The Gift of a Radio by Justin Webb

Author:Justin Webb [Webb, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473589667
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

I arrived at Sidcot in September 1972. My preparation for school had been wholly inadequate, though I am not sure any amount of prior effort would have made it any more bearable. Mum and I had read Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings stories of pillow fights and stern but kindly masters; of the hero’s wizard wheezes with his best friend, Darbishire. When things go wrong there’s a ‘Jumbo jet of a hoo-hah’ and then all is well. It was alluring. But for all the Jennings bravado, I didn’t, when it came to it, want to go.

The journey there from Bath was no more than forty minutes. Yet I wondered if it might go on for ever, that meandering drive through villages, past farms, out on to the busy A38. Perhaps we might break down and go home and decide the whole thing was a mistake. But the Hillman did the job. First days in boarding school are only sad for parents as they consider, if they have souls, the enormity of what they have done. For the children there is too much to take in for sadness to descend. Mum was brisk and to the point: ‘You’ll love it.’

Mum definitely saw Sidcot as that truck on to which her baby was being thrown, the escape from the burning village, the despairing leap of faith that consigned all she cared about to the truck and its drivers. She had faith in them; she seemed to think Anthony Buckeridge knew what he was talking about. She didn’t realize that the drivers of this truck were drunk and the cargo dangerous.

Charles waited in the car. The teachers were full of false bonhomie – ‘Hello, young man!’ – as if it were all going to be tremendous fun.

I hung on to my radio. Once the jolly goodbyes were completed we were handed over to the fourth-formers to be shown the ropes: the changing rooms where we would be bullied, the dorms where we would try to sleep. We were also informed of our collective nickname as third-formers (the first year of the school began with the third form, for reasons lost in history).

We were Turds. This play on words was also a handy summary of our position in the school. We progressed from ‘Hello, young man!’ to ‘Get in the shower, Turds’ in a matter of hours. On the first full day of school, at the form meeting, the teacher gave us new boys our first warning, not about bullying but about snitching if you were bullied. ‘Don’t come running to me,’ he said, ‘if you get hit as a result of being cheeky.’ It was a standing joke. ‘Are you being cheeky?’ a fifteen-year-old would ask an eleven-year-old, before punching him, with impunity, in the face.

One day we too would be able to bully the teary new boys. That was the implicit promise. But until that day came there was no remedy for being young, bruised, lost and far from home.

Every letter I wrote, every week without fail, from September 1972 to July 1979, my mother kept.

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