"He drew", part 1

I've been drawing illustrations for the anonymous poem He Drew. I read the poem when I was about seven, and it's stuck with me ever since. Many people have told me I'm not alone.

"He always wanted to say things, but no-one understood.
He always wanted to explain things, but no-one cared."

"So he drew."

"Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn't anything. He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky."

Again, my illustrations but not my poem. More pictures in a few days; you can find the whole poem online if you go looking.

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Thomas Thurman CWR

How was/is your school organised? Mine wasn’t, very.

My school (state comprehensive) had houses called Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex. Northumbria was red, Anglia was yellow, Mercia was blue, and Wessex was green. I was in Wessex.

There was a system called “tutor groups” that applied to everyone except the sixth form, where you had to report to a particular teacher (in whatever room they taught in) at the beginning and the end of each day. The teachers were organised into houses and you were in the same house as your tutor. Despite the name your tutor wasn’t responsible for teaching you anything.

The school had 1200 kids and had outgrown the rather small hall, so assemblies alternated between Mercia+Anglia and Northumbria+Wessex. If you weren’t in assembly you just sat around in your tutor group doing homework (i.e. playing Top Trumps).

The school secretary was really really keen on coding everything. Each of the teachers, each of the rooms, and each subject had a three-letter code, and you were expected to memorise all the ones which applied to you. You wrote your tutor’s three-letter code after your name on everything– my tutor was Mr Crowther who taught chemistry, so my name was “Thomas Thurman CWR”. His room, where we went every morning and evening, was L05 (laboratory zero-five).

We had house points in the first two years, but they weren’t tallied up per house and they only applied to you. (This made no bloody sense even at the time.) You were given a card where the teachers initialled squares.

You got a badge if you made 100 or 200 house points. I finally reached 200 at the end of the last term of my second year. I’ve still got the badge somewhere. [edit: found it!]