Are you experienced?

Quite a few times recently, when searching online for various things, I've come across articles posted on a site known as the Experience Project: basically it's a compendium of personal stories written about this-that-or-the-other, and submitted apparently 'by real people'.  Therein lies both its charm and its downside: some of the stuff seems mildly implausible to say the least.

Nevertheless, having become more than just a little irritated at getting messages requiring me rto register before being able to read something on the grounds that it was restricted to a 'mature audience' (although I suppose I can see why they need to do it), I duly registered - after all, it's free to join.

The organization is a little bit chaotic, but I found some groups to join fairly easily and thought I might as well throw in my two-cents' worth, so I wrote and posted a few brief "experiences" myself.  The one I really enjoyed writing was the story of my three years spent out in Hong Kong.  Some people can write very detailed and vivid accounts of what happened to them when they were eight or nine, but I'm afraid I'm not one of them, and all I was able to do was paint a bit of a kaleidoscope of impressions by piecing together the few definite facts which have stuck in my mind over the years.

I'll always remember it as a happy time, though I do, having by then attended six schools in as many years, distinctly recall experiencing at the age of eleven a definite sense of wanting to settle down somewhere permantly after we'd returned.

White cliffs and dark clouds

One of the consequences of my father being in the army was that as a child I went to a number of different schools. For in contrast to my sister's experiences seven years earlier, times had changed and it had become a more usual practice for families to accompany servicemen on tours of duty abroad, rather than their offspring being packed off to boarding schools for the duration. I was quite lucky in that as I grew older, moves necessitating changes of school coincided with natural break-stages in my education - first from Infants to Junior, and then from Junior to Secondary school.

So when we returned from Hong Kong in September 1959, it was time for me to start my secondary education. We sailed back in the 'Oxfordshire', a former troopship still at the time used to ferry service families around the world in the days before the advent of widespread cheap air travel. According to my sister, who would've been almost 18 by then and thus probably with a better memory of it, children of school age attended classes during the voyage, although I have no recollection whatever of it and have no idea what, if anything, I might have learned. Be that as it may, we docked at Southampton on 20th September, and went to stay in some temporary Army accommodation at Dover while the details of my father's next posting were finalized.

Part of the old Dover Citadel, a fortress dating from Napoleonic times, had been converted into Married Families' Quarters, and we had our meals in the Officers' Mess - which I was surprised to discover is in fact still standing nowadays, though much of the rest of the area is in ruins. Somewhat to my dismay, I was told I had to attend Dover Grammar School for boys, even though it was unlikely to be for more than a few weeks. At the age of ten - I was still a couple of weeks short of my eleventh birthday - it was my first taste of grammar school, and I hated it. Undoubtedly part of the trouble was that unlike all the other schools I'd ever been to, I knew this one was only temporary and so I just didn't see the point of making the effort to settle in and make friends only to be uprooted again straightaway. I wasn't even in the same boat as all the other kids like I had been at Minden Row, which was a Service Childrens' School. With its grey stone walls and columned archways surrounding the archaically named "Quad", it seemed very forbidding, and in my fertile imagination a bit like a medieval monastery although I don't imagine it's nearly as old. The Headmaster, whose name I've long since forgotten, struck me as very stern and authoritarian, especially as in one of those trivial things that obstinately sticks in the mind for years and years after the event, I got into trouble in the first few days for not wearing a school cap: my mother simply hadn't been able to buy me one in the correct size.

As things turned out, I couldn't have been there much more than three or four weeks when I caught one of those common but highly infectious childhood illnesses that everyone got back in the days before MMR jabs became all the rage. My mother kept me off school, and in the meantime the details of my father's next posting came through. I tried to persuade her that it really wasn't worth my going back there just for a final week or so, and she rather uncharacteristically took the line of least resistance and agreed. Thus by November we were off on our way up to the Midlands.

Despite my initial inauspicious introduction to a grammar school education, I settled in very quickly and easily at Leamington College for Boys with my customary resilience and adaptability: I did very well and was very happy there - no doubt much to my mother's relief. In fact she confided in me many years later that she'd always known Dover had been the one school I'd never settled in at.

Geography lesson

When I was scanning some old family photos round about Christmas-time last year, I did quite a few which dated back to our time out in Hong Kong. My memories of it all are really quite hazy and more than somewhat disjointed, partly because I was only seven when we went out there, and partly because everything was changing so rapidly the whole time we were there. The pace of reconstruction, land reclamation and redevelopment seemed absolutely frantic and were I to go back there now, I doubt if I'd recognize anything much at all as it would have all changed, probably way beyond recognition.


My old junior school - Minden Row - I have a very indistinct mental picture of. I think it was quite small: the main part of the building I recollect was old, with a verandah and rooms with high ceilings. We were taken there every day in the "school bus" - a three-ton army truck - picking up pupils along the way, but I can't any longer even place exactly where it was. There's still a street in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon called Minden Row, after which the school was presumably named but nothing on a modern map to indicate where it once stood. I'd always assumed that in any case British service schools wouldn't have survived the demise of Hong Kong as a British colony in 1997: there would've been no obvious need for them after that?



But last night I came across some old maps scanned and posted on Flickr - and there was one of Tsim Sha Tsui in the 1960s! Looking intently at the full-size image, I could just about make out the words 'Minden Row School' on one of the buildings there - at the far end of the street where we once used to go every morning! A bit further down towards the bottom of the map (within walking distance) was a green space marked "playground": I bet that would've been where we had our games periods, and where instead of playing, I used to surreptitiously watch the trains going by along the tracks of the Kowloon-Canton railway on the far side!

I was pleased with my little unexpected discovery. There's next to nothing anywhere about the school: it perhaps wasn't used as a school for very long, I don't know. But I still remember my time there with a certain amount of affection, if not - sadly - any degree of clarity.

Blast from the past

I had an unexpected but very pleasant exchange of emails over the weekend with a fellow ex-pupil from my old Junior School - Minden Row. He'd just posted some pics on Friends Reunited, which although I joined some months back I've never found at all fruitful in terms of being "reunited" with anyone I knew. We weren't in the same class, in fact neither of us could remember anyone else's names. And neither of us could remember very much about the school itself either. However, as we looked at each others' photos and started reminiscing a bit, one or two long-forgotten memories re-emerged. Not nearly as many or as vivid as the ones I have of Leamington College, but then I was there longer and it was - albeit only slightly - more recent.

It may perhaps bring forth other ex-pupils with more pieces of the puzzle. I don't know what happened to the school: there isn't anyone listed there after 1964, so I'm guessing it may have closed down then, in which case there probably aren't going to be that many ex-pupils. I may still get another nice surprise or two out of the blue one day, though.

All in the family

The phone rang last night. It was my sister. I'd been meaning to give her a ring: although we weren't particularly close as kids - it was mostly the normal brother-vs-older-sister thing - over the last few years we have tended to keep in touch with each other more regularly. Our parents both died some years ago, and gradually most of the aunts and uncles have passed away, leaving a shrinking "extended family" which I guess perhaps makes you value what's left more than you used to. We had quite a good long natter, anyway, exchanging reminiscences of when we were both growing up as kids.

Which is odd in a way, because her childhood was quite different to mine. We're not very alike temperamentally to start off with: I take after my mother and inherited a lot of her "call a spade a bloody shovel" approach with a natural tendency to speak my mind and forget any upset ten minutes afterwards. She on the other hand was more like my father with his habit of deep brooding and sulking - you could never really tell what eiher of them was thinking a lot of the time. And whereas I got to move round with my parents wherever my father's postings took us, my sister, being that much older, got packed off to boarding school which she hated. I don't doubt my parents felt they were doing the right thing by us both at the time, and certainly in the initial chaos of post-war Europe, there simply weren't the facilities to cater for servicemens' families abroad anyway.

She remembers a lot more of Hong Kong than I do: she flew out to join us for our final year having finished her O levels, whereas I was then still only nine and while I have assorted mental visualizations which are reinforced quite easily by seeing old photos, my memories of events and of our life out there are really very hazy and I suspect not very accurate. She's embarked on writing an account of it, which I'm very much looking forward to reading if only to see how much more of my time out there will come flooding back to me.