The folly of youth By Steve Way

 

I was recently reading a compilation of articles by former school inspector Gervase Phinn, which included many examples of the innocent but hilarious sayings of some of the primary school children he had come across. It made me think about a time when I caused my primary school head teacher to fall backwards, helplessly laughing as a result of something I said. I would be interested to know if you remember naively and unintentionally causing merriment for the teachers or adults around you. (I note that Mr Hayden was crouching down on the grass in front of us, where we were all sitting, so he came to no harm – it was more of a backwards roll than a fall.)

There are usually more disadvantages than advantages in having a surname that begins with a letter towards the end of the alphabet. Perhaps if I’d had less time to stew on my conundrum, I might not have uttered such nonsense… perhaps.

“I need you to remind me what colour your house is,” Mr Hayden had said. Mr Hayden was often responsible for teaching us maths, so I thought we were doing some kind of a survey. Only very rarely at our school did we split into one of four ‘houses’ of different colours, mainly only sports day in fact (which at the time was only a few weeks away hence, as it turned out, the Head’s question.)

Of course, right from the start, I had got the wrong end of the stick but I had an added dilemma. My parents, well in this case my dad, had recently repainted the outside of the house. Naturally, I had no say in the matter but even at my tender age I didn’t like the nondescript boring colour they had chosen. Not being one of the standard primary colours I wasn’t sure how to describe it.

While I was struggling with this dilemma, I became vaguely aware of two things. One was that my classmates seemed to live in houses that were painted in only a narrow range of colours, all of them primary and that at least one of them appeared to have got the colour of their house wrong. One lad who lived in the same road as us answered ‘red’ but I was certain that each day on my way to school I passed a blue coloured garage and front door.

Another corner of my fevered brain was struggling with the idea that Mr Hayden had asked to be ‘reminded’ of the colour of our houses. He was a conscientious teacher, one of the best in fact, but I couldn’t quite fathom why at any time he needed to know what the colour of our house happened to be.

Eventually, it was my turn to answer. I thought I had at last found a solution to my primary quandary. I’d decided upon a way of describing the new colour my parents had used.

“Well… it’s a sort of coffee colour…” I said warily, still wondering how Mr Hayden would be able to incorporate this unusual shade into his survey.

It was as Mr Hayden was falling backwards helplessly and my classmates were either laughing at me or looking at me wondering what planet I was actually inhabiting at this moment (I think they often wondered that) that the penny dropped. Finally I understood why Paul, or whatever his name was, said his 'house' was red when it was definitely painted blue.

Of course by then it was too late.

My answer, if you're at all interested was supposed to be yellow.

Though I sometimes wonder if I should have been able to represent ‘a sort of coffee colour’ house all of my own.