SOAPY HUDSON

I hadn't thought about this guy in years and then Pow!!, one day last week, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, his name just popped into my head, and a whole slew of bad memories avalanched their way into my forebrain.

To us, you see, the guy was, after all, quite terrifying, even though I'm sure that he was a pussycat in reality, because a steely grey crew-cut hovering above a mustard-coloured tweed jacket and being below average height might have cut an impressive figure back then, but it seems far more ordinary to me now.

But I really ought to give you some context here.

We were young... Foolish...

That much is true, at least. We were the massed, shrieking hordes of first and second year pupils at the shiny new comprehensive I was sent to in order to get my "education" (such as it is) which was slowly transforming itself from the grammar school it had once been. My year was the second year of intake of the new system meaning that me and my year full of grubby, snot-nosed oiks and the year above us were all common as muck, but everyone in the third year and above was a grammar school boy, well versed in the ways of "getting on" in life and finding reasons to make the lives of the common people like me even more miserable than they might ordinarily already have been in our one-room shacks with our tin baths in front of the fire.

"Soapy" Hudson was a teacher. In fact he was the legendary head of the elite section, otherwise known as "The Sixth Form" and he had a fearsome reputation for his temper and, perhaps, his beatings. None of this might actually have been true, of course, but you know how people are prone to embellish the truth; This was a man to be feared.

Very rarely did he come down from his own little Mount Olympus and walk amongst we mere mortals, but one of the duties that had to be endured by all staff from time to time was the horrors of "Dinner Duty" which basically, at least in Soapy's case, meant patrolling the long corridor at lunchtime as the jostling queue of young hooligans that we undoubtedly all were lined up to get into the vast dining hall to receive our daily hot meal.

This being a long queue, and the process of dishing up the food being a "one at a time" process, the procedure could take a while and there was an awful lot of impatience, not least because the longer it took, the more it ate into the "free time" of the lunch break, and so the student body was prone to getting bored and so much pushing and shoving and fighting and shouting was likely to occur, which is why the staff had to walk up and down keeping this single-file riot under control.

Some used a more "matey" approach and chatted along whilst trying to keep the order and chaos at an acceptably civilised level. Others, generally the sports masters, waded in and got physical, shoving a queue back upon itself as it surged forward like a human Slinky.

"Soapy" did neither of these things.

"Soapy" marched up and down with a sort of military precision that leads me to suspect that he had once been in the forces. He was quite obviously old enough and, by the time me and my contemporaries had grown into the Sixth Form (and thus completed the total transformation of the school's pupils into 100% oikdom), he had retired, and we never got to experience the vision of his full-on wrath, about which we had heard so many terrifying whispers.

But, as we tried to keep breathing, in the orderly scrum of those queues, what we didn't want to do was catch "Soapy" Hudson's eye. A sudden bellow of "YOU BOY!!! NO, NOT YOU... YOU!!!!" would bring an awful silence as some poor wretch had been found to be the source of the latest outrage and was called out of the line to kneel before "Soapy" and tremble with fear.

And you never really knew who it was he was looking at. Once I thought that his spotlight had settled upon me, and I pointed to myself in disbelief, but I was that day's "NO, NOT YOU" part of the familiar war-cry, because "Soapy" had a lazy eye and you were never really 100% certain as to quite who it was that he was directing his rage towards which, now that I come to think about it, probably only increased the level of his rage.

This was all so very long ago that I don't suppose that he's still with us any more if enough time has passed for him and his as it has for me. Perhaps, like a lot of the other authority figures in that place, he wasn't all that old at all but just seemed it, and his disappearance wasn't a retirement but just a career move...? Who knows? I doubt that I ever will...

The stuff of nightmares reduced to nothing more than a nostalgic anecdote... Here's to you, "Soapy" and thanks for the memories...