The naughty table…

Billy Deasey was the classroom dunce. These days I guess he’d be called dyslexic, because he really couldn’t get the hang of reading. Back then he was just plain slow, a little bit stupid, thick, retarded, a dullard. ‘He’s a little slow.’ The teacher would say, explaining his blank expression to the school inspectors.

Kevin Bowler, who sat opposite Billy, was the classroom bad boy. He was always getting into trouble, fighting in the playground and pushing people over. I guess he may have had ADHD. But back then it hadn’t been invented and naughty badly behaved children were just naughty badly behaved children.

On the same table as Billy and Kevin sat Hilary Payne. Hillary just couldn’t sit still and was constantly touching things and moving them about, putting them in to order by length or colour or size. As she fiddled with things she’d move her head from one side to the other, counting beneath her breath, reaching fourteen then starting all over again. She was the girl who left the classroom three times each night, coming back to make sure that she’d shut her drawer properly. A creature of habit you might say.

I can’t quite remember the names of the other kids on the ‘naughty table’, there would have been five others with varying degrees of nonconformity. I seem to remember that there was a boy in callipers called Vincent who ate cat food and another boy who wore thick lens National Health specs and two pink hearing aids strapped to his shirt. The shy girl who lived in a railway carriage, and was always crying, might have sat at that table too, and the girl who fainted a lot, although I can’t be sure.

We didn’t quite have a dunce’s cap, that had been dropped a few years before, but if you fluffed your four times tables you were made to feel very stupid, very stupid indeed. The teacher would tell you that you weren't trying, and the other children would looked pleased at your discomfort then tease you in the playground later.

Kids eh? Always poking fun and blaming somebody else.

Anyway, it always seemed to be the naughty table that got the rest of us into trouble.

When they made too much noise we were all told to put our fingers on lips. When they fidgeted too much we were all made to sit with our hands behind our backs, or sometimes told to sit on them. If they ran around when they should have been acting ‘normally’ we were all made to it quietly with our hands on our heads.

Yes, the naughty table had a lot to answer for. How us normal children hated them, particularly the shiny teacher’s pet favourites on the good table.

Of course it wasn’t just the naughty table, most of us kids did something wrong or got too excited on occasion - well, apart from Caroline Jones who was always perfect.  When we did something very bad we were made to stand in the corner on our own or, even worse, stand on our chairs until the teacher decided that we could get down. I once stood on my chair for forty minutes, and all I’d done was pretend to spit at Nigel Edwards in the playground when we were playing cops and robbers.

Generally though, we were a very quiet and well behaved class. But then how would we dare to be anything else? After all nobody wanted to be moved to the naughty table. It was the ultimate badge of shame.

Conditioning is a wonderful thing.