Concerning Constitutional Eruptions (#1)

Comrades –

I think it’s fair to say I was a rather sensitive child. I recall the spiteful Mister Adams, the then-deputy head of my secondary school (vile selective grammar in the heart of the Cotswolds with aspirations to the culture of an Etonesque boarding school for toffs combined, unhappily, with the bitter self-loathing of a non-fee-paying  institution that never quite sent enough people to Oxford nor the other place) remarking to another colleague as I was having a panic attack in the gym one day — “he’s a rather sensitive child” — the words spat out rather too loudly in order that I not only heard but also felt them and their implications of weakness, lily-livery and general divorce from masculinity, but also that the rest of the class would be clearly apprised of my position on the sensitivity scale (top right) and the corresponding position on the pecking order for the remainder of the educational experience (bottom left). Without fuss or noticeable effort charts were plotted and graphs extruded, and the mimeographed results passed around the year, detailing one’s position on the Physical Violence Index (A reasonable but improvable 3rd). Due to my increasingly undisguised contempt for the institution and its inmates this position steadily climbed over the years until I hit the heady heights of Number One — while my head was being highly hit — and let me tell you from painful but character-building experience that it is a true test of one’s ability to adopt an air of withering disdain when being dragged by one’s feet down four flights of concrete stairs by thirty braying schoolboys (although those of you that know me well will be unsurprised to hear I believe I succeeded). What smarted more than the tone and the volume was that this spiteful and malicious remark, like all honestly hurtful and malicious remarks, was actually the cast-iron truth. I was a rather sensitive child.

And while my sensitivity may these days be rather masked by powdery foundation of sneering cynicism and a brushed-over application of quick wit, there is one area where all the quick quips and the rambling run-on-sentences fail to reach. My deepest darkest sensitivity, that cannot be masked or hidden or helped in any way — is doubtless something more physical. It still occasionally surfaces despite my best intentions. It regularly and often hurriedly and without warning rises to the surface and is ejected violently from my body. My sensitivity, my friends, is constitutional. It is also eruptive. Often quite spectacularly so.

However despite the unpleasant nature of feeling my last meal rush with burning intensity through the delicate membranes of my nasal passages and spray into the toilet bowl, shimmering through my tears below me, I have been fortunate enough to have endured the trials of a vigourous vomiter in a number of hopefully instructive and/or amusing circumstances. And so in the first of what may turn out to be a reasonably long series of infrequent story posts, I present to you the following charming and heartwarming tale.

A Shaggy Dog Story

I was, I believe I may have already mentioned, a sensitive child. Certainly too sensitive to be sent to a Catholic primary school run by craggy bitter old nuns from the local convent, but given the absence of any other outpost of humanity within half a day’s walk, this was to be my lot. The school was at the other end of the village* — just past the phone box which in any other circumstance was just beyond the outer limits of my prescribed play area, despite its passing resemblance to a conning tower from which to shoot down the Millenium Falcon piloted by Han Solo (played with vigour and some good mouth-based blaster effects by Stuart Whitman) and Princess Leia (my sister, playing the role somewhat grudgingly, however it appears there really are no roles for women and she was stuck with it). The school had decided -– doubtless after a few dozen cases of severe life-long trauma –- that at the tender age of 5 we were too young to be confronted with a bony harridan in a blue habit with a face like a worried onion and we were gently led –- some would say inducted under false pretences -– into the world of the school by a homely woman called Mrs Bennett, all woolly jumpers and curly hair, with a tissue for every occaison and the ability to turn a deaf ear whenever a nascent pupil inadvertently called her ‘mummy’ for the fifth time that day (although she fell somewhat in my estimation when she once tried to call me ‘Jerry’ – let me tell you my fury knew no bounds that day, but that’s another insurance claim). We liked Mrs Bennett. Mrs Bennett liked us. She particularly liked me, because I was a smart kid, and so I went on The Clever Table. I’m not really sure that The Clever Table was a bona fide educational tool, and I’m equally uncertain that this sort of binary streaming at five years old is really the best sort of educational practice, but these were the 1970s and, well, I was on The Clever Table and thus didn’t give a fuck, lording it over the other (non-clever-table, normal table, stupid table) kids — a Mentally Magnificent Miniature Mussolini. Amazingly this didn’t turn me into a figure of loathing (it took years of developing what I have in place of a personality for that to occur). One possible reason for this is that I had Zebedee.

Zebedee was an Old-English Sheepdog. People in Australia have no idea what one of these is, even when prompted with the line “You know, the Dulux dog” or the possibly-even-more-helpful “You know, like Digby, The Biggest Dog in the World”. He was a big beautiful shaggy friendly dog that was my favourite companion (although until I went to school it was pretty much the dog or my sister, and the dog stole my Lego a bit less often) and at the end of the day he would appear in the classroom-length picture windows as my mum walked into the playground to collect me. All the other kids would look at him covetously and I would glow with the special kind of unearned pride that is familiar to anyone who’s ever had a famous friend. I loved him to bits (and I was later to discover that I owed him a great deal: however shitty and aspirationally-middle-class the name ‘Jeremy’ is, ‘Zebedee’ is a fuck of a lot worse and would have been my name had the dog not arrived a mere month before I was born).

All of Class 1 knew that Monday was going to be a bad day. For a start, The Clever Table were split up, forced to sully our pencil cases among the dribbling neanderthal classmates we generally used as footrests. For a second, Mrs Bennett was ill. Which meant Sister Alexis, with a face exactly like the old woman disguise the Wicked Queen adopts in Snow White, was taking her place. Sister Alexis was a five foot tower of terror who would brook no talking, no fidgeting and no smiling. You would certainly never refer to her as ‘mummy’. And she was making us do dictation. Now, I realise that the concept of making 5-year-olds do dictation is ridiculous, and I realise it could never ever in any real-world-scenario happen. But after years of working this through in my head, there really is no other explanation for it other than it actually happened. Five-year-olds, pencils wobbling precariously like cabers in their tiny hands, tongues poking delicately from the sides of their mouths in solid concentration as Sister Alexis read us some tosh about John the Baptist and we attempted to a) hear what she was saying through her thick Irish brogue b) spell the words and c) not get cramp. Still we did it, because Sister Alexis was scary as fuck. And we didn’t talk, or fidget, or smile. We just wrote.

Or rather most of us just wrote. One of us was sat there in a tiny blue chair (the red ones were less good, for some reason) with a little yellow dot on the back (this meant it was Even Better) sitting very still, holding in his hand a broken pencil. I could have just put my hand up and walked up the the front desk and sharpened it but as I have mentioned, Sister Alexis was scary as fuck. So I sat there and thought about pencils and thought about drawing and thought about cartoons and then the true horror of the situation  came crashing down around me: I was now so far behind everyone else that I was never going to catch up. Trouble the painful likes of which I had never known would befall me in the terrible shape of Sister Alexis’ hideous wrath (a bony finger between the shoulder blades).

And me, a guiding light from the Clever Table. Oh the humanity.

So I devised a plan. A plan so cunning and foolproof and devilishly clever that sensitive children throughout time have pressed it into action only when the situation absolutely demanded it, such is its power, adaptability and utter effectiveness: I started to cry.

Slowly, the plan worked. Around me my concerned classmates became aware of my silent sobbing and a murmur of “Jeremy’s crying” started to bubble about the room. This was enough to pause Sister Alexis who promptly swooped over to my desk and asked me what the matter was.

This created a problem. I was suddenly and starkly aware that in the cold light of ‘the facts’ I was crying because I had a broken pencil. Even in my despair, I realised this was a pretty fucking weak excuse to be crying. I needed something better. I needed something bigger. I needed a reason so big my almost completely empty page would be utterly overlooked. And it came to me, as if John the Baptist himself had reached out from his heavenly veil and popped it like shiny 5p into my ear.

Zebedee had to go.

“My dog’s died!”, I wailed, obviously rather convincingly, because Sister Alexis put her arm around me and gave me a hug. I saw my histrionics reflected in the empathetic eyes of the non-Clever Table children around me, and I knew that my old pal Zebedee had saved my life by giving up his own. But he had done far more than that. The entirely-fabricated death of a family pet had enormous unforeseen benefits. I was excused from dictation. I was allowed to play in the quiet corner. I was allowed to play in the quiet corner while everyone else had to continue working, which is like playing in the quiet corner, squared. It’s that good. But the best was yet to come.

Lunch followed, and despite all the bad press kids get about being cruel, they can also be incredibly kind and generous. I have no idea who the first child was to give me a piece of their lunch, maybe some raisins or a KitKat finger, a piece of Curlywurly or a Texan bar, but pretty soon, like a bunch of flower-bearing chavs making their way down to Whitehall in the wake of Princess Diana’s death (good riddance, the evil cow) they showered me with an embarrassment of edible riches.

Not being particularly grief-stricken, I wolfed down every last bit. I was in a Wonderful World of Disney crime caper movie, except instead of the plucky teen investigator, I was a criminal laughing and rolling around in piles of ill-gotten loot. I was trying my damnedest to look sad on the outside but inside I was in heaven. Actually, inside, things were about to get pretty hellish.

About fifteen minutes into the afternoon classes, when the sound of my retching echoing round the Class 1 toilet was distracting even the deafest pupil in the school, Sister Alexis decided that grief, overfeeding and vomiting was probably the limit of what a young boy should be put through in one day and called my mum to come and collect my grey, tear-streaked, wracked little body and return me to the comfort of my home. Mum rushed to the school as quickly as she could, and through the picture windows that ran the length of the classroom the whole class saw her arrive through the gates and onto the playground.

With the dog.

Who was clearly not actually dead.

“It’s a miracle!”, I should have cried, as St Joseph’s Catholic Primary is probably one of the few places in the world it might have worked. But I’d been expelling Double Deckers, birthday cakes, bits of apple, Jaffa Cakes and fish paste sandwiches for the last half an hour and wasn’t at my best, I fear. The horror of walking out of the door and feeling the disappointment and confusion of my classmates mist up along the picture window behind me was a terrible weight to carry. The guilt stung the back of my neck. The shame was like lead in my shoes. I have never forgotten the horror of that moment. But it taught me a very valuable lesson:

I needed to get a lot fucking better at lying.

Jeremy Saunders is in Paris.

* the village being Nympsfield in Gloucestershire, for those of you planning a coach tour of Places Jeremy Saunders Encored His Lunch