I left my first primary school when I was 8, and went to a different one. This means I know that all of the memories I retain from that school happened before I was 8. My first (innocent) kiss, the first time I got in really bad trouble, some of my times with my best friends.
In Manchester, if you say you went to a rough school, you mean that it was a genuinely dangerous place. My primary school wasn't rough, but there were a few rough kids. The area I grew up in is a mix of comfortable and poor families. I know this area well, but I couldn't tell you if it was more working class or lower middle class when I was growing up, it's that hard to call. There are certainly a lot of areas of Manchester that are extremely deprived by comparison.
We used to "scrap" a lot. I remember one boy punched one of my best friends, with his thumb tucked into his fist by mistake, and broke it. I remember a boy who I later became good friends with, running across the playground to "get" me. I ducked down, put my arms around him as he ran into me, and stood up, throwing him over my shoulder without even knowing what I was doing, ending the fight instantly. My friends were amazed, I remember the rush of seeing the boy on the playground tarmac, defeated. I was probably about 6 years old.
We were nice, clever, polite, well brought up boys, but a bit tough and boisterous. We always had little naughty plans going on, sneak there, fight those kids, kiss the girls and make them cry. We liked books and football and nature documentaries and wrestling. There was often talk of who was "cock of the school" - which of the oldest boys was toughest, unbeatable by his peers. Who was the cock of our year? We had little cliques, and while wrestling was something we did constantly, there was no question of actually fighting your close friends the way you would fight other boys outside of your clique. That would be unthinkable, but we had to know.
My primary school had two playgrounds, the Big Playground, used by all pupils and in front of our classrooms, and the Little Playground, which kept the youngest kids separate at playtime and was behind our classroom block. The Little Playground was a rectangular strip, cross it, and you were in the Nature Area.
The Nature Area...the depth of feeling you have as a kid is impossible to rekindle, but should be evoked from time to time.
Try to imagine, me and 4-5 of my close friends, my band, my coterie, my brothers. We had entered the school together at 4, and been mothered, cherished, indulged, nurtured together. I had the first kiss I mentioned above, underneath the cherry tree in the middle of the Little Playground, I remember it. Our wonderful teachers loved us and we loved them, they would bring us into the Nature Area a few times a week, to learn and explore among the trees and flowers and insects and birds. It really was idyllic.
Then one day we woke up and we were 6, we were no longer "Reception", we were "Infants". We were pushed out, to do hard maths with hard teachers and Raise Your Hand When You Want To Speak and Sit Still. No more Little Playground, no more cherry tree, no more Nature Area. We'd see about that. Our mentality changed, we made plans in hushed tones of how to pass under the watchful eyes guarding our entry into the forbidden zone, our paradise lost. We developed subtle strategies so that small groups of us could slip into the Nature Area and rendezvous deep among the trees, where we could fulfil the next steps of our plans without the younger kids or the adults on playground duty ever knowing we were there, and get back before we were missed. We got good at it, we must have been caught on our way in a few times, but we were never caught on our way out, or inside the small patch of forest.
What did we do when we got there? Well, I wish I could tell you that we picked berries and made chaplets of oak leaves, but we didn't. We kicked the shit out of each other. Initially our plan had been to sneak into the Nature Area and use wrestling matches to determine who was the "hardest" among us. When we finally made it into the woods, we found something even better. There was a tree at the back with a strong limb that two boys could jump up and grab, wrap their arms around and hang from, and then kick at each other as hard as they could. You could also perform complex leg-judo moves to force the other boy to let go and fall. Tree fights got pretty brutal, they ended when one kid dropped from the branch, unforced dropping merely because your arms were tired would result in serious social stigma. This was perfect, it separated the "hard" from the "not hard", nobody got marked in the face, and the art of tree-fighting was far enough removed from a normal playground scrap that two best friends could cheerfully lash out at each other to the limit of their ability without sacrificing their honour or their friendship. I remember being good at it, enjoying it, but I don't remember being the best. I'm sure we established and tested our pecking order successfully. I forgot about the intricacies of tree fighting, until I reconnected with my best friend from that school after bumping into him in the street in Manchester. We instantly recognised each other after 20 years and began going for beers together. He was living with the guy who had broken his thumb by punching him in primary school.
At age 8, I left that school and joined another school where they didn't have tree fighting. It took me a while to fit in.