Escaping School On My First Day
At the age of five I was led by the hand down the road to Oakfield Road Primary School by Lennie, the older kid who lived next door. We walked past the scrapyard, the machine tool factory, past the terraced houses of my friends until we arrived at a forbidding Edwardian stone structure, to find sixty kids assembled at the entrance, twenty of them like me, about to enter school for the first time.
We were told to line up. I was terrified. I had never faced such a regimen before. A stern looking lady with horn rimmed glasses came marching down the line.
"Stop talking." She said.
That was it for me. I'd seen enough, I was out of there, like a bolt of lightning out the gate and down the road, racing home as fast as my legs could carry me, which turned out to be not as fast as a headmaster driving a car.
"You can't run away Paul." Mr. Alderdice said, matching the speed of his car to the pace of my tiny legs. "You have to go to school."
He was right. At home my mum agreed. Crying I climbed into the car and struggled to get out of bed for the next ten years.
