I didn’t think that I was at a rough school, it was all just normal to me, but years later someone pointed out to me that most kids don’t go to a school where part of it is burned down by a young arsonist, where boys are caught on the roof looking in the girl’s changing room skylight or where the French teacher was beaten about the head with a large rubber sex toy.
So obviously I did!
And part of our daily life was protecting our albums from being defaced or stolen. One of the disadvantages of being identified as a particular group was that we were easy pickings for bullies and to be fair we weren’t the fighty sorts. So if you didn’t watch out you’d lose a lot of albums and they’d be smashed or vandalized by a few real hard cases. Parents tell you, stupidly, to stand up to bullies. Well, one of our number did and kicked seven shades out of one. All that happened was that the bully told his big brother and his mates and they came up to the school gates, waited for the lad to leave at the end of the day and put in him hospital for three months and traumatized a nice kid.
These kids were or knew some seriously evil people and it wasn’t worth messing with them. The odd thing was, out of school they were OK. I was drinking on my own in the Garrick in Stockton as usual when two of them came in. I was initially scared but they were perfectly civil. Almost schizophrenically so.
I only lost one record to them. Ten Years After’s ‘Recorded Live’, which I absolutely adored but stupidly left on my locker at break time for 10 minutes because I was distracted by a particularly fulsome girl’s attention. Of course it disappeared, only to turn up later with various obscenities carved into it. It was like knifing a friend and it really upset me so much that I went and bought a new copy and I never bought a new record.
The fact that I can still recall it shows you how traumatised I was by it. I was vulnerable because of my affection for albums, the hard kids always knew the way to really upset me. So after the TYA incident I never let an album or single out of my sight for a moment.
