![]() The teachers were largely of that post-war generation that still held to military values. ![]() I don’t know how that can be set off against the downside – first and foremost the unutterable boredom of my suburban, rather working-class grammar school. The pleasurable parts are easy enough to identify – the commonality of being part of a group (my secondary school had only 400 pupils, my primary even fewer), the simple fun of being young, the imminence (if in fantasy only) of sex, advertised by the precocious girls of the fifth and sixth forms. School days for me were like the rest of my life since, a mixture of the pleasurable and the torturous. I find it impossible to say what the “happiest days of my life” were, since I know that perspective on the past is impossibly distorted by the present, and that the span of time is so great and the complications so numerous, it makes even making a guess an activity verging on the spurious. Tim Lott : I was a big fish in a small pool – to be a schoolboy is wondrous I left in a fury at 16 and went to art school, where I did, at last, spend some of the best days of my life. I hated every minute of it, only just scraped through my public exams, got half an hour’s Latin detention for jumping down three steps into the garden, and rebelled. But instead I was forced to do science and geography. That’s what I wanted to do when I grew up. Some were excellent, particularly the art, history and English teachers, and I loved those subjects. And not all of the teachers were Gorgons. Better still, the asthma got me out of stinking lacrosse, and although the illustrations in our library copy of Michelangelo had fig-leaves over the rude bits, we found the Miller’s Tale, which perked us all up. We Jews got an extra half hour to finish our homework during assemblies, I never had to sing There Was a Green Hill Far Away, which I could hear through the wall, and which gave me the creeps. A line of sore thumbs.īut there were silver linings. We stayed in a classroom and filed in at the end for notices. So I felt a bit of an outcast, all the more so because Jews were not allowed into assembly. I did have some best friends, but not in the main, popular gang, who knew all about sex. And I chewed my handkerchiefs to ribbons in class. Our uniform was deeply unattractive, and I was tall, stooping, asthmatic and rubbish at lacrosse. I went to a rather strict girls’ grammar school in the 50s, where the often ferocious teachers wore tweeds, brogues, and stiff, grim hairstyles with the occasional grey sausage curls. My school days were not a bundle of laughs.
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