FEED THE WORLD
The terrible thing about being at school during the mid eighties were the famines in Ethiopia.

Being a kid from Coventry who had his fill of fish fingers and McCains oven chips, I didn’t have much concept of famine, but the endless, relentless playing of that bloody awful song by Band Aid made me want to vomit – Bob Geldof deserved a hearty, swift kick in the bollocks for that audible, trite, load of stinky clam-clappers abortion of a song, not a fucking knighthood. So, in my way, I suffered.

For humanities (a subject where you get all touchy-feely and talk about how to make the world a better place through the awsome power of talking shit and doing pie charts), we were divided up into groups for our end of year project. The swats joined forces, the kids from the same estates grouped together, and what was left over formed my group – my mate Terry, a lad named Darren who had head lice, and a girl named Sarah who had infamously had a peperami shoved up her clout behind the bikesheds by her boyfriend, who then sold the sticky fanny battered pork product to Greggy Smith for a cool five pounds.

We were absolutely shit at humanities. And the teacher, the lovely Miss Gainey, was away shooting out a sprog so we had a series of supply teachers who monitored the lessons for a whole half term while we were supposed to be putting together our presentation. The other groups were going great guns, developing irrigation systems for use in third world countries, inventing fuels out of used bits of goat shit – but we just sat round and drew pictures and tried to look busy.

Then, a week before the end of term, we discovered the presentations were going to be made infront of the school at assembly. There was even going to be some geezer from Coventry City Council there, something to do with Education. Apparently he was a bigwig and had to be impressed. My group instantly and similtaniously shat itself.

We had to come up with something – fast.

And, in the space of about thirty minutes, we came up with our project that we should’ve been working on for the whole term. It was Terry’s idea. I blame him. It was a shit idea. But we had fuck all else to fall back on (a load of exercise books filled with games of naughts and crosses and elaborate drawings of willies are only going to get you so far). So we decided to do a presentation from the point of view of those suffering from the famine. Step forward, do a little bit of: “Ohh, I’m so hungry and it hasn’t rained for bleedin’ ages!” Job done. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. When Miss Gainey returned from preggers leave she didn’t even rest her boobs on my shoulder while she corrected my work, like she’d always done previously (it was our special little thing), she was that fucking pissed off. It was as if we'd just received instant membership to the Klu-Klux-fucking-Clan, though we wern't racist, just incredibly fucking stupid.

Fast forward to the day of the presentation. The fella from the council, a black guy in his fifties in a nice pressed suit, is being shown round the school by the headmaster. Things are going well, no doubt the headmaster is banging on about inclusion and race relations – the usual inner-city twattery made all the more apparent now that he’s showing a black man round who earns more money than he does. (Remember, this was the eighties and things were still a bit shit re. race equality in the Midlands).

The assembly’s a few minutes away. The hall is filling up with bored kids trying their hardest to look even more bored. The humanities class are, in their individual groups, adding the last minute touches to their various presentations. And just at that moment, as the headmaster is showing this council official round the lobby, my group who’ve been getting ready walks past. We each say: “Hello, Sir,” meekly, and continue on our way. The head and his guest just stare. Then the head starts trying to explain something to the visitor. He eventually gives up.

I don’t think even our head, king of making bullshit appear like gold, could come up with a plausible reason why four white kids, still dressed in their school uniforms, had filed past with their faces blacked out to resemble members of the black and white minstrel show...

The black guy from the council fumed and didn’t look too pleased.

And we didn’t get to do the presentation. Instead we were sent out onto the playing fields with empty bin liners on litter duty, but only after we’d scrubbed our faces raw getting the boot polish off.
( SpankyHanky, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 11:33, Reply)