A Somerset Lad

The taste of spearmint sweets and all at once it is a Saturday afternoon.

Chewing gum was, of course, banned from school.

To have a packet of Wrigley’s was not considered as great an offence as having a packet of Player’s No 6 or a bottle of Autumn Gold cider, they would have meant a journey to the principal’s office and a caning, the gum would merely have been confiscated and thrown in the bin.

The prohibition of chewing gum causes me to wonder how I came to have a packet in my pocket that Saturday afternoon. I know it was Spearmint because I preferred Doublemint and was annoyed at not having any. Perhaps it had been bought the previous Saturday and had remained in my coat pocket because it was not the favoured flavour.

Being a skinny kid under five feet tall and less than seven stone in weight (the statistics are from my school report of the time!), I might not have been expected to have been among the lads two years older who sat at the back of the bus. For some reason, they included me among their number, and I would sit awkwardly in the corner seat, often not understanding their conversations.

The strip of Spearmint gum marked the beginning of the journey to Plymouth. It was rare that we were allowed to go there. To those of us from small, rural villages it seemed like a big city, to the boys from London and the Midlands, it was just an ordinary town.

The journey was being made to allow those who wished to do so to attend the League Division 3 match between Plymouth Argyle and Charlton Athletic. Argyle were challenging for promotion to Division 2 and the terraces of their Home Park ground were filled with supporters.

In one of those extraordinary moments of synchronicity, I have just Googled the match to discover that it was played on 8th February 1975, exactly forty-seven years ago today. Not only are the details of the match to be found, there is even footage of the match online. (It is not possible to spot a short, skinny kid chewing gum among the 22,946 supporters).

Why after such a lapse of time did the taste of spearmint evoke memories of a match hardly remembered in the intervening years? Is it the case, as some psychologists have argued, that everything we have seen and heard is stored in our memory, and the question is one of retrieval? Deep within the recesses of my memory, is there a file marked “8th February 1975?”

If there is a file, it’s not very comprehensive, it can recall Spearmint gum, but not that Plymouth Argyle missed a penalty that would have won the match in the 89th minute.

League of Ireland football is comparable with National League football in England. Small clubs rooted in the community with intimate grounds where player and spectator are in close proximity.

Sitting in the stand at Richmond Park with sheets of rain coming in from the west, attending the pre-season friendly match against Cork City seems not as wise a choice as the alternative which was to stay in the warm watching Ireland play Wales.

Then there comes a moment when time seems to slip.

The smallness of the ground allows the possibility of being seated within a few metres of the players’ tunnel. The pre-match warm up finishes and the players return to the dressing room. There is the echoing sound of studs on concrete.

Suddenly, it is not a bitterly cold February afternoon in Inchicore in 2022, instead it is a bright Saturday morning in Devon in the mid-1970s.

The sound of studs on concrete is the sound of teenage boys walking through the archway that led to the backyard of the school after Saturday morning football. In memory, boots had to be swapped for shoes under the archway. In memory, there are wire cages in which the boots are placed. Whatever the details, the stone would echo with the clatter of the boots and the loud conversation of boisterous adolescents.

It was a sound of joy, a sound of exuberance. After changing, there would be lunch and then the few hours of freedom brought by Saturday afternoon. The school bus would draw up at the end of the drive at two o’clock, those over-fifteen years old would be allowed to get off the bus in Torquay, the younger boys had to go to Paignton.

Of course, our upbeat mood was irrational, there was nothing about which to be excited. Torquay would be the same place it was the previous Saturday, and we would do nothing we had not done on many previous occasions. We would go to a cafe, look at records, mooch around the town.

In retrospect, it all seems very dull, but at the time there was a sense of something indefinable, something that we could not have articulated, and which defies articulation even now.

Perhaps it was about optimism, about anticipating the undiscovered country that lay ahead. Perhaps the sound of football boot studs on concrete was the sound that announced a taste of the freedom we hoped to enjoy in the world beyond our years at the school. Perhaps there was a deep and irrational sense of hope that never quite dies, no matter how distant becomes the memory of those Saturday mornings.

Perhaps I have written before about John, a friend who was a school teacher who was sat in the staff room of the school in which he taught, laboriously writing reports for the fifty or sixty students to whom he taught mathematics.

He was amazed when a colleague came in, picked up the pile of reports, and in fifteen minutes had finished the report writing.

Intrigued, John went over to the reports to see what had been written in so short a time. Against the subject, in a neat hand, John’s colleague had written the same two words on each report, “seems interested.”

Seems interested? Who could have argued with such a comment? The worst dullard in the class would have been pleased at receiving no negative comment, while the genius would have been spurred on to show even more interest.

Of course, the writer of the brief reports might have had a trickier time when it came to parents’ evening.

Parents’ evening was not a joyous prospect in our house, not that there were many to attend. I attended the Elmhurst Grammar School in Street for a year between 1972 and 1973, then, when it went comprehensive, I attended the new school for a term. By 1974, my asthma had deteriorated and I spent most of the year at home. At most, my father would have gone to two evenings.

The reports back included such words as “quiet,” and “satisfactory,” along with the inevitable “could do better.”

Sometimes I felt the teachers had been unfair, sometimes I felt they hadn’t a clue who I was. The teacher who wrote on my report that I had “made good progress in swimming” in the summer of 1973 would not have been able to describe me to my father, otherwise he would have known that I couldn’t swim (I would not be able to do so for another quarter of a century).

Parents’ evening have changed, the teacher now meets parents in their kitchen or living room. The five minute slots are conducted online and the levels of attendance are far higher. Gone is the prospect of passing an evening with only the parents who have the interest and motivation to come to the school building, instead the Microsoft Teams platform takes the evening into every home.

I wondered how the teacher who wrote “seems interested” several dozen times might have coped in this new dispensation. Perhaps he might have devised a one size fits all narrative to deliver to the successive faces that appeared on his laptop screen.