The Laurence Olivier meltdown and other school trips

The other day I heard the relatively unusual sound of lots of happy children in my street, looked through the window and saw a crocodile of primary school pupils. They were wearing uniforms and some of the girls even had their hair in pigtails.

I remember being on that sort of trip, snaking our way through the streets on our way somewhere. The earliest memory I have of this sort of occasion was a trip to the Natural History Museum. The school was close enough to it for us to be able to walk there. The trouble was that I lived even closer to the museum than I did to the school. So I walked to school and almost back again before we all returned to school. And then I walked home again.

As I grew older my father seemed to be on a mission to turn me into a museum guide and teachers leading the trip sometimes found that I knew as much, if not more, about the place we were visiting than they did. My father had managed to locate and recce the most obscure collections in London long before the school got anywhere near them. If those teachers had me down as a geeky little know-all they hid it well.

I was at secondary school when we went on a trip to Greenwich. We turned up wearing our own clothes as a special treat, all except one boy. The story was that he had forgotten that he didn’t have to wear his uniform but in truth he couldn’t afford the sort of smart fashionable clothes that everyone else was wearing. I always remember him when the issue of school uniform and its abolition comes up. A uniform evens things out.

The onset of O and A levels gave rise to a different class of school trip. I expect theatres were glad to have the guarantee of bums on seats by putting on something from the latest syllabus. The best performance of this kind that we attended was one of “The Winter’s Tale” at the National Theatre with a cast that included Sheila Hancock. We really were transported to the Edwardian countryside, the chosen setting for this version of the play. There was a ripple of nervous laughter when one of the performers, raising a rifle and aiming it somewhere over our heads, caused most of us to duck instinctively.

The worst performance was probably one of “Waiting For Godot”, put on by the students of a drama school. You either love or hate this challenging play but if your first experience of it was the version we attended it can be reasonably assumed that you wouldn’t choose to see it again. They were pretty bad and I think we were the only people there. We sat through most of it but left before the end (how mean is that!). The most entertaining moment had been when the teacher accompanying us, his very long legs folded up before him like those of a large spider in the cramped seating, had begun snoring. His head was tilted back and he really let rip. It was funny but we couldn’t blame him.

I think it was 1980 when those of us studying “Othello” for O level English Literature trooped into a large cinema in Leicester Square. In company with hundreds of students from schools across London we sat down to watch the film of Laurence Olivier in the role of the Moor. He had famously “blacked up” for the stage play, filmed in 1965. He may have been one of the greatest actors this country has ever produced but that didn’t stop him from getting sweaty. It had been strange enough seeing an obviously white man playing someone who was supposed to be black. There were a great many close-ups, showing us things that a theatre audience would never usually see, and the sight of sweat coursing through the dark greasepaint was more than some of us could cope with. We began to giggle. It was contagious.

The schools sitting alongside us looked on disapprovingly at first but even they gave in and eventually waves of laughter swept the auditorium. Teachers and students curled up as Laurence kept it up, his great performance lost on us. I can’t help wondering if it was my lot that set things off but that might not be the case. If you were there and you remember it you may know the truth. I would love to hear from you.