Let me put this out there straight away.  Freddie Tyas was called “Spaz”.  I can’t help that.  He was.

I’m talking here about my schooldays in the 60’s.  If you’ve seen any of those TV programmes like “It Was Alright in the 80’s” you’ll understand that it was alright in the 80’s.  Twenty years earlier in the 60’s it was even more “alright”.  We were closer to World War 1 than the 60’s are to us now.  Minnie Caldwell’s Bobby was barely a kitten then and “woke” was something we did 5 minutes before the school bus came.

So, yes, “spaz” was derogatory but it didn’t carry the opprobrium for the utterer that it does now.  The charity for spastics was called The Spastics Society, for God’s sake.

Anyway, to return to Freddie Tyas whom, you remember, we called a spaz.  He was a genius, mindst.  Improbably, he was once given a mark of 120% in an end-of-term Maths exam.  This was because he overlooked/ignored the exam paper’s instruction to “Answer any 5 of the 6 Questions” but answered them all.  Perfectly.  He went on to get a First at Cambridge.

He wasn’t a spastic in the sense you’d imagine though.  He was able-bodied enough in that all his faculties worked.  He was just…….awkward.

I remember he was once asked to collect the tennis rackets up after a sports period.  The P.E. master, 40-a-day Freddie Sutherland, showed him how to put his arms out in front of him (like a fork lift truck) so he could load the bats.  But this was beyond “Spaz”.  Clearly, spatial awareness wasn’t one of his super powers and he wafted his arms about in all manner of ways but couldn’t for the life of him emulate a fork lift truck.

On another occasion half a dozen of us had gone train spotting to Crewe sheds.  We’d gone into a shop to get some provisions (crisps, pop and tuffees).  Now, Fred might have been a 120% Maths genius but carrying a glass pop bottle more than 5 yards from the shop door without dropping it was beyond him.

But whilst physical co-ordination eluded him he wasn’t lacking in self-awareness and well understood his shortcomings.  He introduced us to his “dance”, a sort of staccato shuffle, looking for all the world like Virgil Tracy of Thunderbirds, all the time singing Johnny Tillotson’s “Poetry in Motion”.

I googled him just now but there’s no reference.  I’d love to know what happened to him – most likely some boffin on a NASA space programme.

If I met him now I’d apologise for our taunting back then.  I rather suspect that he’d shrug off any need (as best as Fred could shrug, anyway).  He was always quite comfortable with the way he was.