The Female Approach...a saw...

The Female Approach (With masculine sidelights) by Ronald Searle With a letter from Max Beerbohm, published by Macdonald, London (1949).

It still has the dustjacket on this. All in pretty good condition.

I fell asleep before at 5pm, today Sunday, 'cos my brain had atrophied (and I couldn't do anything) and I woke up just now with an alert saying do your blip entry. I didn't know what time it was and my befuddled brain was confused as to what 20:30 meant...I thought it meant 10:30pm...

So I took a pic of one page of the illustrations in the book in my bed with me, 'cos I thought I was running out of time today. This old book has a written inscription in blue fountain pen dated Xmas 1949, but no actual publication date so I assume it is 1949. Just googled it and realized it should not be sleeping in my bed with me...oops...

This is the page I took a photo of from the section "all fools day...observed from a safe distance". Why this page? Because I did the same thing at school. I was profoundly deaf and in a hearing school. I had no idea what was going on or what the teacher was telling us to do. I looked at what other children were doing to see what I was meant to do and got hit over the head with the thin end of a wooden ruler. I was always being punished for doing wrong and I had no idea what I was doing wrong. And this particular day I was screaming and sobbing with the pain of this ruler suddenly swiping the left side of my head unexpectedly. I was about 6 years old. I was sobbing the rest of the day in pain with my head. It wasn't the first time that had happened.

The next day I went to the woodwork room or whatever it was called. We had real tools in the classroom in those days even in the infant school. In the break time I sawed partially through the wooden chair legs and then put the saw back in the woodwork room. No one saw me.

You can guess the inevitable when the teacher sat on her chair. I don't know how they knew it was me that did it. The upshot of that episode was that the woodwork room was always kept locked when it was not occupied.

This was the third infant school I had attended. I had been expelled/excluded/taken out of the two previous infant schools I had attended. I think they were running out of infant schools to send me to. I can still remember what got me taken out of the previous infant school. A girl was bullying me badly that I has to sit next to in class so I got the scissors we had in school, and when she turned the other way I cut a piece out of her grey pleated skirt. It didn't go down well.

I think I had better stop on my infant school misdemeanors here. But they were all a result of being bullied by teachers and the other children around me who also took their cue from the teachers. I didn't have speech to be able to explain to anyone what was happening to me. I could hear nothing at all. The first infant school I went to, the children ducked my head in the toilet basin and flushed the toilet. It took a few of them to do this. Then when I finally managed to get back to the classroom the teacher punished me, presumably for having wet hair, and I was put in the corner, facing the wall, with a white dunce's pointy hat on with a red D on it. I was sobbing my heart out. I didn't understand the world. I remember running away from the school when no one was looking....

Anyway, back to this book. You can see why this cartoon of the St Trinian's schoolgirl resonates with me.