Burbidge and Doey…

It’s funny the words that we sometimes use to hurl insults at each other. Although when I say funny it isn’t the ha-ha kind and I’m not at all sure that peculiar quite catches it either. Good old Bill could turn quite an insult: ‘You peasant swain! You whoreson malt-horse drudge!’ ‘You juggler! You canker-blossom!’ I have no idea why a juggler should be seen as an insult, I quite like them, they’re very dexterous. Perhaps that’s the insult.

I’ve been called quite a few names in my time, but I gave up saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ when the perpetrators of my taunting saw the sense in what I was saying and began beating me with branches and throwing bricks at me. What a Doey I must have been. But I digress.

My school days are a distant memory now and they somehow seem to have become muddled together with Tom Brown and Billy Bunter. It was an all boys school with a boarding house, although only a third or so of the boys were boarders. We had prefects who caned, fagging, a tuck shop, bullying, and some of the masters hadn’t a teaching qualification to their name. It was great in many ways, a tiny microcosm of society with all its class structure, prejudice and cruelty. Acting, looking or being different was not a good idea. It was far better to tow the party line - which brings me to Burbidge and Doey.

Mathew Burbidge was a boarder in School House. He was a tall chap with fair hair and, unfortunately for him, a twitch. It wasn’t a very bad twitch, occasionally his head would flick to one side and his eyes would blink several times. Not a bad twitch at all, but enough for his life to be made misery and for his name to be used as an insult for anyone who tripped or stumbled: ‘You Burbidge’ the boys would shout every time someone dropped a rugby ball or fumbled a catch at cricket. Burbidge just sat at the house sidelines and blushed. Well, what else could he do? Fighting back against a couple of hundred other boys wasn't really an option.

Doey on the other hand was quite different. Doey Quainton (I never knew his first name, just his nickname) was a day boy and came from one of the villages surrounding the school. His father was dead and he lived in a cottage with his mother. He was an affable chap who was always smiling and he did everything slowly. He talked slowly, walked slowly, laughed slowly, eat slowly, he even cross country ran slowly and was always last back to school after the five mile run. Of course all that slowness, together with his continuous smile and the fact that he was a day boy, obviously meant that he was the village idiot.

If anyone did something stupid, or reported a minus weekly house point score at the weekly lunchtime house meeting in the chem lab, then he was called a ‘Doey’ or, if it was a particularly stupid act, a ‘Doey Quainton’. Doey didn't seem to mind though. He simply kept smiling, moving along slowly on his way to the library where he spent most of his time.

Burbidge and Doey left school the year after I arrived. Doey went to Cambridge and Burbidge went to work in the family business. Their names however lived on in our school and when I left six years later you could still hear the cries of Burbidge and Doey from small boys who had absolutely no idea why they were saying it or who Burbidge and Doey were.

Fame can take many forms I suppose.