A Somerset Lad

Invigilation – do they still use that word?

Invigilation always seemed a good word. People keeping vigil over you, it made them seem like protectors, guardians, rather than the stern figures charged with seeing that you did not contravene any of the numerous regulations that surrounded examinations.

Sitting supervising a mock examination for Junior Certificate science, I decided that the best way to keep vigil was to sit in a vacant middle seat at the back of the classroom. Students are much more wary about being watched when someone is behind them than when the person watching is in full view at the front. How do I know? Because I always hated it when teachers were at the back of a room during lessons and I was not sure what they could and could not see.

I don’t remember ever doing mock exams, certainly not exams with external printed papers and examination booklets. Perhaps there was less concern with examination results before education became commodified and reduced to a series of numbers on a certificate.

I struggled to remember sitting my Certificate of Secondary Education examinations at Heathercombe Brake School and have no recall of how they were administered. They must have taken place in a classroom, but did the teachers act as invigilators? Were they allowed to supervise their own students?

What is most baffling is I that I have no recall whatsoever of the examination where I would have been the only candidate. I had taken four of the subjects a year early, and was then meant to take five more in the final year. Being instinctively lazy, I dropped two of the five, and only continued with those I liked. One of the three subjects, World Affairs Since 1930, was one I was allowed to study by myself, which means I must have been examined by myself, but I have no memory of sitting alone. Perhaps its timing coincided with that of another subject and a mixed bag sat together in the room.

The A-Level examinations at Strode College in Street in Somerset were a different proposition. The sports hall became the examination hall and every exam was conducted with a rigid formaility. The chief invigilator was a stranger seated on a platform at the front of the hall. The silence was disturbing, it added to the sense of vulnerability as you turned over the paper and panicked as you read through the questions, each more difficult than its predecessor.

Examinations became a regular feature of life. There were undergraduate examinations at the LSE, theological examinations at Trinity College, Dublin, Open University examinations in Belfast. Each time the experience was similar.

Perhaps it is a case of repressing memories, but from all of those moments which would be significant in shaping my future, I do not remember the face of a single one of the people watching the candidates

The taste of spearmint sweets and all at once it is a Saturday afternoon.

Chewing gum was, of course, banned from school.

To have a packet of Wrigley’s was not considered as great an offence as having a packet of Player’s No 6 or a bottle of Autumn Gold cider, they would have meant a journey to the principal’s office and a caning, the gum would merely have been confiscated and thrown in the bin.

The prohibition of chewing gum causes me to wonder how I came to have a packet in my pocket that Saturday afternoon. I know it was Spearmint because I preferred Doublemint and was annoyed at not having any. Perhaps it had been bought the previous Saturday and had remained in my coat pocket because it was not the favoured flavour.

Being a skinny kid under five feet tall and less than seven stone in weight (the statistics are from my school report of the time!), I might not have been expected to have been among the lads two years older who sat at the back of the bus. For some reason, they included me among their number, and I would sit awkwardly in the corner seat, often not understanding their conversations.

The strip of Spearmint gum marked the beginning of the journey to Plymouth. It was rare that we were allowed to go there. To those of us from small, rural villages it seemed like a big city, to the boys from London and the Midlands, it was just an ordinary town.

The journey was being made to allow those who wished to do so to attend the League Division 3 match between Plymouth Argyle and Charlton Athletic. Argyle were challenging for promotion to Division 2 and the terraces of their Home Park ground were filled with supporters.

In one of those extraordinary moments of synchronicity, I have just Googled the match to discover that it was played on 8th February 1975, exactly forty-seven years ago today. Not only are the details of the match to be found, there is even footage of the match online. (It is not possible to spot a short, skinny kid chewing gum among the 22,946 supporters).

Why after such a lapse of time did the taste of spearmint evoke memories of a match hardly remembered in the intervening years? Is it the case, as some psychologists have argued, that everything we have seen and heard is stored in our memory, and the question is one of retrieval? Deep within the recesses of my memory, is there a file marked “8th February 1975?”

If there is a file, it’s not very comprehensive, it can recall Spearmint gum, but not that Plymouth Argyle missed a penalty that would have won the match in the 89th minute.

League of Ireland football is comparable with National League football in England. Small clubs rooted in the community with intimate grounds where player and spectator are in close proximity.

Sitting in the stand at Richmond Park with sheets of rain coming in from the west, attending the pre-season friendly match against Cork City seems not as wise a choice as the alternative which was to stay in the warm watching Ireland play Wales.

Then there comes a moment when time seems to slip.

The smallness of the ground allows the possibility of being seated within a few metres of the players’ tunnel. The pre-match warm up finishes and the players return to the dressing room. There is the echoing sound of studs on concrete.

Suddenly, it is not a bitterly cold February afternoon in Inchicore in 2022, instead it is a bright Saturday morning in Devon in the mid-1970s.

The sound of studs on concrete is the sound of teenage boys walking through the archway that led to the backyard of the school after Saturday morning football. In memory, boots had to be swapped for shoes under the archway. In memory, there are wire cages in which the boots are placed. Whatever the details, the stone would echo with the clatter of the boots and the loud conversation of boisterous adolescents.

It was a sound of joy, a sound of exuberance. After changing, there would be lunch and then the few hours of freedom brought by Saturday afternoon. The school bus would draw up at the end of the drive at two o’clock, those over-fifteen years old would be allowed to get off the bus in Torquay, the younger boys had to go to Paignton.

Of course, our upbeat mood was irrational, there was nothing about which to be excited. Torquay would be the same place it was the previous Saturday, and we would do nothing we had not done on many previous occasions. We would go to a cafe, look at records, mooch around the town.

In retrospect, it all seems very dull, but at the time there was a sense of something indefinable, something that we could not have articulated, and which defies articulation even now.

Perhaps it was about optimism, about anticipating the undiscovered country that lay ahead. Perhaps the sound of football boot studs on concrete was the sound that announced a taste of the freedom we hoped to enjoy in the world beyond our years at the school. Perhaps there was a deep and irrational sense of hope that never quite dies, no matter how distant becomes the memory of those Saturday mornings.