In my bit of England, when I were a lad, we had infant, junior, secondary schools, 6th form college; and if you were lucky, university.
I was reminded the other day of an “incident” at junior school (7-11 years old) that still sends shivers of embarrassment down my spine when I think about it 30 years later!
Every year we had a “prize-giving” day - in those days, being labelled as a winner or a loser was still acceptable (I’ve got some other stuff about this that I will write about later).
We had a young female teacher, who, in the minds of 10 year olds, was a goddess: I guess we must have been approaching puberty. Ma Wilson (all female teachers were prefixed with “Ma” by the pupils) kept a rubbish bin under her desk. Something that kept us busy one day was the rumour that you could look up her skirt and see her knickers if you diverted your eyes while pretending to be looking in the bin. It just so happened that we sharpened our pencils into that bin. Like the 25 other boys (it was an all boy school), I had a good look, but all was dark. All I can tell you is that everybody’s pencil was shorter at the end of the day than it was at the beginning.
Anyway, Ma Wilson, was a cosmopolitan girl: she was into Disco music and instigated dance lessons - dance lessons at an all-boys school! We must have been really infatuated, because quite a few of us went along. You’ve got to picture the scene: in England, kids wear school uniforms - we were all in grey shirts and trousers with burgundy ties and Doc Marten boots (the number of lace-holes was a measure of how “hard” you were). A bunch of pre-pubescent kids, identically and inadequately dressed, lined up before a young, beautiful female teacher, following dance lessons. Because it’s always good to have a goal in life (apparently), she decided that we were going to learn the steps to “Night-Fever”, the Bee-Gees standard from Saturday Night Fever. Not only were we going to learn the steps, we were then going to perform them in front of the whole school at the said prize-giving, including the ageing group of school governors who were wheeled out for the occasion.
When the moment arrived, she duly rolled out her record-player (if you don’t know what a “record” is, refer to one of my earlier articles), lined up the aspiring disco-dancers and set us off: 3 steps to the left, point left-hand towards the ceiling at an angle of approximately 60° to the vertical, 3 steps to the right, with corresponding arm movement. Now walk forward towards aligned seated septuagenarian school governors whilst twiddling arms in the same way that football coaches do when they want to substitute a player. And so it went on. And on. And on.
The embarrassment was palpable and it takes my breath away even now, 30 years later. I can’t remember how many of us did the dance, but I would love to know if I am the only one who:
- remembers it
- feels the same physical feeling of embarrassment just by thinking about it.
Poor old Ma Wilson; I wonder what happened to her? I’m sure she was a good teacher, but I am pretty sure she steered clear of dance lessons at all-boy schools. And I don’t think many of the governors will have got out of their bath chairs to copy the moves.
If you want to see how it should be done so you can see just how deeply this marked me, here is John Travolata in the original film, dancing pretty much the same moves, albeit in a slightly different style.
