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About John Peel
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Parents' Evening
Pupil, parent and teacher, Ian Whitwham, gives the low down on Parents' Evening from all sides...
We are back in the fifties Grammar school. It is Parents’ Evening. I am with my mother. I am a pupil. The masters sit in rows like crows with their brylcreemed centre partings and their robes of Academe. A grim inquisition. We are in awe. Most nervous.
I polish my shoes on the back of the grey flannels. Mother has got herself up. In a floral item - she’s been poured into it and forgotten to say when - and a hat of a type favoured by the French Resistance. We move along the grim patrician stare. Mr. Sam Morgan, his face scorched by 30 years of whiskey and rage, gives us ten seconds of his attention,
"Whitwham? - who? Satis - good on Venezuela".
‘Thank you’.
‘N±ð³æ³Ù!’
We move on. And endure more brief verdicts - they seem to range from satis to clueless to hopeless. I peak at satis. Mother is still awe-struck . She left school at twelve. They’ve read all those books. We haven’t. We’ve only got The Observer Book of Jets and Biggles.We come away groggy with unsolicited insult. I’m a bad on Bismarck, Cosines, Agrarian Reform, Trade Winds, Silas Marner, Zeugma, the Pluperfect, most irregular French verbs, All Science - and the forward defensive. I am good on Googlies however - and Venezuela. At Algebra I stray into the moronic. Art I should give up. Or in. My French teacher suggests that "he would be better off planting Vegetables’. Mother thanks him for his deliberations. We shuffle off and she cuffs me. I must be better than vegetables.
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