Backstairs Billy Read Online Free PDF Page A

them. No one ever complained in the Tallons’ shop or was rude to her face because she could turn in a second. ‘One minute she was all smiles then next she’d torn your character to shreds with a pointed one-liner,’ recalled one of Billy’s early friends.
    Once, when a boy said something rude about Billy’s mother he was livid and in a split second he turned to the boy – who had a reputation for fighting – and spat out, ‘I don’t know that your mother is any better – all fur coat and no knickers, I’ve heard!’
    The next we hear of Billy is when he went, aged eleven, to the local school, Barker’s Butts.
    The school had come into existence, in the form in which Billy knew it, following the Education Act of 1944. This set up a tripartite system, with grammar schools taking the top ten to fifteen per cent of each age group (these were the elite), technical schools taking those who were deemed intelligent but of a more practical bent, and finally secondary moderns, notoriously bad schools that were effectively dumping grounds for those deemed good for little more than factory work, driving buses or sweeping the streets.
    Billy failed his eleven plus and had no choice but to attend a school that had low expectations for its pupils and could attract only those teachers who could not get jobs elsewhere. He was immensely intelligent, as his later career was to show, but, like so many boys condemned to a dreary future by the old tripartite system, he was rejected by a system that gave you one chance and one chance only at age eleven.
    Billy began to think for himself in his mid-teens but by thenit was too late – the end of his school days was already looming. He may have collected beautiful china and pictures later in life but he rarely read for pleasure and had no interest in books generally – both legacies of those early uninspiring years.
    But even Billy was surprised that, unlike other aspiring Coventry parents, Mabel and William Sr had not tried harder to get him through the eleven plus and into grammar school.
    ‘I think they were just tired by then,’ he recalled. ‘And they themselves were not academic or ambitious for me in any particular way. I don’t think they really understood the system either; the implications, I mean, of failure at age eleven.’
    But, whatever his parents’ level of interest, there is no doubt that Barker’s Butts was what today would be described as a ‘sink school’. Although many ex-pupils remember enjoying their time there, none made any claim for it as a place that taught you to have high aspirations. Peter McGrath attended in the 1950s. He recalled:
    Well, when you are in your early teens you’re barely aware what sort of school you’re attending, especially if you come from a working-class background. You just go where you are sent and Barker’s Butts had some good teachers, or at least teachers who cared about us – and we had a great football team!
    The problem was that Barker’s Butts worked on the principle that the children in its care needed only a very basic education – a smattering of geography and history and arithmetic, a bit ofreading and English grammar, but no French or Latin, no physics or biology. Pupils were being made ready for lives as factory workers and bus drivers, shop workers and dustbin men. The only compensation was that daily life among one’s friends made up for some of what the school lacked. Billy later insisted that though the school offered little, he was not particularly unhappy.
    With little academic ambition for its pupils, many of whom were sent out on projects to count the number of cars passing along the street or given other inane tasks just to keep them occupied, Barker’s Butts was a drab environment for a boy with ideas above his station.
    The school that Billy knew was demolished in the 1960s as part of a local education authority re-organisation. Architecturally it was typical of early twentieth-century board