HAPPIEST DAYS

Same van, different day - No girl.
So maybe I was wrong after all...

I noticed a youngish looking girl as I drove to work the other day. I didn’t, I hope, “notice” her in a “creepy” kind of a way, she was merely where she was when I drove by on my way to work, and I happened to see her standing there as I was slowing the car down to allow another car to come through in the opposite direction in one of those “20 m.p.h.” zones that seem to confuse the people in the cars behind me so much.

She was leaning against a van, texting away upon her teffalone, and wearing her civilian street clothes with that “first job” air of freedom and hopefulness that comes from having escaped the stifling cloisters of education, thrown off the uniform forever, and being free to engage with the big wide world and all of the so-called “freedom” that it offers once you get beyond the confines of formal education, bless her.

At least that’s what it looked like to me, and it seemed to be about the right time of year for that to be the case. She could, of course, merely have been stopping for a bit of a breather having walked up the hill, or her phone might have just rung. There are millions of reasons why someone might just stand next to a van at that time of the morning and I just happened to fabricate this whole woven fabric of back story for her.

Maybe I am my mother’s son after all…

But that moment did get me thinking… and no, not in a “creepy” way… about school days and how eager some of my fellow students were to escape into the “Big Wide World” (or, as we were later to discover, “The Big Wide World of Work”) at the first opportunity that they were offered. They all seemed so eager to be gone whereas I had kind of got used to being there and would rather not have had to come up with something else to do, if I’m being totally honest with you.

I’ve always been very comfortable with the status quo.

I remember listening aghast, and yet simultaneously amazed at the boldness of them, to tales of escapees burning ties, thrown away bags (I so nearly wrote “satchels” there before realising that it was merely a literary conceit… even I am not THAT old…), badges torn off blazers and those blazers then thrown away (or burned) in some gesture of freedom from what some of us considered to be oppression, not really realising that we were throwing off the shackles of something that turned out to be a rather “safe” environment when you compare it to the brutal environment of the “Real World”.

I’m sure that a lot of young people feel much the same way about the perceived shackles of their own educational establishments and how they can’t wait to be free of them, but, as I get older, I find myself looking back with more and more fondness upon those allegedly supposedly “happiest” days of my life, as the cliche goes...

Oh, I know that an awful lot of it was pretty grim, and large chunks of those years, especially any times when I was expected to appear upon a sports field, can still conjure up some pretty miserable memories. All of the petty squabbles and bullying that goes on in any society where humans interact can be found in microcosm in any institution, and schools are no exception to this. All of those day-to-day fears of retribution from both teachers and fellow pupils, all of those vital pieces of homework not actually done, or those tests which I was bound to fail... each one could be thought of as being yet another hammer blow in the eventual shaping of me and how I turned out to be.

But somehow I do also sometimes feel ever so slightly nostalgic for the lack of responsibility, the sense of order and the known quantities. Knowing that each day had its own routines and order, other people would take responsibility for organising my meagre existence and the administration of my life, such as it was, and that things would pretty much stay like that until the day when I had to leave, and, just so long as I could not draw enough attention to myself to appear upon the radar of the thugs and bullies, I would probably come out of it all fairly intact.

Perhaps it’s just that I thrive upon the mundane. I happen to like rigidity and order in my progression through my daily life. I’m rather happier (although I’m sure you couldn’t really tell) if I know that next week, next month or even next year is going to be much the same as this one.

Oh! I may rail against the monotony and tedium from time-to-time, but the truth is that I rather like the comfort and security of it, and those five years of secondary school, and the subsequent signing up for two more after it, now seem to be a time when everything was not only safe and predictable, but so many possible futures seemed possible.

I was always rather shifty-eyed, even amidst a crowd of
people whose names I have mostly forgotten.

This, of course, had the added benefit that I was actually doing something that kept me busy at that precise time, so I didn’t have to actually do very much about planning for any of those possible futures and so they could remain intact in my imagination, unsullied, pristine and perfect, and consequently couldn’t start to disintegrate and fall apart because of my own failings and shortcomings until some abstract future date came and I finally had to address them and, naturally, fail to achieve them.

The fact that I’m now pushing up against the door of having spent half a century on this sad little planet and I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life may have something to do with it.

Now I can happily look back upon a time when there was an almost total lack of “responsibilities” like bills and stuff. A time when when the only real problems were avoiding the bullies. This was  something I eventually became quite adept at, usually by managing to be so insignificant that I could never be a threat, developing an air that implied that I really didn’t care about them enough to be bothered by them, and managing, against all of the odds, to develop something approaching a sense of humour which kind of acted like a barrier to their nonsense. All that and maybe the sadder truth that there was always someone else much further down the food chain who attracted more of their attention. The only other main concern was usually being sure that you would be getting more than 70% in your vocab test to avoid the snide comments and the inevitable detention, which all seems kind of pointless now, but, at the time all seemed so terribly important.

In the end, of course, most of us survived to become, if not exactly stand-up citizens, at least reasonable human beings, live our lives and, those of us who are still able to, can look back upon those years and remember whatever it is, both good or bad, that we carry with us about our own experiences. Mine, I’m happy to say, it seems, just aren’t as bad as some others, and I can now look back upon those years with a certain amount of fondness and wish that life could be quite so simple these days.