School's Out Forever: Goodbye Ilfracombe College

Nostalgia: your memories, but drunk. A lethal cocktail of wistful yearning and time-adjusted pretence that the past was the best. Intoxicating, yes, but not entirely healthy, and something I find deeply suffocating.

I prefer to look forward. Living for now and tomorrow is what matters. The past happened. Parts were good, others less so, let’s move on.

So, probably not the best frame of mind to visit a school I’d left twenty two years previously.

Old school guy

But that’s exactly where I found myself just last week, scoffing greedily through my own past like a man starved of personal history.

Facebook is to blame. Because of course it is.

Scrolling idly through that ultimate nostalgia platform, I stumbled across a post, informing me that the building at which I spent the formative years of my life was about to be demolished. And would I like to have some nibbles and a look around before they wheel out the wrecking ball?

How could I not?

For starters, my wife and I were in the same year group (where she was no doubt bowled over by my cunning wit, rock hard abs, and outright lying). By wandering around our collective memories, we could reminisce together, laugh together, and hopefully not bump into exes all awkwardly together. Also, we could take our kids and bore them senselessly about how Mummy and Daddy were the coolest dudes that ever rocked a school tie (they're still at an age where we can get away with this kind of deceitful boasting).

Lastly, and perhaps mostly oddly, I think about that building a lot. Not, I stress, in a romantic or emotional way. My brain stores away screensavers of places I’ve been to in my life. These are recalled quite arbitrarily like a little slideshow for when I’m concentrating. (Don’t ask me, it’s just how my mind works.)

How could I resist the chance to see if my memory’s renderings hold up to reality?

The college as I remember it. Photo credit Paul Weatherbed from Ilfracombe History Facebook group.

Spoilers: I couldn’t. 

So, to Ilfracombe College (now Academy, natch). It’s a vast concrete behemoth of a building, a brutalist block of ungainly brick. Jutting from Ilfracombe’s highest peak like a Dr Seuss illustration come to life, it exudes a menacing incongruity among the town’s infinitely more pleasant rolling green and sea views. More factory than educational institution (it even has a chimney for gawd’s sakes), its colour-drained Lego aesthetic couldn’t look any more 70’s unless it was built from a packet of Rothmans and casual racism.

Stepping back into my childhood was immeasurably surreal; like stepping physically into a dream. Everything was eerily similar, yet marginally different.

All of which I found initially overwhelming. 
Hey, it’s first year tutor room! 
Hey, it’s the bit where I got sent out! 
Hey, it’s the bit where I stormed out - and had to wait until it no longer looked like I’d just been crying before going back in! 
Well, punch my dead Dad – it’s the Kit-Kat machines! (Actually, no, they were long gone even during my time.)

My first tutor room! (Had fewer drums in my day.)

Spent most of my final year lunchtimes sat here

My kids and I taking over the library. Former teacher Mr Cooper to the right.

Eventually though, contrary to my queasiness over lunging back into my past, it turned out to be a very pleasant, even cathartic experience. Not that I had anything to "work out" by being there. School was school: neither amazing nor terrifying for me. Just, you know, school.

But being back in those rooms, smelling those smells again, and seeing some of the exact same signs and sights was a weirdly tangible way of reliving the past for one last time. Melancholy? Maybe a little, but it was largely a celebratory exploration of our teenage years. Free from the shackles of rampant hormones and chronic self-interest, I could reflect more sagely on frankly, what an awful dickhead I must have been back then. Sorry, everybody.

We even caught up briefly with a few old school pals, all exchanging pleasantries along the same lines of, “well, isn’t this bloody weird?” Which made me realise, of course, that it was less the bricks, the gas taps, and the graffiti-scrawled desks we were remembering, but the friends we'd made and the teachers we encountered. They had been responsible for all of these extraordinary times, not the corridors or toilets or whatever. As my Video Production teacher (and damned lovely man) Peter Cooper later commented, “A building is nothing without people.”  And given he steered me towards top GCSE marks for that subject, I’m inclined to agree.

So after an hour or so of gawping, gasping and treading gingerly around the physical space of our own past, my wife and I lead our children out into the night for chips and a collective sigh at a closed chapter.

Brilliantly, I sat at my exact place in science classic before noticing this classic bit of schoolboy art.

I know that it is utterly grand and self-indulgent to proclaim so, but 39 feels the right age to be stepping back for one last peek into my childhood. I’ve no upper tier of parents or grandparents above me, so kissing off the past has eased me comfortably into the next phase of adulthood.

I mean, let's be honest - it’s about bloody time, eh?

Bulldozers – do your work and demolish it now please. Make way for the next generation.

Goodbye then.