In general I am not a person who likes competition; I do not seek it out, or look for opportunities to turn ordinary conversations into opportunities for dominance, as some do, and I would rather spend a sunny afternoon knocking a tennis ball about with the intention of making it easier for the other person to return it, than blast it past them, grunting. I did not compete in anything at school, not sports, not academically, not socially – oh, except I was a Sketcher. Perhaps that experience of loaded, formal absurdity has something to do with me eventually becoming a poker player.
Do you remember that odd moment in the early 80s where the progressive backlash against traditional sports opened up a strange space in which schools sponsored all kinds of oddities? – Morris dancing, competitive mime, bike polo, water croquet – all that sort of stuff. It was a strange fleeting festival of freedom, like the 17th Century Great Frost when all those people skated and sold chestnuts on the Thames: nothing is true, everything is permitted, my school has entered me for the County Macrame Championship. My school was heavily into Sketching, that is, competitive Etch A Sketch (as you know), and I was the jewel in their red moulded plastic crown. (Can you imagine how infinitely hilarious and disgusting Kate found this? Can you imagine how she sabotaged my practice, pretending she was just walking past and on the way past batting up the Etch A Sketch from underneath, so that everything melted off one half of the screen; imagine her livid sneering joy when I flung it across the room and slammed out to sulk.)
Competitive Etch A Sketch was usually played by 5 or six individuals against each other, and sometimes against the clock. The rounds varied but were often something like:
- calligraphy (text unseen, supplied dictated – usually poetry – there was fierce argument taking place at a national level as to whether or not spelling counted)
2 – caricature (category supplied unseen: something like Political Figure or From the Stage usually. Replaced the earlier, kinder “portrait” round – simply a recognition of what it had inevitably become)
3 – religious / traditional tableau (This was “Christian Scene” until someone objected on behalf of the one Hindu family in Wirral – the Hindu family themselves would never have said a word and their daughters attended a convent school and were well versed in Christian scenes)
4 – skyline ( you could prepare this one)
5 – abstract emotion (you were allowed to select a piece of music to play as you show-cased this one – there was much glitchy shuffling around with tape decks).
Skyline was the one we should all have practised like crazy, because we knew it was coming. We were supposed to “read around the news” to prepare for the other rounds, become familiar with popular quotations that might come up for the calligraphy round, and so on… But no one could be bothered.
That didn’t mean we were ready for Skyline either.
“Right then, you lot, what are you looking at for Skyline?”
Mr. Dalgliesh was the cool teacher who had given up his Thursday lunch times to lounge, semi-sitting on the front of the desk, jangling the change in his pocket, and train the Sketchers. I suspected him of taking this up because he was tone-deaf and Mr Walsh, who did guitars on Wednesdays, had such a fervent fan-base. Judging by his willowy frame and rimless glasses, it looked like football was out of the question. Now, I think he might have been hoping to turn a few disaffected lives around, rotate the two knobs of destiny to switch a trajectory from Delinquent to Artist or something, but unfortunately his Sketchers were all firmly on the rails, unlikely to veer off further than the occasional unpaid for Mojo or Chewitt. He did his best, though, to engage; to raise a warm but quizzical eyebrow, to establish a collegiate atmosphere of respect and equality under which our young souls could realise our potential, unsmashed between the joint forces of Brute Authority and Inner City Peer Pressure.
“You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?”
”Don’t Do Liverpool!” we chorused.
It’s done to death and the Liver Birds always came out looking like Busby.
“Sir, that’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
(Mr. Dalgliesh, uniquely, made a point of never saying “Life’s not fair.” He tried to be original, and take circumstances like things not being fair seriously, an exhausting quixotic project which we respected, and viciously exploited.)
“You’re going to say Don’t Do Liverpool because all the kids from the Liverpool schools will be there and at least one of them will do Liverpool. But it doesn’t belong to them. They don’t own it. If anyone does, we do, because we can see it, and they can’t.”
“Good point, very good point. And no, nobody owns any skyline. But for the sake of argument, if you were to suppose for a moment that you can own it, by living in it, what have we got?”
His craftily triumphant tone fell flat as we all considered the obvious, but boring truth.
“Erm… you want us to sketch Birkenhead?” Someone took pity on him and filled the gap.
“Yes! The Woodside Cooling Tower is made for Sketching. The architect probably designed it on an Etch A Sketch, in fact. Look at it! Look at those orthogonal steppy edges!” He was getting a bit over-excited and some of us exchanged glances. He ran over to the nearby Local Geography shelves and pulled out a book, manically flapping the pages. “Look! Here it is!”
The tower did look as if it had been designed on an Etch A Sketch. He slapped it in front of us and at once, as one, we automatically relocated the stylus, shook the etches for 5 hard seconds and slammed them down on the table to sketch, fast, without being told we were treating it as a speed round. Despite the need for speed, I had some plans to include some impressionistic waves on the Mersey and maybe even some cross-hatched shading on certain planes. It looked pretty good. After a roughly guessed 60 seconds, we all inspected each other’s work: Dominic had created an Art Deco frame around the whole image, which allowed him to drop a couple of seagulls in flight down from the the top horizontal etching line, rather than make them appear to be planted on the buildings on garden canes.
“See? Definite possibilities. Some great stuff there.” (Anyone who did an impression of Dalgliesh always included the phrase “great stuff”.)
“We can’t all do Birkenhead though.”
“We can’t any of us do Birkenhead. It doesn’t exist.”
“Birkenhead doesn’t exist?”
“The skyline doesn’t exist. Look in your book, Sir. It won’t be there.”
Mr Dalgliesh started flapping the pages of the book. He went back to the shelves and pulled out a few more, including a large slim hardback photographic volume, pompously entitled “Maritime Merseyside”. He turned the pages crossly, muttering, “Well there’s Cammell Lairds… there’s Egremont Town Hall… the baths at New Brighton… you could comp it all together…”
“But it’s not a skyline. No one has ever photographed and published the skyline. If no one has done the picture of the skyline, how can in count as a skyline?”
“Is that because it goes round the corner? When you’re on the ferry, aren’t some things on one side of the corner, and some on the other?”
By this time, several of us were Sketching speculative maps, trying to plot the landmarks along the Wirral coast. Others were still asking questions.
“How many do you need for it to count as a skyline? One building is a building, 50 buildings is a skyline. What about three buildings? What about two? What about one building, in a town that only has one building?”
The bell rang.
“We’ll have to go into the rules of the skyline round next week – time for afternoon registration.”
I didn’t want to talk about the rules of the skyline round. I wanted to talk about the essential nature of Skyline.
I think, that winter of 1982, I eventually constructed and memorised a pretty good Toronto and squeaked a victory against St Werburgh’s in the County final, even though my Abstract Emotion round – Anger – was ruined by Mr Dalgliesh refusing to let me use my Sex Pistols tape. One of the St Werburgh’s boys sheepishly asked me for my phone number afterwards but I was horrified and would have nothing to do with him. Apart from anything else, I knew for a fact that he was habituated to the most disgusting food – it was known that the St Werburgh’s school dinners contained slugs and beetles and that they were so used to it that everyone ate them all up.
I came home with a small silver trophy with my name engraved on it in an exquisite cursive; and a book token for £5 which sat in a little card saying WELL DONE! under a dancing balloon-brandishing cartoon teddy bear, who was very happy for me. I explored this feeling of having won repeatedly over the evening. It didn’t go away, but it changed flavour. It sat there, vibrating. Maybe it changed me. (Maybe this is why I am here, playing poker.) (No. That’s not why I play poker.)
All content copyright Deirdre Heaney