Autobiography by Morrissey

as Mr Chew has his trapped audience before him, he is in Measure for Measure delight. Nothing, I have decided, could waste precious life more than trigonometry and logarithms. Meriting equally fully plumbed hatred is Mr Hawthorn, who wastes each woodwork lesson by roasting and scorching every boy before him; no intellectual distinction, yet a fascinating study in volatility, Mr Hawthorn is pitiful to watch – every word uttered without hope, his Eric Morecambe spectacles completing the nightmare unleashed. No one laughs at his jokes, because they are not funny, and they are always hurtful. Mr Chesworth runs the metalwork class, but he does not teach it because his irritability causes the boys to close down and back off. His favorite trick is to creep up behind a boy and then pull the boy’s head back by the hair, to which the rest of the class fall silent at the vocational hatred.
    A single minute is not allowed to pass without fiery physical attack from teacher to boy. With no identifiable human being behind the agonized persona, such teachers are restored only by the general truth that the trapped audience before them cannot squeal, for no one would listen. The classroom is their stage, and each day is their theatrical execution – to our joint disadvantage. What gives these teachers the green light for such relentless physical harm? And who, without seeing it, could ever believe it? Warped with trial–sentence–death affixed to their brows, the teachers of St Mary’s block the route to education, because, after all, why bother? The rabble before them are refuse – future postmen at best, largely unemployable, unfit, and ripe for life’s incinerator. Ruggedly rugger-grunting Mr Thomas’s concentrated insults are his only connecting moments with the boys stuck in his company – boys who surely hammer-rammer his nightly dreams.
    ‘Does your mother know you’re truanting?’ Mr Pink leans from his car window as I sidle along the street. I had discovered that if you were to walk out of the school building with concentrated quietism that you would be neither stopped nor thought to be suspicious, and this I did regularly for days of self-exile in Longford Park – awaiting signs of 3:40 movement when it would be safe to be seen on civilian streets. All of the vile merging forces of St Mary’s reduced me to nobody, and it could only be by fleeing the wreckage that I saved myself. To know this was to be guilty – guilty of something. To vary facial expression could lead to a beating, and boys would be forced to hang from the wall-bars in the gym with their bodies facing outwards as Mr Kijowski kicked a football towards them, targeting the stomach whilst demanding that they do not raise their legs in self-protection. It is barbarism. On days of whipping rain we are nonetheless forced outside into a wet yard for what was known as ‘break time’ as – blatantly beyond logic – we are herded out into the rain with all of its obvious detriments. We are then brought back into the school, ravaged and soaked by the bad weather. During several lessons, I stand up and protest against this mayhem, explaining how no one should be forced to go out into a blizzard of rain that will leave them drenched for the rest of the day. But no matter what one thought one knew, if the boys remained inside the building then the teachers must lose their own ‘break’ in order to watch them, and it was for this reason only that dry kids were ordered outside into cloud juice.
    ‘Yes,’ snaps Miss Power, ‘and YOU’RE another one not content with the hair color given to you by Christ.’ Baffled, I immediately imagined Christ setting my hair beneath a blow-dryer, but of course this is in fact Miss Power’s boorish way of drawing attention to my 14th-year adventure of hair of canary-yellow streak. Kath Moores, a close friend who lived in Dukinfield, had whisked the yellow streak through my hair from left corner front to right corner back.