Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

It was the end of P.E., and Miss Hewkin was calling us down off The Apparatus. More things had capital letters in those days. There was The Playground, The Church, The Library, The Hall...fewer things, fewer names, and life was seen from just three foot off the ground. These places had greater significance than they do now.

The Apparatus was an exciting conglomeration of climbing racks, rope bridges, ladders, a slide, nets, little houses and a small sand pit which hardened after the rain. There was no padding or cushioning around The Apparatus – just grass and earth. They wouldn’t allow it any more. It would have ‘legal nightmare’ written all over it.

I was halfway across the rope bridge, around the back of The Apparatus, off the ground and amidst the leaves, when Miss Hewkin called out. It was summer. There were trees on the surrounding bank above The Green, a grass patch that seems so impossibly small now. Too small to have held so many games of ‘It’ and football, and so much involved and tortuous small-scale social intrigue. Below the area that receded grassless beneath the trees where we used to sit, dart-like grasses grew. They were ideal for breaking up and throwing into jumpers or hair from the leafy canopy as people walked by below. There is a mobile classroom blocking the route up underneath the trees now.

Ahead of me, just pulling himself off the rope bridge, was Olav. He was a thin yet boisterous, social kid, who bore the childhood handicap of a pair of oversized ears with a kind of gleeful indifference. He stood at the end of the rope bridge that I was working my way along, weighing up which way he wanted to get down. We were about five foot off the ground – nothing nail-biting, and there was a sheer jump to grass on his left, and the network of steady ladders and things working down on his right. As I reached the end of the bridge, he turned left and stopped at the edge. Miss Hewkin called again. The wooden platform that Olav was standing on was not very big. It only just took the two of us. He hesitated, shifting his weight forwards and then backwards into me. I was not a confident nor sociable child, and I certainly wasn’t a bully. Whilst towering over us all in the playground, settling disputes and dishing out sympathy for grazed knees, The Dinner Ladies (more capitals) called me the Gentle Giant. But Olav was dithering, Miss Hewkin’s voice was getting louder, and we were going to get into trouble. I was a Good Boy. I didn’t want to be in trouble.
So I pushed him.

He wailed in agony from the ground. I scuttled down the ladders and things and sat down, head bowed and cross-legged in the group of children on the grass under the eye of Miss Hewkin. She went and tended to Olav, who amidst the tears of pain, denounced me as A Pusher.

I said that I swung off the end of the rope bridge and lost my balance. No reaction was forthcoming from The Teachers.

I can’t remember the rest of the day apart from a terrible rising fear about what would happen when my parents found out. When Hometime came, I rushed out of the door of the school and hugged my Dad, paying particular attention to covering his ears, in case any of the other children blurted it out as they met their parents.
It was something I wasn’t going to be able to keep up for ever.

I gave the same version of the story to Mum and Dad as I had to the teachers, and the story was accepted, but I felt enormously guilty about the whole affair. Olav had his arm cheerfully covered in plaster when he came back to school, and no grudge was held that I can remember.

I bumped into him in an Island nightclub a year or so ago, and in a jovial spirit, apologised for breaking his arm. He looked at me funnily (it was a £1-a-pint night in Colonel Bogey’s, so that may have had something to do with it) and frowned.

“That wasn’t you. I fell off.”