Memories of Childhood

Do you think he used a Hover Mower whilst listening to Lawn Free? I'll fetch my anorak!

Does anyone remember playing BATTLESHIPS with paper and pencil? Drawing out squares to represent the various craft(2 for a destroyer, 3 for a sub etc-helped if you had squared paper of course ) And for that matter the YES/NO books-for those of you who don't know what those were, these were strange formatted books(By that I mean long & thin types) and you got a special pen which would highlight your choice of YES or NO in yellow-if you were right you could move on to the next problem.

I have thought of something else. Did any of you have HOUSES at your schools-you know the sort like Harry Potter had with Gryffindor, Slitherin Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. Well I recall we had historical characters of DICKENS(Charles), ATHLONE(Lord), CROMWELL(Oliver) and PEMBROKE(Lord) my house, at primary school and then in the secondary school we had athletes BANNISTER(Sir Roger)again my house, BOARD(Lillian long jumper), PETERS(Mary-pentathlete) and BRASHER(Sir Chris) Both Brasher and Bannister were milers and Sir Roger broke the 4 min mile record. DICKENS-Blue BRASHER-Blue, CROMWELL-Green BANNISTER-Red
ATHLONE-Yellow BOARD-Green PEMBROKE-Red PETERS-Yellow You got various house points for achievements both sporting and educational. One of my primary school teachers developed TABLE BINGO, like ordinary bingo with cards but instead od just numbers, you had to know 6x7=42 for instance and then if you had that on your card, you crossed it off-at the end, if you won you received 10 house points.

We didn't have houses at my primary school but we had three at my secondary school with a house point/merit system.Apparently after its 60 year history the secondary school I went to has now done away with entire thing.

^^^
The secondary school I went to had houses and forms for your first 3 years then just forms for the last 2(or 4 if you attended 6th form), the school is 669 years old this year.

What would be seen as unthinkable today went on right up to the late 80's I think. We used to have separate entrances for boys and girls at my larger school. I am not sure why this continued because as soon as you got in everyone joined up so it rather defeated the object UNLESS it was more to do with the cloakrooms. Boys and girls did PE separately too. Girls played Netball and Hockey whilst Boys played football, athletics(the dreaded cross-country in ALL weathers) and climbing wall bars, vaulting over horses(not real ones ) and weightlifting, which nearly did most of us in.

A good School memory.

In fifth year getting caught smoking by one of the woodwork teachers. Luckily for me, it was the decent one of the two woodwork teachers we had. The one who caught me came up to me and said ‘give us a fag and I won’t snitch’ Not only did he light up there and then, but he kept his word and said nothing, when he could have really dropped me in it.

Glad it wasn’t the other woodwork teacher who caught me as he was a real nasty piece of work who’d think nothing of throwing the nearest tool that came to hand at you if he caught you not paying attention in a lesson...

I made a pencil box out of wood but put so many small tacks in it because it wouldn't hold properly. In the end I managed to make it with a swing lid. I've got it somewhere. Mind you when it came to plastic and we were asked to make a coat hook it didn't quite go according to plan. I wasn't great with my hands and wood-We were asked to do an animal and it was supposed to be a whale but it looked nothing like it. Never got to work with metal though, that might have been good. One of my best friends

One of the things that older kids used to scare younger ones when moving up to BIG school with was getting their heads flushed down the toilet-I'd heard so many 'stories' of this and it worried me when I went to my bigger school but as it turned out I never had it done to me and I didn't know anyone who had it done to them. There was a scientific pond outside our library which was full of insects, algae and plants etc and people were threatened with being thrown in if it was their birthday - some would gleefully come up to you and say "you're going in the pond!" but they never did it to me, although one kid ended up in it, absolutely drenching his uniform and I think they had to go for a tetanus jab or something. Kids can be so mean at times.

As kids and something attached to the bike spokes. I remember attaching pieces of card (with clothes pegs) to the back on the frame and letting it flap against the spokes, sounding like a motorcycle as you pedalled for all your worth along the road. You had to change it every so often though as the card wore down-I have no idea where this 'craze' came from but later someone cottoned onto it and brought out plastic ones.