Here we are in September once again, and that means for a good chunk of the population – parents, kids, and those working in education – it means back to school. While for the rest of the world (well, UK specifically) it means our Facebook feeds flooding with first day photos like a wall of bad polyester blazers. And that’s just the teachers.
Having worked in education my entire adult day-job life, its probably safe to say that school places aren’t exactly an unknown to me – which made the challenge of returning to my first and earliest set of stories ‘til the End of the World take on a different flavour. It could have been very easy to write about contemporary education – and in fact several of my modern day books have more than a few nods to the unsung heroes of modern day teaching.
But the true challenge was not in describing around me but instead go back to what it used to be. And therein lay a very peculiar kind of challenge – which as a writer is basically catnip. So first, I had to go properly back. To when everything felt like the end of the world.
Mmmmmm Bop?
Way too many Ms, I know, but memory distorts the past, doesn’t it? To give a little context, I was just about leaving primary school (in the United Kingdom that’s at age 11) around the turn of the millennium, so my formative experiences of school life are from the very same era that gave us Smallville, Buffy, Teen Wolf and the like. And yet, if that was meant to give me an idea what high school would be like (ghouls and hairy monsters aside), it was a sore disappointment.
While in no way claiming this is what schools are like today, in the early 2000s, the thing that I most remember is noise. Movement, chaos. In lessons sure, we were (relatively) well behaved and we got on with work and so many of us went and got fab grades and stuff – but the in-between? The social time? Feral. Anyone who’s seen the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan has experienced that first rush onto the playground at breaktime.
A lot of depictions of school today are incredibly professional – and rightly so in many respects. But the early 2000s were nowhere near as professional as today. Sure, teachers were teachers and kids were kids – but shit was very different. People did smoke behind the bike sheds (and other less than savoury things). People were throwing house parties which ended up with projectile Baileys across the driveway and potentially an ambulance being called. The linguistic atmosphere of a corridor of high school kids did have the gentile tones of a Bernard Manning crossed with an uncensored Eminem album.
And the teachers? I’m definitely going to get some raised eyebrows for my portrayal of Miss Drake in the series, but by ‘eck was some of today’s standards just a whisper in a darkened handbook back then. Teachers getting drunk at the Leaver’s Do (one chunking up in the back of the headteacher’s car as was the rumour), ‘ignoring’ kids having snuck beer into a residential trip, or sometimes making a year seven wet themselves in front of sixth forms to assert dominance. Yes, most definitely OFSTED had some blinkers on back then.
Capturing the Atmosphere
This was the challenge when going ‘back to school’ for ‘til the End of the World. How much of what I actually remember, do I actually remember? How much of that atmosphere is rose-tinted glasses and how much is the lived experience? Could I recall what being a teenager actually felt like – and crucially, did it really feel like that?
What stuck out most strongly was that when we were fifteen and sixteen, like those protagonists, we weren’t kids. Not to us. We were something else between, and we thought we knew who we were and what we wanted. We had so much self-possession, that actually we probably did think we could handle all the adult stuff, like sex and smoking and deciding on our own curfews. And yeah, if demons and vampyrs had come along, we probably would have thought we could handle that shit on our own.
We would have believed that not all adults could be trusted, while at the same time probably spending the majority of our time doing what they said. But adults would also keep things from us, telling us things like ‘it’s for your own good’ or ‘because I said so’ that would have been incredibly frustrating. So, yeah, that absolutely had to go in there – because adults do lie to kids. And whether or not we could have handled it, we would have thought we could – which is exactly what they do here.
And probably the big thing to capture when going back to those ‘glory days’ (so-to-speak) is the feeling that problems were always going to be bigger than they were. A friendship on the rocks was like someone dying. A failed test result to some was like the ultimate proof of academic inadequacy. We couldn’t regulate the same way a lifetime of experience teaches you to, so for us every little event is a heartbreak, every day is the end of the world. Our world. And yeah, maybe in the end that’s where so much of this came from.
‘til the end of the world…
Wrapping Up
There’s so much more I could pull apart here, but we only have so much time. The things I’ve mentioned above are not specific to that early 2000s period when ‘til the End of the World is set, they are foundational to the adolescent experience. But the darker aspects of a somewhat more gritty, realistic childhood are there. I haven’t gone back to school thinking of everything has happy times where we all did what we were told and things were incredibly professional.
I’ve written a (mature) YA novella series which goes back to the High School that was. Sweary kids. Unprofessional adults. Shit going on inside and outside of the classroom. And yeah, in the background the sweet soundtrack of music our parents listened to, and the irreverent camp of Take That and Britney.
I’ve written a school in which smartphones didn’t exist (pretty much). Where people walked home at night. Where kids went to the park and hung out / fought horrible monsters and then snuck back in home way after bedtime. You know, real stuff. And if I take a little poetic licence from time to time, then I think that’s okay.
Because our school years made us, one way or another. And looking back always has a kind of fog of time – not always for the better and not always for the worse. So, if your lived experience of high school, old or new, differs from the one you find in Calendar High School – that’s okay. This is how it was for me.
Minus the demons. Maybe.
‘til the End
Rick Rawes
Leeds, West Yorkshire
4th September 2026
Leave a comment