Memory Lane 16

12th August 2024, Greg Powell recalls his earliest days from 1959:

Subject: A story of School - Part 1 - Arrival 1959 - aged 11

On the first morning we were lined up in the playground and I suppose given words of welcome, no doubt advice on how we had to maintain the standards of the school and exhortations to fulfil our potential, all of which is lost in the mist.

What I do recall is asking at the end to go to the toilet and on emerging from the toilets in the gym block finding that everyone had disappeared and I was soon hopelessly lost. Dr Watson and I had very limited contact in the ensuing school years but this was our first in an empty corridor and he took me to the form room of 1C. I was of course late and last and sat in the last empty desk which was to become a familiar experience as somehow I never quite knew when the next year started and generally arrived a day late. 

I had come from Pinner Wood School with just two others from my class, Brian Smith who was in 1A and Chris Prior in 1B. What, to my great dismay, had been left behind were friends who had not been successful in that tight lottery the 11+, which incidentally we now know had a higher pass mark for girls, and which was such an arbitrary cleaver.

It’s an example of how life would have been very different, so I hope you will bear with this digression. Fortunately, Nigel and I are still best friends. We met when we were 8 when my parents moved from South Harrow to a street built for rent or sale to council tenants from South Harrow and Rayners Lane, many of whom had been living in wartime prefabs (actually bungalows with fridges and in our case a sunken bath) in Coles Crescent. I transferred from Grange School to which I was to return for a Harrow schools football trial aged 11 together with Clive Busby. There was a ghastly humiliating moment for all concerned when those who had passed the 11+ were asked to stand. Nigel was among the vast majority who had not. 

Nigel was a terrific fast bowler, aggressive batsman, had a cousin who was on the Lords Ground Staff who provided cast off proper cricket kit and stumps, and a dribbling right winger who fell in love with Man U at the time of Munich. I was certainly quieter, often silent and daydreaming and I know that if we had been at secondary school together it was a friendship that would have provided a very different micro environment within the institutional layers of school. 

Nigel and I hung out over the holidays with the Prior brothers in Montesole playing fields as we played endless football and briefer cricket, we did Penny for the Guy outside Pinner Station, carol singing to raise money for Xmas presents for our mums, sold the School Fair Programmes together (although Brian Smith always seemed to have sold thousands) and life went along pretty well but I have always thought how it all could have been so much better, especially also if friendships with girls in my class had also not abruptly ceased. Incidentally, as a footnote, when the Old Boys Cricket team was short Nigel turned out and we shared a record stand for the 6th or 7th wicket.

But as it was, my overwhelming emotions in the first years were being alone and stress from the consequences of casual teacher violence and a declining amount of effort or endeavour on my part. In the technical drawing class I was perched on the high stool drawing on parallel lines the letters of the Alphabet. I forgot to leave a space beneath the first line. Told off, I started again and I forgot again. 

I was hit violently without warning across the backside with a wooden "T" square. I hated that class. I got stomach ache on the days that class came around and got days off. I used the word hit, nowadays it would be assaulted. I write about it 64 years later, it was also a demonstration of how much individual teachers effect lives. I would have good experiences with others, John Tully in particular when he was my form teacher, a woman French teacher who was kind for 1 year and generally Peter Cahill as I was good at sport, and David Dixon in English. That brings me full circle as by strange chance Mr Dixon rented a room as a lodger in Nigel’s House!

My beginning was a story of decline, 12th to 23rd in that year’s exams, all a rather solitary and unhappy time leavened only by being in the cricket and rugby teams.

(first published June 2024 in Newsletter 4):