhurst, and the buses from Gosport Hospital up to Fareham weren’t quite as frequent as from Brockhurst. (The idea of getting up a bit earlier in the mornings never seemed to occur to me.) The eternal problem of traffic along Fareham Road (and Gosport Road) seemed to be getting worse by the week, meaning that the bus to Fareham was invariably delayed, and usually the Provincial bus no. 17 up Trinity Street had left by the time it had finally made it to West Street. So on these occasions I had to belt up Trinity Street and Park Lane like hell and then file in at the front of the assembly to the side, gasping for breath, together with assorted other boys from the lower forms. After a word with the duty prefect whose job it was to take names of late boys, pointing out that I was by now in 6 Arts Upper and a prefect to boot and had a long journey from Gosport every morning, I persuaded him that the whole situation was too absurd, so he turned a blind eye in future. I suppose I should have thought of sneaking in at the bottom of the field in Harrison Road instead.
I also remember exercising my prefect’s privilege once to hand out a detention to one boy from the lower forms, probably for something completely daft like talking with his hands in his pockets. Having been no stranger to quod myself, I thought I’d get my revenge on the system in this way. However, as if to demonstrate how stupid the quod system was, I said to the quod overseer that I thought it would be a good idea if the boy in question were to stand facing the wall for 20 minutes, or something equally inane.
1969 was then marked by my more or less total devotion to getting good A level results, but this didn’t stop me putting one over (or at least trying to) on the CCF just before the summer see "The Great Escape" Ultimately my patience and industry were rewarded: I got 3 good A levels as well as 2 S levels and was relieved that I could more or less put the Price’s era behind me.
But not quite though: I was still only 16 and reckoned I was too young to go to university, so I thought I’d have a bash at the Oxford University entrance exams at the end of the year and then get some kind of job to tide me over till the autumn of 1970, meaning that I’d have to do one more term at the school. Even then, attempts were made to force me into extra-curricular activities. As I had to be occupied in some way as I only had a few periods of German and French each week, I ended up supposedly having to play table tennis together with lads from the third and fourth forms, on top of which Mr. Nash (the new art teacher) tried to get me to develop some ideas for the design of a new facade for the wall of the new building facing Park Lane. My artistic prowess hadn’t improved one bit since my 2A days and I just sat around doodling meaningless squares and rectangles on pieces of paper. Nobody cared two hoots though: for many years afterwards the wall was just as bare as it had been in 1969. At least I was still maintaining my co-editorship of the Black Lion with Chris Bard though, which took up a fair amount of time, and - for what it was ultimately worth - embarked with some other boys on a complete reclassification of the library books under the eye of Mr. Gros.
Somehow though my enthusiasm for the Oxford exams waned, despite Tibor Jay’s and Flo’s efforts, as my fellow A-level students had all left and I was stuck on my own. I realised that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew and when the exams finally came in November I was all at sea. It was hardly surprising that I didn’t make it to Oxford.
As the 60s drew to a close I was basically satisfied with what I’d actually achieved at Price’s, despite wondering what the real purpose of a lot of my time spent at the place had been, but I then had to fill in the time until the coming October and university. In January 1970 I got one of those jobs which I had professed to hate so much - working as a clerk filling in invoices at Brickwoods in Portsmouth for half a year and thus getting to know the everyday world of office workers, which differed radically from the sheltered environment of Price’s and was quite a shock and rather uncomfortable at the beginning. But this was tempered a bit by the fact that I met up with another ex-Price’s lad from the old 5B a year below me called Ray Atkins doing the same thing as me and we had quite a laugh together, on top of which I hung around with the Black Lion crowd for a while as we rehearsed and then put on the Light Show in February.
And so my last tenuous links with the school
were finally severed.
Despite what I often thought about Price’s I was taken aback when my father
and I drove up Park Lane one day many years later and I saw that the place had
more or less completely disappeared. I just couldn’t believe that a school
with so much tradition and history (the old school house was a listed building
too, or so I had thought) could simply be demolished to make way for yet
another boring housing estate. For some time afterwards I was a bit sad.
Fifteen years later I still can’t quite understand it ...
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Parts 1-3 of this Guide Copyright for the Whole World by robin ward on behalf of black lion enterprises, December 2002