Back in 2002, in the early days of the wideworldinterweb, when people still paid attention to Friends Reunited and other cave paintings, someone did something cruel, evil, and funny. Some unknown person (or at least unknown to me, though they are presumably known to themselves) from my old school, or perhaps two or more people working together, although the literary style suggests a single writer, appropriated the identities of several (10) Lutterworth High School and Grammar School* old boys and girls and made entries on Friends Reunited in their names (*it was and is actually a Comprehensive school, but continued to go by the name of Grammar School, even after the medieval era. Mind you, though, if you think that’s bullshit, it’s now called Lutterworth College). Anyway, as I navigated around the Lutterworth-schools sections of the re-acquaintance-themed netsite, I noticed that the interconnections between the unlikely entries told a dark and exciting tale of alien invasion, conspiracy, murder, incarceration, escape, and robots. The entries and the tale they told came from the differing individual points of view of the stolen identities who were the purported writers. The clues that allowed readers to link from one to another were mentions of names in one entry which tempted you to log on to the named person and see what their entry said. Sure enough, it would contain a continuation or another version of the story. Total brilliance. In the meantime, it had a bit of fun with the characters concerned, whether they were the supposed writers or others named in the story—usually old Lutterworth High School teachers of the 1976-79 era, l’epoch Clunk.
After a while, the entries got reported and taken down. Luckily for humankind, however, I cut and pasted them into a Word document, so they have survived for posterity. Well, actually, I’ve since lost the e-document, but I recently rediscovered a hard copy, which today I scanned and copied into this blog post for your amusement. Obviously, the said reproduction is going to be of greatest interest, if it's of any interest at all, to those who went to school in Lutterworth in the seventies and very early eighties. But the way the story is constructed and the medium through which it was told may also interest others who are interested in that sort of thing. (I apologise, btw, for the pretty shitty quality of the reproduction, but there you go.)
The supposed lead story-teller and hero of the whole scenario is David Clarke, or Clark, or Clunk--as he was always known. The nickname, Clunk, which to the best of my recollection he carried throughout his school years from the age of 5 to 16, was a perpetual and pithily hilarious reminder that he suffered from severe learning difficulties. Incidentally, and this is the point at which I digress, I remember that one social-economic indicator that every schoolboy and girl back then recognised was the number of arms a kid had on his or her glasses. If he or she always had two arms, both of which were always in perfect repair, then he or she clearly came from at least a solvent family, and perhaps even a family that was quite well off. If they always had two, but with one of them sometimes attached with, say, a sticking plaster or band-aid, then they were from a poorer family but one with capable, make-do-and-mend kind of parents. If they went around for periods of time with just one arm to help their nose in its job of supporting their spectacles, however, then their parents were obviously poor and relatively un-resourceful in other respects as well. The longer the periods spent with one-armed glasses, the poorer and less resourceful the family was likely to be. Now, where is this leading, you may well be asking? Well, the thing is, in my recollection, Clunk, whose parents were, alas, very poor and un-resourceful on account of their own obviously severe learning difficulties, usually came to school with one arm on his glasses. Except for one day, when he came to school with no arms on his glasses. To cope with the fact that the second arm had become detached and had presumably somehow got lost, one of Clunk’s parents had, in an attempt at resourcefulness that was so desperate that it was in its own special way valiant and admirable, attached his glasses to his face with an elastic band going around the back of his head. The effect--that is, the tension stretching the skin on Clunk's face and the consequent contortion of Clunk's eyes--most likely impaired Clunk’s vision even more than his original genetic defect, so someone was probably doing him a favour in assembly when they placed their finger beneath the elastic band and then quickly lifted it, sending the glasses and band flipping spectacularly through the assembly hall air for a good 20 metres and maybe more. Poor Clunk.
Anyway, the others in the story. Reggie Lightbrown was called Goony on account of the fact that he was both mentally and physically goonish, goonoid, and indeed goony. Ian Holcroft was called Scabby because he had eczema. And Shane Richards was called Honey Monster because he looked exactly like the Honey Monster in the Sugar Puffs adverts back in the seventies. We were not witty, as such, we were quite literal, and we were cruel, but we were funny. Or so it seemed to us at the time. The other “writers” had no particular nicknames, but their idiosyncrasies are vividly displayed in the characterisations given to them here by the actual writer. The other non-authorial characters featured in the narrative include Clunk’s older brother, Charley, who had considerably greater learning difficulties than even Clunk, and never went to normal school, but could often be seen sadly lumbering around Lutterworth with little more physical agility or mental awareness than a bovine that had escaped from its farm and found itself confused and terrified by the people and the cars and the noise of the town. Charley Clarke was picked up and dropped off at our school each day on his way to and from his special-needs school, a passenger on what we routinely referred to as "The Spag Chariot". I remember an English teacher going absolutely batshit at us when he heard us calling it that, though I can't remember his name, though I can remember knowing he was right but my friends and I carrying on like that anyway. The other non-authorial characters are teachers from 1970s Lutterworth High School. Mr Greenhalgh was indeed a terrifying and mentally unstable deputy head with a penchant for grabbing children by the tie and half-throttling them if he deemed the knots of their neckwear to be excessively large. Mr Seal was indeed an inadequate and consequently sadistic PE teacher, if you’ll excuse the redundancies in this sentence. And Mr Elliott, a music teacher, did indeed, I now realise after reading this story, resemble a robot.
As you will no doubt already have noticed, the people in this story or these stories are people who stood out: hated teachers and weird kids. People who, frankly, bring out the worst in most of us: sometimes these weird kids suffered, as many of the rest of us were often cruel to these people. I am not proud and I have no excuses that will save me from eternal fire if such eternal torment actually exists, but I would like to say that if I had been 45 when I was 5 and 46 when I as 16 I would definitely have behaved differently. One thing I will say is that some of the teachers were little better than us children back then. I still remember Mr Bailey taking the register and calling one kid “Jathon Watth”. Because Jason Watts had a lisp, see, see, fnnrwaahaa? Thththththththth—hahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa. A fucking teacher, for Christ’s sake. I remember well enough that I was not immune myself from the mockery of teachers and peers. During one of the more corpulent stages of my childhood, for example, Mrs Knapp called me a “fat slob” in a geography lesson, and for no particular reason that I can recall. I remember also being called “Elephant” and greeted with such salutations as, in the local accent, “SARS! You big, fat fookoh!” Sadly, none of that taught me to be any more considerate of the feelings of others, or not at the time anyway. For example, the person who nicknamed me “Elephant” I nicknamed “Pipes” because he was skinny, like a pipe-cleaner. Fortunately, I believe things are rather better in schools these days. Or at least the teachers are made to behave better, even if there’s not much you can do about the kids.
So why am I reproducing this and putting it out into the world on my blog? Well, perhaps it’s not justifiable. In fact, it really probably isn’t. But I’d say this: the protagonists are highly unlikely to see it, and if they do then it was all a long time ago by now. I don’t think it’s particularly nasty, anyway. Indeed, Clunk actually comes of it rather well. Here, he’s obviously intelligent and literate, which one must suppose he kept a secret at school. He is a bit paranoid and rather irresponsible with regards to firearms, and yet he’s fundamentally decent, heroic, and kind of a Fox Mulder figure. Besides all that, some old friends from time to time over the last nine years have mentioned that they too saw this story on Friends Reunited, and in turn I’ve mentioned that I believed I had a copy somewhere and would let them see it again if I found it. And it was a cleverly inventive and therefore interesting use of what was then a new medium of communication. And it’s pretty funny. If you don’t think any of what’s below or above is funny, then fair enough, I admire you, you are a saint, and I apologise. But I bet you did. Go on, admit it. You knew you shouldn’t, but you did. Go on. Admit it. You did. Yes you did.
