The idea was we would all have a daffodil of our own nurturing to wear on St David's Day. Miss Postelthwaite presented all Year Ones (seven and eight-year-olds) at Holy Trinity Juniors with a daffodil bulb to overwinter.
I overwatered mine.
The first morning of spring term my mother rang my headmaster. ‘Iestyn's father is at this very moment walking Iestyn to school via Lower Marsh market to buy a replacement daffodil, Mr Tonge,’ she said. ‘Iestyn overwatered the bulb the school very kindly gave him to rear as a Christmas holiday project and killed it.’
At parents' evening when I was eleven, my mother told Mrs Spinoza, head of housecraft, 'Iestyn failed to sieve the flour into his homework apple crumble.'
I was twelve when she buttonholed my choir master at Southwark Cathedral. 'Dr Bramma, now. Iestyn has been moonlighting, in a very low way.'
Performing the role of Sandy in a school assembly of Grease.
NB: this was in a mixed-sex school. But aged twelve, I was the only pupil at Archbishop Michael Ramsey with both the high notes for “Hopelessly Devoted to You”, and the cleavage for “You’re the One that I Want”.
Ofsted shut my school down a decade ago with a rating of AH - Abandon Hope...
Also, bear with me, can we just recall the time my mother turned up at my father's day job?
When Terry 'the Bargoed Yodeller' Edwards (my father) needed some extra income (very often, with his seven pints minimum a night habit) he worked on the bins in Battersea as plain 'Tel'. In the middle of one such contract, Tex ‘Jessie’ Jameson booked Terry for a fortnight's yodelling at the El Paso in St. Austell. Terry paid Doctor Halfpenny the £1.40 to sign him off as sick from the bin round.
NB: I don't know what Dr Halfpenny would be called in today's money, taking inflation into account. Dr Twenty-Seven Pounds Sixty?
'Are you Clarence Pugh, the chief shit-shoveller?’ My mother was wearing her old WRAF uniform, with her hair slicked and side parted.
Dressed to distress.
And with Terry's sick giros in her hand.
She advised Clarence to sit up straight behind that desk unless he was meaning to court slipped discs.
And had he seen the main entrance recently? Someone could do with a chucking round of a duster and mop. The dust off the swing doors reminded her of the sandstorms when she was posted to Egypt.
Furthermore, Clarence, we must leave two-and-a-half inches of curtain fabric showing on either side, not have them the curtains drawn right back to the point of a completely nude window - that was common!
Now - Terry’s sick giros. Clarence must have them straight back. Terry hadn’t been off sick. He’d been moonlighting, yodelling.
Oh, Clarence, now, really, she had seen more convincing innocent acting from Joan Collins. No giros for Terry - but how about a thought in the direction of offering his wife a cup of tea? Come all the way from Lambeth Bridge on the forty-four bus, she had, parched.
Tear up those giros while she watched, there’s tidy, now, Clarence.
‘Oh, and a plate for the biscuits next time – even, heaven forfend, a doily.'
NB – my mother always dressed to distress (Clarence, me, my father’s mistresses, et al) even when she was phoning.
So, as I say, no self-nurtured daffodil for me on St David's Day that year.
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