Author: Martin Kemp

Martin Kemp- 15/12/2012

I arrived at Winbury in1949. My elder brother Steve was already there so he became Kemp Major and I was Kemp Minor. My younger brother Jerry arrived a year later and he was Kemp Minimus. We were taught by a fierce man called Smerdon, and played football on a heavily sloping stretch of ground within the school. Having only attended Mamzelle Blonay's mixed kindergarten in Bath Road Taplow which was also home to a secondary school inhabited by of somewhat terrifying and fierce older girls (no doubt the source of some of my hang-ups, as I used to dream about them),

I was completely bewildered by the school hierarchy of staff, prefects, etc. For the first year I kept being awarded lines various transgressions. These were never explained to me and I hadn't got a clue where I'd gone wrong. Each morning I missed my statutory drink of milk through taking too long to put on and off my outdoor shoes. I liked the work, but soon found out who my arch rivals were in the monthly placings: Chapman (Michael) Keating and Felstead. `The latter two followed me to Borlase. I must have been quite arrogant because one of my reports contained in the general section the words "He must come to realise that even he can be wrong. "

I gradually worked my way up through the field until I was often top. However, Keating and Felstead followed me to Borlase and I had to start all over again. I was a fat boy, the butt of many jokes, which has continued for most of my life except at Borlase when I rowed a lot, a brief period in 1962 when I returned half starved from a 10 week trip round Europe in a land rover, weighing just under 11 stone, sun bronzed (for the first and only time) and laconic, and conned my future wife into thinking I was quite good looking. She soon found out her mistake.

Lots of school plays require a statutory fat boy or man and so I flourished, playing a coachman held up by a highwayman ?Reynolds?-I failed to remember the line "you'll hang fer this, m'lad!" and had to be prompted by Mr Spicer, a fat pirate and another fat boy in "What happened to George" involving Michael Caridia as the juvenile hero, a tramp and I believe Michael Bryant and some villains. Both Michaels went on to stage careers, Michael Caridia starting with a Norman Wisdom film (years later my son Hartley went on tour with Wisdom as lighting designer) and Michael Bryant as Michael Tennant as someone else had copyrighted the name. I failed to get the part of the mother in Tom Sawyer, because I laughed uncontrollably, with embarrassing results, at a scene where we were trying to extract a tooth from Tom's mouth, and was substituted.

Teaching was often good, but patchy. A very pleasant teacher who perhaps went to be a missionary, taught me maths and later began my interest in music by teaching the recorder, and Mr English taught me chess. Some teachers were ex service and Mr Reed, who I believe was manic depressive but mostly manic, ordered our class, average age 8, to learn overnight the whole of the Hamlet speech "Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt" which could have been my signature tune. We all failed to learn more than two or three lines, and were shouted at and punished. Rumour has it that he was carted off in a white van inhabited by nice young men in long white coats but I never met anyone who actually saw this.

John Spicer, the Head, was respected and immune from criticism but his brother Denis for some reason was tagged with a long running joke mixing him up with Dennis the Dachshund, the Germanic comrade of Larry the Lamb in the children's series Toytown, and when he was around he was pursued by faint echoes of doggy snufflings and incorrectly pronounced German words. He was quite strict but didn't really deserve it.

The most eccentric was "QB" Quinton Barber who wore plus fours and was like someone plucked out of the early years of the century. He had a passion for the ukulele, George Formby's instrument but by then out of fashion. It may be thanks to his efforts that eventually, 60 years later, the ukulele has made a comeback, with hideous results. He dressed the older boys notably a boy called Simpson?? In pierrot garb and made them sing "there's a Tavern in this town" When I arrived at St John's College Cambridge, another Winburian called Brodie Griffiths and I discovered that he frequented a tavern called the Baron of Beef opposite the college chapel. He did not respond to greeting, which was probably very sensible

(to be continued)