At the tender age of about 3 or 4, (it was so far back in the mists of time that I can't remember exactly), I was shuffled off to nursery school, now better known as pre-school. I can't remember being too impressed with it, my only concrete memory being that I was disgusted at having to have an afternoon nap. We laid out the little mattresses on the classroom floor, and we all had to lie down and close our eyes. I vaguely remember little brown blankets to cover us, but I found the whole business quite stupid. Only babies had to go to sleep in the daytime!
When at the age of 5, real school reared its ugly head and I had to toddle off to St Oswald's primary school down on the corner of Little Horton Lane and Christopher Street, I didn't notice much improvement except that afternoon naps were out.
I envy my kids and grandkids who had young dolly birds to initiate them into the horrors of education. I had Mrs Binner! Old and fat with a wart on her nose, she liked us kids as much as we liked her. She was of the old school (pun fully intended!) that believed a rap over the knuckles with a ruler reinforced any lesson. And that was when we were being good! When we transgressed, out came the cane, which was brought down smartly across the palms of our hands. That stung like hell, but it was worse when the cane was old and split. Then it hurt like buggery! One sadistic old bitch used the cane across the backs of the legs when our handwriting didn't look like this, according to her exacting standards. Rather, it tended to look more like this, much more normel for littel kids!
This gruesome introduction set the standard for the rest of my education, and all through school I detested the classroom, never actually playing hooky, but finding any excuse to keep away from the place. I played the hypochondriac so well that just by thinking about being sick, I could throw up on demand! I never confessed to my mother that she could have sent me to school with no worries, but who is going to make a vomiting child go to school? Sorry Mum, I should have told you years after the fact, you might even have got a giggle out of it. Then again, I suppose I was never too old for a clip round the ear!
(Even though my daughter-in-law Leanne has 2 kids and has been married to my son Vince for a few years at the time of writing, she is still grounded for life! That could have been me, if the concept of grounding had been around when my Mum could have used it!)
I hung out with my best friend Rose Dixon, who helped keep me sane during this long ordeal, though my parents didn't approve of her because she was a "Canterbury kid", living on a nearby council estate. I remember her as a good kid, who, like me, kept out of trouble, so I couldn't figure out why it should matter where somebody lived.
When I turned 11, I was forced to sit the 11+ exam, designed to decide which type of school I (and the rest of my generation) was destined for.
There were Elementary, Secondary Modern, Central and Grammar Schools waiting for us, probably with as much trepidation as we felt regarding them. No Hogwarts to dream about then! Nobody wanted to be destined for the Elementary schools, as we kids thought that they were only for the dumb kids that couldn't make the grade.
We all hoped for Bradford Grammar School, but we were mostly too dumb to make the grade there! I managed Priestman Central School, an experimental concept for kids who were too bright for the Elementary or Secondary Modern schools, but not quite bright enough for the Grammar schools. Unfortunately, Rose didn't make it there, and we drifted apart and eventually lost touch, and I had to seek out new friends. I found them in the form of Christine, Wendy and Renee, and we became inseparable.
The only part of school that I enjoyed, apart from an adolescent crush on a genuine French teacher (a real tasty geezer!), was reading and writing, pastimes that I still enjoy to this day. An old English teacher, Mrs Wilson, stimulated my interest in poetry by making me read out my poems in front of the class. Unfortunately, she couldn't stimulate a love of good poetry in me, my tastes running towards doggerel, and even now, I consider Pam Ayres to be far superior to Keats, Byron and the like.
My penchant for reading and writing and for certain French teachers led directly to my regularly coming top of the class in French and English while languishing at or near the bottom of the class in every other subject.
I referred to Mrs Wilson as old, and even allowing for the perspective of the young, who see anything over twenty as over the hill, she'd have been well into her fifties, like the rest of the teachers. In fact she and Mr Cotton, who taught geography, had taught my Dad when he went to the same school years earlier, though I do believe they had retired by the time my daughter Rose attended the same school. Our Phys Ed teacher would have been the only one under 40! The generation gap would have been at its widest in the 1940's and 50's.
At that time no attempt was ever made to make lessons interesting, and we were subjected to learning things like times tables by chanting them God knows how many times! Maths was a succession of problems on the order of "If 3 men take 3 days to dig a hole, how long would 6 men take to dig half a hole?" (Think about that one! The answer is on the last page.)
History was little more than learning dates, geography was learning about the gross national products of different countries, and science was messing about with Bunsen burners. No wonder I felt that school was a boring waste of time.
School outings were almost non-existent, not that my poor long-suffering parents could have afforded to pay for them anyway. My best friend Christine Walker went on a four day trip to Paris, and I don't think I ever forgave her! She wasn't much brighter than I, and came a cropper when trying out her schoolgirl French on a shopkeeper. She asked for "Un kilo des pommes, s'il vous plait", and ended up with an enormous bag of apples, and all because she'd thought that a kilo equalled half a pound!
Whoever said that schooldays were the happiest days of your life didn't go to Priestman! It was a mixed school, but as I had no interest in boys until a few years later, the opportunities were wasted on me! One of my friends, Marilyn Bond, had a brother James, though of course this meant nothing at the time. I've often since wondered how he fared when introducing himself in later years. "Yeah, and I'm Attila the Hun! Now tell me your real name, 007!"