26th October 1962
If this story had background music, it would be Telstar – by the Tornadoes, since you look quizzical. Three bars of its electronic warble transports me straight back to the earliest times I can clearly recall. There were two dangers that threatened my existence when I was six. The Russians, and Miss Carney.
The Russians were just very, very bad. Everyone said so, so it must be true. Father Brown, the parish priest, told us many times that if the Russians invaded, he would be put up against a wall and shot. The Russians were always there, but also always distant, like rain clouds on the horizon.
On the other hand, Miss Carney was right there in front of me all my waking life. Miss Carney was very scary teacher for a six-year-old. To twenty-five bewildered ‘infants’, recently graduated from the reception class, Miss Carney introduced the mysteries of Being Silent and Folding Your Arms. In 1962, quite random corporal punishment was commonplace in Salford schools. Miss Carney doubled its impact on our behaviour by making absolutely sure none of the six-year-olds in her class could predict what would lead to a telling-off and slapped legs. So when one afternoon Miss Carney announced we would Listen Carefully For A Sound, In Silence, that is what we did.
In Salford we didn’t have school lunch breaks. We had dinner time. Dinner time lasted from 12.00 noon until half-past one. There were two choices: a school dinner costing one shilling, followed by an extended shriek around the playground, or to go home and have a dinner, cooked by your mum, then sit on the sofa watching the news and the test card, in black and white. Sometimes the test card was replaced by a short film of say, a pair of hands moulding a clay pot on a potter’s wheel, or a time-lapse film of a flower budding, blooming and fading.
If you got as far as ‘Watch with Mother’, you knew you were ill and were being kept at home, because by the time it came on afternoon school had started.
Miss Carney’s vigorous approach to class management could, and often did, result in a recently-enjoyed dinner being produced again. So when she ordered us to One, be silent, Two, fold our arms, and Three, rest our heads on our folded arms, that is exactly what we did, in unison, without question.
What I remember quite vividly then had never happened before and it never happened again. Miss Carney’s classroom had tall metal-framed windows all down one side, opening to the street. On the opposite side of the room, similar windows looked onto the main corridor. The windows were the sort that opened by tilting the top panel with long wooden window-pole. They would usually be opened a couple of inches if need be. On this day though, I peeked beneath my tatty fringe as Miss Carney proceeded to work feverishly at each and every window panel, pulling it laboriously to its maximum. Soon every window all round the room was lying flat open and a brisk breeze was riffling the wall displays.
That was when Miss Carney described to us the noise we were to listen for. She said it would be like a factory hooter. It might go up and down, or it might just be one sound that stayed the same. We were to listen and tell her which one it was. Then she simply stood very, very still.
We listened. Time passed. Cars passed. Sparrows twittered. Autumn trees rustled. And then……a swooping, up and down howl sounded somewhere in the distance. It was a very unimpressive sound considering the amount of window-opening that had taken place. Miss Carney stopped being a statue, said we could sit up, and went around shutting the windows. Our class resumed its normal routine of crayons, plasticine and fear.
More time passed. We grew up. We grew tall. We went our ways to new schools. We grew up more. Some of us took an interest in history. I was one. I came to realise there was a gap in my memory map. I could remember grainy, blurred reports showing the Berlin Wall going up. JFK’s assassination – the man reading the news bulletin had a wobble in his voice. Telstar. Yuri Gagarin and the Space Race. But then why did I have no memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962?
It took fifty years for me to piece it all together from the ragbag of childhood recollections. I now realise that an early warning alert was being used in Salford on the day of the Cuba Crisis. Had Armageddon kicked off, we would have enjoyed four minutes of discreet English panic before we died.
Miss Carney was a cruel tyrant of a teacher, but not inhuman. She had no concept of what a nuclear strike would do, but must have spent her teenage years seeing what happened in the Manchester Blitz. In her mind, she could protect these children by making sure the big classroom windows were not caught by the blast. At least she had formulated a plan – nobody else in authority had.
That October afternoon, our mothers and the dinner ladies had fed us, listened to the news, and packed us back to school. The education board, the council, and the government had responded to the Cuba Crisis with a rather creepy, unofficial, unorganised ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ message. There was no real assurance that our little suburb, our city, our islands would be anything other than a smear of ash within a couple of hours. Given all that insanity, opening the windows wide seems like all you could do.
Maybe listening to Telstar one last time would have been nice.
If this story had background music, it would be Telstar – by the Tornadoes, since you look quizzical. Three bars of its electronic warble transports me straight back to the earliest times I can clearly recall. There were two dangers that threatened my existence when I was six. The Russians, and Miss Carney.
The Russians were just very, very bad. Everyone said so, so it must be true. Father Brown, the parish priest, told us many times that if the Russians invaded, he would be put up against a wall and shot. The Russians were always there, but also always distant, like rain clouds on the horizon.
On the other hand, Miss Carney was right there in front of me all my waking life. Miss Carney was very scary teacher for a six-year-old. To twenty-five bewildered ‘infants’, recently graduated from the reception class, Miss Carney introduced the mysteries of Being Silent and Folding Your Arms. In 1962, quite random corporal punishment was commonplace in Salford schools. Miss Carney doubled its impact on our behaviour by making absolutely sure none of the six-year-olds in her class could predict what would lead to a telling-off and slapped legs. So when one afternoon Miss Carney announced we would Listen Carefully For A Sound, In Silence, that is what we did.
In Salford we didn’t have school lunch breaks. We had dinner time. Dinner time lasted from 12.00 noon until half-past one. There were two choices: a school dinner costing one shilling, followed by an extended shriek around the playground, or to go home and have a dinner, cooked by your mum, then sit on the sofa watching the news and the test card, in black and white. Sometimes the test card was replaced by a short film of say, a pair of hands moulding a clay pot on a potter’s wheel, or a time-lapse film of a flower budding, blooming and fading.
If you got as far as ‘Watch with Mother’, you knew you were ill and were being kept at home, because by the time it came on afternoon school had started.
Miss Carney’s vigorous approach to class management could, and often did, result in a recently-enjoyed dinner being produced again. So when she ordered us to One, be silent, Two, fold our arms, and Three, rest our heads on our folded arms, that is exactly what we did, in unison, without question.
What I remember quite vividly then had never happened before and it never happened again. Miss Carney’s classroom had tall metal-framed windows all down one side, opening to the street. On the opposite side of the room, similar windows looked onto the main corridor. The windows were the sort that opened by tilting the top panel with long wooden window-pole. They would usually be opened a couple of inches if need be. On this day though, I peeked beneath my tatty fringe as Miss Carney proceeded to work feverishly at each and every window panel, pulling it laboriously to its maximum. Soon every window all round the room was lying flat open and a brisk breeze was riffling the wall displays.
That was when Miss Carney described to us the noise we were to listen for. She said it would be like a factory hooter. It might go up and down, or it might just be one sound that stayed the same. We were to listen and tell her which one it was. Then she simply stood very, very still.
We listened. Time passed. Cars passed. Sparrows twittered. Autumn trees rustled. And then……a swooping, up and down howl sounded somewhere in the distance. It was a very unimpressive sound considering the amount of window-opening that had taken place. Miss Carney stopped being a statue, said we could sit up, and went around shutting the windows. Our class resumed its normal routine of crayons, plasticine and fear.
More time passed. We grew up. We grew tall. We went our ways to new schools. We grew up more. Some of us took an interest in history. I was one. I came to realise there was a gap in my memory map. I could remember grainy, blurred reports showing the Berlin Wall going up. JFK’s assassination – the man reading the news bulletin had a wobble in his voice. Telstar. Yuri Gagarin and the Space Race. But then why did I have no memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962?
It took fifty years for me to piece it all together from the ragbag of childhood recollections. I now realise that an early warning alert was being used in Salford on the day of the Cuba Crisis. Had Armageddon kicked off, we would have enjoyed four minutes of discreet English panic before we died.
Miss Carney was a cruel tyrant of a teacher, but not inhuman. She had no concept of what a nuclear strike would do, but must have spent her teenage years seeing what happened in the Manchester Blitz. In her mind, she could protect these children by making sure the big classroom windows were not caught by the blast. At least she had formulated a plan – nobody else in authority had.
That October afternoon, our mothers and the dinner ladies had fed us, listened to the news, and packed us back to school. The education board, the council, and the government had responded to the Cuba Crisis with a rather creepy, unofficial, unorganised ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ message. There was no real assurance that our little suburb, our city, our islands would be anything other than a smear of ash within a couple of hours. Given all that insanity, opening the windows wide seems like all you could do.
Maybe listening to Telstar one last time would have been nice.