My influences: Miss Headington

I grew up on a housing estate in south Bristol and went to Knowle Park Junior Mixed School, the local primary school.

In my second and third years - I can never work out how this relates to the current year number convention - I was taught, in a class of 50 children, by Miss Headington who must have been around 50 years old at the time. She had a reputation, probably undeserved, of being a harridan and, although I was a quiet and obedient child, I had a couple of run-ins with her.

The first had to do with punctuation. We wrote with fountain pens and I made full stops with the point of the pen - in consequence, they were small. Unfortunately they were too small for Miss Headington, who assumed that they were absent. After a couple of differences of opinion about this, Miss Headington made me sit in class - my recollection says a whole morning but I suspect it was probably half an hour - with a large full stop on a piece of paper hung around my neck. The point was made; for the rest of my time in her class I made sure there was no mistake - my full stops were the size of peas. I know this to be true - I still have one of my exercise books from the period. When I moved up to Mr Wheaton's class (see the next post), I reverted to making them with the point of the pen; Mr Wheaton's eyesight must have been better, as I had no further problems.

The second had to do with male rights! Hymn books for assembly were distributed by hymn book monitors before we walked across to the hall for assembly. The hymn book monitors were all girls, so the girls got the decent hymn books and the boys got the hymn books with missing covers and torn pages. One morning I was shouted at for failing to sing in assembly; the reason, as I explained, was that the relevant page was missing from my hymn book. This was not accepted as a valid excuse. I was incandescent at the unfairness of this and, when we returned to the classroom, I went up to Miss Headington's desk and complained about the appointment of hymn book monitors. To my surprise, Miss Headington accepted the unfairness of this and appointed some boys as monitors. It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that I was not popular among the girls.

So what did I learn from these experiences? Well, for the whole of my life since, I have been moved and angered by unfairness, and it still informs and influences my political opinions. And also, I realised in retrospect, despite my quiet and reserved demeanour, I am quite prepared to take on authority to get things changed if I think they need to be changed. But, despite my lack of popularity with the girls at the time, I have remained firmly heterosexual!