Electric Braes And Gassy Bananas
It's that time of year when nervous, twitching school teachers across Scotland are told to trade their corduroy jacket for a white one with extra long sleeves. I refer, of course, to the season of the school trip. I've suggested we cover this on the MacAulay & Co Show because, if I'm right, thousands of listeners will have their own memories to share and exorcise. Call it communal counselling if you like. An on-air support group. Just another example of your public service ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in action.
Let me start the ball rolling with my own experiences. My name is Jeff and I'm a survivor. As your gentle applause fades, let me transport you back to the early 1970's. It was the era of MB bars, Whizzer & Chips and Stylophones. Junior Showtime was on the STV and little Lena Zavaroni was duetting with Glynn Poole. (boy did I want to slap his smug little face). Over on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 1 the Blue Peter team were explaining how you could have hours of fun by collecting pebbles at the seaside and then washing them at home. Who needed to sniff glue when Mother Nature offered this kind of excitement?
All you had to do was find a beach.
That's where the school trip came in. Glasgow schools invariably bussed their children to the Ayrshire coast in the hope that a few hours on a windy seafront would expunge twelve months of industrial pollution. In those days soot was one of the five recommended food groups.
Our school favoured Ayr or Troon as reachable destinations. I recall that parents of the better-off pupils had to fork out cash for this annual treat. There was the veiled threat that anyone who hadn't stumped up the money would be left behind doing really hard sums in the Headmaster's office. In the end, of course, even the poor kids who hadn't paid were allowed on the bus. This caused a brief flurry of resentment among the rest of us and sowed the seeds of Mrs Thatcher's eventual rise to power.
But I digress.
Negotiations about seating positions on the bus usually began a week or two before the actual trip.
"Who are you sitting beside on the trip to Troon?" became a frequently posed question. I liken it to American High School kids asking each other who they have invited to the Senior Prom. No one wanted to be left without a partner. This would invite ridicule and, for the boys, the possibility that one might be forced to sit next to a girl. The girls, it should be said, tended to be much more sensible about the whole business. They would behave themselves - indulging in whispered verbal assassinations of classmates - while the boys ran up and down the aisle stealing sandwiches from each other and generally messing about until a red-faced teacher would bellow a "final warning" that anymore nonsense would result in the bus heading back to the school where the Headmaster was already devising some sums that were even harder than the last lot. This "final warning" tended to be repeated six or seven times on each leg of the journey.
The journey itself had its own moments of excitement...even the interior of the bus impressed us. Hitherto most of us had travelled on big yellow and green double decker Corporation buses, complete with slashed and repaired vinyl upholstery. School trips tended to involve a single-decker "luxury" coach where, to our astonishment, the seats appeared to be covered in carpets. Carpets, I tell you! And this was when most of us boasted that we had linoleum in our bedrooms.
The journey also had moments of sheer magic. Once we diverted through the Ayrshire countryside so that we could experience the famous . This is a kind of optical illusion produced by the skewed landscape. The idea is that you switch off the engine and your car or bus appears to roll uphill all by itself. Many who witnessed this phenomenon became hysterical and lost control of their bladders. Others - and I was one - couldn't actually see what the fuss was about but pretended to see the illusion anyway. I can never get those Magic Eye things they do in newspapers either. Unless they say it's a sign of intelligence in which case I pretend to see those too.
On arrival in Troon or Ayr, we would we given a stern warning about our behaviour and a spiel about how we were representing the school and, oh, more stuff about hard sums waiting for us in the classroom. Then we would disembark with the kind of restrained excitement shown by the Zulu warriors who charged at Rorke's Drift. Only the promise of food could get us back into line and this came in the form of school packed lunches. Now, my mind may be playing tricks on me, but I could swear these packed lunches involved a carton of warm milk and a cold mutton pie.
Yes, that must be true because I remember we all gave our pies to one of the very poor kids who we quaintly termed a "grubber" He tried to eat the lot but failed and so we fed the leftover grub to the gulls. They would swoop down, lift entire pies in their beaks and then glide over the town dropping globules of greasy mutton on unsuspecting pensioners.
Ayr was a decent enough location for a school trip. It had a beach and funfair and lots of chip shops. I played my first and only game of bingo there and won a table lamp...as well as some hard stares from mutton-stained pensioners sitting next to me.
Troon would have been fine in the sunshine, but there was little for us to do there when it rained. I recall the entire class cramming into a steamy amusement arcade where, having frittered our pocket-money away in the penny falls, we spent the rest of the afternoon watching our teachers play 'Pong', little realising we were witnessing the birth of a billion pound video games industry.
The worst disaster was the year our teachers decided we were in need of a bit of cultural enlightenment and set a course for . This beautiful historic property once provided a home for General Eisenhower. It's managed by the National trust for Scotland and I'm afraid those gentile ladies from the NTS did not relish the prospect of thirty oiks from the east end of Glasgow rampaging around their pristine rooms. We were allowed to enter on a staggered basis, two at a time. After that were allowed to make our way across the castle grounds and down to the little beach below the cliff tops.
Well, you can imagine how much time each pair spent in the actual castle. Put a stopwatch on us and you'd have had contenders for the Commonwealth Games.
Finally, there was the journey home. This was usually a more subdued affair, but with frequent stop-offs for vomiting. It was only on the way home that we tended to open the little bags our parents had given us for the journey. These usually contained sandwiches and bananas. Of course, after so many hours baking on a bus, the bread was crisp to the touch and the bananas were black and producing enough methane to power a small country.
But all in all, I take my hat off to those teachers who were prepared to supervise such trips. Without them we wouldn't have all these wonderful childhood memories.
Feel free to add yours.
