School in the 60s, 70s and 80s

My earliest recollections of school are from the mid-1960s when I began going to the local Infant School in South Yorkshire, where I grew up.

I can remember vividly how warm and colourful the school seemed in the midst of winter, due mainly, I suppose, to the central heating (which was a luxury we did not have at home).

As far as I can recall, we didn’t actually do a lot of work, just lots of painting and playing around in sandpits and water tanks and such. I especially loved painting (and occasionally eating the powder paints we used) and playing Thunderbirds in the sandpit.

Some of my most vivid memories from this time are Harvest Festival time, when we would put together baskets of fruit to take to the old folk at the retirement village and Christmas when we would invariably bung on a nativity play.

One year I played the role of ‘Pedro from Mexico’ (a chap wearing a cowboy hat, stirrups and chaps, with a glued-on moustache, who was apparently present at the birth of Christ).

I also benefitted from a first-class musical education – Learning to play Frère Jacques on the recorder, tapping away on a triangle (I later thought I could join a reggae band as a triangle player and just stand at the back and ting), or banging away on like an epileptic orangutan on the glockenspiel.

When it was time to move to Junior School (primary), the lessons became more “scholastic”, though we still spent lots of time visiting the local church for brass rubbing and the local fire station and farms.

We seemed to spend a lot of time in the warmer months drawing outside on the grass underneath a huge weeping willow tree. At the end of school each day, we would place our chairs up on our desks and say our prayers (“Hands together, eyes closed”).

School dinners possibly traumatised me for life, along with school milk – which was invariably warm and half-curdled from sitting in the sun. Luckily, Mrs Thatcher took that away, so future generations of children were spared.

I loved playing marbles and conkers in the playground, where we would huddle with chapped lips and runny noses in Autumn, but I was rubbish at sports and PE and lived in fear of these items . . .

I enjoyed going off on school trips to visit Lifeboat stations, old people’s homes, banks and factories, and even on a week-long trip to Grasmere in the Lake District in 1973, where we witnessed the filming of the movie Swallows & Amazons.

In September 1973, I crossed the road (literally) and started at the “big school”. I was now off to Grammar School (later renamed as a “Comprehensive” and in recent years as an “Academy”).

Probably the best thing about Grammar School (apart from the beautiful maroon and gold blazers which were a novelty to me as I’d never had to wear a uniform before) was the youth club – was a great place to listen to the latest records, eat Mars Bars, drink Tizer and try (unsuccessfully) to chat-up girls.

Technology increasingly entered my school life – from the ubiquitous Overhead Projector (pictured) to the magic of the Banda machine (referred to in Australia when I moved there in my teens, as a Gestetner machine or Roneo machine).

This was the pinnacle of tech when it came to duplicating in the days before photocopiers or computers and printers became commonplace.

Making copies was an involved process. First, you created a master copy on a two-layered sheet. You typed, wrote or drew on the top sheet. Below the top sheet was a dark-coloured sheet, coated with a layer of wax containing colouring agents.

When you typed, wrote or drew on the top sheet, the pressure of that writing would transfer the coloured wax from the lower sheet onto the shiny underside of the top sheet, producing a mirror image of what you needed to copy.

You fixed that mirror image to the drum/roller of the Banda machine and then turned a handle to rotate the drum. The blank paper in the in-tray went over an absorbent pad soaked with solvent; some of the coloured wax dissolved and was left on the paper as it passed over the drum. Into the out-tray arrived your copies; mirror images of the mirror image, so perfectly legible again.

Those resulting slightly fuzzy copies, usually in purple ink, bore the unmistakable fragrance of the solvent: methyl alcohol.

The aroma wafted about as the teacher entered the classroom with the “handouts”. Depending on how recently the copies had been made, students could spend the entire lesson poring over their Banda sheets in a vaporous alcoholic haze that made them slightly fuzzy themselves – our first encounter with substance abuse.