Class in the classroom

I was struck by the media's statement-of the-bleedingly obvious last week, about well-to-do and not-so-bright kids overtaking their more gifted peers from less affluent backgrounds.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, my class -like all others in Scottish primary schools at that time - had its fair share of 'wee nyaffs' as my soundly middle-class parents would call them. They'd have a more politically correct title now, but these were kids who lived 'up the back' (i.e in the housing estates at the back of Largs), often in single parent families, and with some quite serious behavior problems. With hindsight I now worry much more about the origins of their problems than I - or perhaps anyone at that time - did: There were a few very small boys who spent any free moment drawing and circulating obscene and anatomically accurate sexual drawings, for example. Much later, these young mens names would appear in the local paper linked to a small-town world of drugs and theft.

Anyhow, I remembered last week about a particular poetry recital competition I had entered for whilst at primary school. I am born on the same day as Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, and as a child had dreamt up a quasi-mystical relationship with the bard due to this concidence. (Virginia Woolf is also born on January 25th, but is/was not quite such an appealing icon)
Many of my fellow pupils competed in the memorising of tracts of Burns' poetry, which were to be performed in front of a stern and vaguely Dickensian panel of Scottish 'elocution teachers' as they were then known. It was a fraught and very competitive environment, given that few children of that age could memorise their full names and addresses let alone 8 verses of weird-sounding Scots poetry.

The school was to offer one star pupil forward to the next regional level of recitals, and as we were efficiently knocked out, a surprise contendor, I'll call him Ian McCabe, emerged. A tiny, under-nourished looking kid with a mum off the rails, he took the classroom floor aback with his energetic recital. Now, I can see Kenny could have grown up to be a Robert Carlyle-like actor, wiry, full of barely-surpressed anger.

As a child I had a prodigious memory (as evidenced by my Higher Maths qualification - didnt understand a single figure but could memorise and repeat all the neccessary data to pass with flying colours). I made it through to a final stand-off with Ian, where we both recited the same poem to the selection panel.
I don't remember the final event, or anything about how the decision was made, but I won the contest against Ian. And I am still haunted by the injustice of that decision, because even then I knew it was a done-deal before either of us stepped up to the podium - I felt it then, nearly thirty years ago, as I do now.