Like many grand criminal master plans before it my foray into forgery and deception was doomed to failure.
The school I attended, a grammar that was only a short step away from being a public school judging by the number of sound thrashings and buggerings meted out behind the bike sheds had an interesting method of dispensing exercise books. When a book was running out of pages either through being filled with material of educational worth or games of hangman and speed knobs the subject teacher would sign the back page and off you would run to the school bursar, show him the signature and be issued with a new, pristine book to cover with rampant male body parts and maybe a bit of learning as well. Thus it was that having gained the signature of Mr Wilton our French master I learned with a few weeks practice to turn out a reasonable facsimile of said scribble. Just being able to do this was, on its own a pretty pointless exercise unless I fancied landing the teacher in it by scribbling ‘Mr Jones is gay’ signed Mr Wilton on the back of the staff toilet doors. However, it did have one very useful purpose…
Like many schools we had staggered lunches so that pupils on games that afternoon got in first then the other years in turn. Presumably this was to ensure that those on games had time to digest their lunch so that the games lesson did not descend into a hundred or so boys throwing up in the bushes after our sadistic gym master sent the participants on the customary five warm up laps of the playing fields. The ground staff frowned on mass puking as it made the Rhododendrons wilt. The only other people who could get onto first lunch were teachers and those who were receiving extra tuition over the lunch break. Thus if you were not one of those you faced the likelihood of soggy chips, burnt pizza and congealed gravy…or it might have been custard, it all looked and tasted the same. Anyhow, having discovered a talent for forging the French masters signature I used this to sign the back of dinner tickets, for a small fee of course, which enabled fellow pupils to get into first lunch by claiming they were having extra tuition. The profits were not too bad, averaging between £5 and £10 a week which was a good sum back then and certainly kept me in Panini stickers and Mars bars. The only problem was that like most of these things it got a bit out of hand as more pupils discovered my talent.
I suppose I should have noticed but I was too busy separating my fellow pupils from their pocket money for the privilege of avoiding the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The jingle of filthy lucre brought to me by my skilled forging had blinded me to the fact that this particular week I had spent most of the morning breaks and the periods moving between classes signing dinner tickets. At one point a queue had even built up outside the boys toilets where in competition to Adam and his porn empire I had set up shop in one of the stalls and was banging out strips of tickets at the rate of two a minute. In fact it did not dawn on me right up until the moment Mr Wilton stormed across the playground, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up to the headmasters office.
My criminal master plan had come undone the moment almost the entire third and fourth years had turned up in the dining hall demanding to be fed because they had extra French tuition, not that the school had a classroom that could hold some two hundred pupils all wanting to chant “Jean-Paul est dans le jardin de Marie-Anne”. The school cooks faced with having to try to shift an industrial amount of chips and pizza over the counter had immediately closed the hatches and refused to budge and as a result trouble was brewing. The head cook, a truly scary woman whose resemblance to Giant Haystacks was uncanny had gone in search of Mr Wilton, the apparent cause of the chaos clutching a steak tenderiser and on finding him had threatened to do something unspeakable to his nut clusters. Thus alerted that it was something to do with him he set about finding the culprit and someone, pissed off at being denied their pizza and chips had ‘dobbed me in’. Now I found myself up in front of the headmaster with an apoplectic French teacher virtually demanding that I be summarily executed in front of the whole school for daring to forge his signature. Luckily for me the head had obviously just received the bill for the last firing squad and decided that 2000 lines and confiscation of profits was a more just punishment. The only problem was that confiscation of profits meant an increased likelihood of a swift buggering or worse behind the bike sheds when I could not reimburse the irate lynch mob that was forming in the playground.
It was lucky then that I had also learned how to forge the Geography masters signature as well and was able to fob most of my fellow pupils off with that in a strictly controlled manner of course. So apart from the 2000 lines which I had bribed Nicko to do with a promise of a months worth of News of the World stolen from next doors dustbin that he could cut the glamour adverts out of it all ended quite well. I avoided severe pain and a sore arse and I even managed to recoup my profits from forging the Geography masters signature and increasing my used tennis ball business, the latter of which, oddly ended in pain and disaster as well but that’s another story.
Funnily enough, shortly after that I was suddenly demoted from Mr Wiltons top French set to what would now be known as the ‘remedial’ set. Not that I minded at all as it was taught by the far more pleasant and definitely more pneumatic Miss Lessing.
I never did find out who grassed on me though.
Like many schools we had staggered lunches so that pupils on games that afternoon got in first then the other years in turn. Presumably this was to ensure that those on games had time to digest their lunch so that the games lesson did not descend into a hundred or so boys throwing up in the bushes after our sadistic gym master sent the participants on the customary five warm up laps of the playing fields. The ground staff frowned on mass puking as it made the Rhododendrons wilt. The only other people who could get onto first lunch were teachers and those who were receiving extra tuition over the lunch break. Thus if you were not one of those you faced the likelihood of soggy chips, burnt pizza and congealed gravy…or it might have been custard, it all looked and tasted the same. Anyhow, having discovered a talent for forging the French masters signature I used this to sign the back of dinner tickets, for a small fee of course, which enabled fellow pupils to get into first lunch by claiming they were having extra tuition. The profits were not too bad, averaging between £5 and £10 a week which was a good sum back then and certainly kept me in Panini stickers and Mars bars. The only problem was that like most of these things it got a bit out of hand as more pupils discovered my talent.
I suppose I should have noticed but I was too busy separating my fellow pupils from their pocket money for the privilege of avoiding the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The jingle of filthy lucre brought to me by my skilled forging had blinded me to the fact that this particular week I had spent most of the morning breaks and the periods moving between classes signing dinner tickets. At one point a queue had even built up outside the boys toilets where in competition to Adam and his porn empire I had set up shop in one of the stalls and was banging out strips of tickets at the rate of two a minute. In fact it did not dawn on me right up until the moment Mr Wilton stormed across the playground, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up to the headmasters office.
My criminal master plan had come undone the moment almost the entire third and fourth years had turned up in the dining hall demanding to be fed because they had extra French tuition, not that the school had a classroom that could hold some two hundred pupils all wanting to chant “Jean-Paul est dans le jardin de Marie-Anne”. The school cooks faced with having to try to shift an industrial amount of chips and pizza over the counter had immediately closed the hatches and refused to budge and as a result trouble was brewing. The head cook, a truly scary woman whose resemblance to Giant Haystacks was uncanny had gone in search of Mr Wilton, the apparent cause of the chaos clutching a steak tenderiser and on finding him had threatened to do something unspeakable to his nut clusters. Thus alerted that it was something to do with him he set about finding the culprit and someone, pissed off at being denied their pizza and chips had ‘dobbed me in’. Now I found myself up in front of the headmaster with an apoplectic French teacher virtually demanding that I be summarily executed in front of the whole school for daring to forge his signature. Luckily for me the head had obviously just received the bill for the last firing squad and decided that 2000 lines and confiscation of profits was a more just punishment. The only problem was that confiscation of profits meant an increased likelihood of a swift buggering or worse behind the bike sheds when I could not reimburse the irate lynch mob that was forming in the playground.
It was lucky then that I had also learned how to forge the Geography masters signature as well and was able to fob most of my fellow pupils off with that in a strictly controlled manner of course. So apart from the 2000 lines which I had bribed Nicko to do with a promise of a months worth of News of the World stolen from next doors dustbin that he could cut the glamour adverts out of it all ended quite well. I avoided severe pain and a sore arse and I even managed to recoup my profits from forging the Geography masters signature and increasing my used tennis ball business, the latter of which, oddly ended in pain and disaster as well but that’s another story.
Funnily enough, shortly after that I was suddenly demoted from Mr Wiltons top French set to what would now be known as the ‘remedial’ set. Not that I minded at all as it was taught by the far more pleasant and definitely more pneumatic Miss Lessing.
I never did find out who grassed on me though.
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