My Old School - Extract 8

I said at the outset that I would not identify any particular individuals, but this is a brief note about names and nicknames and in particular about persons with the surname 'Graham', and it inevitably requires me to identify at least one individual. All persons with the surname 'Graham' were called 'Gugs'. Don't ask me why, it was just an immutable law of nature. Though, it should be noted that my old chum, HP Lovecraft, referred to creatures called Gugs who lived in the underworld and he described them thus:- It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.—H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath Everyone with the Christian name 'Duncan' was called 'Shanks' - you could work that one out when you recall that the company 'Armitage Shanks' were manufacturers of toilets (dung cans - get it). Everyone with the surname 'Hamilton' was called 'Hammy' obviously. There was indeed one boy called 'Duncan Hamilton' and he rejoiced in the double whammy nickname of 'Hammyshanks'. There was a guy whose surname was 'Offin' and naturally he was called 'Niffo'. Anyone called 'Steel' was referred to as 'mole' - this is a fairly oblique one arising from the chemistry quantification of a 'mole of steel'. Thus there was one character name of Harvey Steel who was called Harvey Mole - he looked a bit rodent-like as it happens. I've previously noted that all effeminate boys were called 'Fanny' or occasionally 'Maggie'. Sometimes nicknames attached to pairs of boys - in my class there were a pair of likely lads who used to hang about with each other, and from the age of about 15 they were miraculously drunk most of the time. They were collectively known as 'Botch Casualty and the Sand Dunce Kid'. Botch was also sometimes known as 'Dengis'(lord knows why) when he was in the company of another nutter called 'Shotbolt'. Of course, anyone with a mental handicap of any sort was fair game. Nowadays we say that such people have learning difficulties. At my school they were 'spastics' and/or 'retards'. There were a pair of 'retards' who hung about together who were known as 'Bleep and Booster' (Lord forgive me, but the illustration does look remarkably like them). Other nicknames included, 'Noddy', 'Santa', 'Stoody', 'Sud', 'Fag', 'Sodge', 'Chooks','Rastus', 'Yomo', 'Bog', 'Stookie', 'Kaffir', 'Mousey', 'Wilf', 'Chunky', etc etc (that's all off the top of my head - others will occur to me in due course). But the real purpose of this piece is to deal with 'Gugs'. The Latin teacher was Ian 'Gugs' Graham. In many ways he was the most interesting character in the whole place, and a future issue will deal with his novel teaching system (ie don't teach anything, in fact most of the time don't even turn up, but scare everbody shitless, and amazingly everybody passes their o-level)(the 'Romanes eunt domum' - 'People called the Romans they go to the house' - sketch from 'Life of Brian', was based entirely on Gugs and his 'methods'). His wife was known to the boys as 'the Gorgon'. And, the bit that really cracked Ann up when I told her, the offspring of Gugs and the Gorgon was a wee boy called 'the Guglet'.