sawyl | What did you do in the class war? (Reply)

Musing on today's teachers' strike in the Guardian, Hannah Pool recalls the last national action in 1987:

The news of a full strike would be met with a cheer in the classroom, followed by a letter to take home. It usually meant accompanying my dad into his office, where the secretaries would be nice to me and I would spend hours practising my signature on the blackboard while he saw students.

Which reminds me of the way my sister and I used to pass the time during the strikes of the 80s. With mater manning — or should that be womanning? — a picket line, we would be packed off to the university to be looked after by pater.

Most of the time, pater's idea of child care involved letting us sit around in his office typing up gibberish on an extremely noisy electric typewriter, photocopy random pages from one of the teetering piles of papers stacked up feet deep on the desk and, when we were good, use an antique VT05 to read news on the computer.

On the rare occasions when he couldn't reschedule his teaching, we'd be dragged along to a lecture theatre, sat in the back row and told to keep quiet. We used to fill the time playing dominoes. Then, when boredom struck, we'd pull faces and roll our eyes at some of pater's gibberish in an attempt to put him off his spiel. Much to our disappointment, I don't think we ever managed to trip him up.