Un peu de tristesse

Some sad news to start 2021 with: I came across a message posted online just a couple of days ago, saying that Mr Marshall, my old form master and French teacher had died "recently".  The details are a bit sparse and I've only been able to find out so far that his death wasn't Covid-related, and neither was it protracted.  My best guess at working out how old he would have been is around 90.

French was far and away my best subject at school: I got a Grade 1 O-level and a Grade A A-level as well as a Distinction in one of the long-since defunct S-levels.  The fact that I can still write, speak and understand French with a tolerable degree of accuracy is in no small measure down to the quality of the teaching I received, in particular the encouragement to aim for perfection.  I'd have liked to have re-established some sort of contact with him, as I'd wondered periodically, on and off over the years, about what might have become of him, but I never succeeded in finding out anything and now it's too late, of course.

 

Sowing and reaping

Like many people, I was both saddened and disturbed to read of the tragedy in Cults Academy, an Aberdeen secondary school, this week: a 16-year old pupil was stabbed to death by a classmate in what's been described as a "pointless fight which got out of hand".  Incidents such as this are fortunately still relatively rare in UK schools, but this one appears all the more shocking in that it occurred in what is reportedly a 'good' school in a 'nice area'.  In what must be every Head Teacher's worst nightmare, headmistress Anna Muirhead has paid tribute to the "gentle, caring pupil" Bailey Gwynne who lost his life, while presumably asking herself the question "How could something like this happen in my school?"  One young life has been lost, another has been turned upside down, while for two sets of families nothing will ever be the same again.

Rumours have surfaced to the effect that the attacker had been being "teased" about his weight but so far it's not at all clear what form this took. Judging by the outpouring of sympathy and the tributes that have been paid, Bailey doesn't fit the typical profile of a bully and I can't detect any undercurrents of this being an issue - although there is and always has been a fine line between the supposedly harmless tradition of teasing at school (in which the victim sometimes gives back as good as he or she gets) and its more malicious and sinister form properly known as bullying.

Fights themselves at schools are of course nothing new: we had playground fights when I was a schoolboy and I well remember the chant of "Fight... fight... fight..." that would go up as we all flocked round to try and get a better view.  That in turn was invariably the signal for a couple of prefects or a Master to appear out of nowhere and break it up, fortunately before any real harm had come to either of the participants.  I've written about my own experience of being picked on for a fight at school: looking back on it now, although I can still clearly remember who my assailant was, I've no idea what started it nor do I attach any real significance to it other than it being part of the rough-and-tumble of school life at the time.  I guess that's probably true of the ten or dozen other playground fights I witnessed during my schooldays, too.  But we never had fights or violence in corridors, still less in classrooms. Nor were weapons of any sort used.

So the other dimension, I suppose here, is the use of a knife.  We had metal knives rather than plastic for use in the school dining hall, albeit rather blunt ones.  And in those days quite a lot of boys had penknives, especially those who were keen on scouting activities (which didn't incidentally include the stabbing of fellow scouts - at least, not deliberately!).  I didn't own one as far as I recollect, nor did I have one of the other types popular at the time - a flick-knife.  Illegal I believe they were at the time, but brought back in appreciable numbers from the Continent!  I didn't personally know anyone who had one and I can't imagine that anyone who did would've dared bring it to school.         

Back in the present, there are no easy answers to the question of why this happened in the way that it did,  I daresay in the fullness of time questions will be asked, reports written and the proverbial "lessons will be learned".  That's what schools are for, after all.  But it will, sadly, come too late for poor Bailey.

What a difference a day makes!

The "day" in this case being the day of one's sixteenth birthday, when - amongst other things - sex becomes legal.  And that's the interesting facet of this story, which in other respects bears striking similarities to the Jeremy Forrest saga which I wrote about in my last entry.  The whole tone of the reporting is different: schoolteacher Emma Ager is not described as a 'paedophile' nor even a 'pervert' (she did, after all, turn down the request for a threesome).  The teenage boy pupil is not a 'victim', nor was he 'abused' - he simply became a "legend" when the inevitable happened and all his mates found out.  And neither was he 'groomed': after all, "I bet you won't be able to keep up with me during sex" is hardly the subtlest chat-up line to use.  Admittedly they didn't run away to France together when his mother got suspicious about the phone calls and told the school - the whole thing in fact seems to have not been a "relationship" in any meaningful sense of the word.

But it was illegal: she was a teacher at his school, he was a pupil under 18 - the whole "abuse of trust" scenario is plain to see, and she quite rightly has now been struck off for it.  She has not, however, as the commentators on the article have been quick to point out, ended up in jail.  Admittedly prosecutions for sexual offences are largely contingent on the alleged victim(s) filing a complaint, and the boy seems to me to have had no obvious reason to make one, since he both started and finished the affair.  Furthermore it's only just now surfaced, six years after the event.

Despite all that I may perhaps be forgiven for wondering if it doesn't stink ever so slightly of double standards - especially with the top-rated comments being along the lines of "lucky lad"?           

Trial by Jury Facebook

His dream in ruins, the hapless Jeremy Forrest was hauled into a Bordeaux court this morning, handcuffed - and complete with a coat over his head!  What was the point of that, incidentally: his photo was in every paper in the land last week, everyone knows what he looks like?  Anyway, if all goes according to plan, the extradition will be finalized on Thursday and he'll be winging his way back shortly afterwards.

Talking of things going to plan (or rather not, as the case may be) the journos have been busy digging away to find out what really went on last week.  The answer, we're told, is a staying in a seedy back-street hotel, living out of packed bags and subsisting off kebab takeaways.  Oh, and the thing that "betrayed" him - the dodgy fake CV.  Personally I'd have thought that was enough to tarnish the gilding a smidgeon on any fairytale romance, but maybe that's just me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Megan Stammers, who was flown home on Saturday, has been staying at an "undisclosed location" being interviewed by the authorities (I do hope they're feeding her well after all those kebabs).  Presumably she'll soon have to start back at school: I mean, she's had a week-and-a-half of 'unauthorized absence from school' already or hasn't anyone else cottoned on to that yet?

There's certainly been no shortage of comment on all this.  After all, being a pupil at school is something almost everyone has had at least some personal experience of.  One that struck a particular resonance with me is this one on pupils' changing perceptions of their teachers.  Coincidentally I was just fifteen, when at my all-boys grammar school, we got our very first female teacher.  Married (well, a Mrs at least), 40-ish and by swinging sixties standards somewhat frumpish, she was in our eyes definitely not flirt material.  Her arrival to take our German O level classes nevertheless provided us 15-year old boys with something of a lively conversation topic, which soon descended into plumbing depths of hitherto uncharted vulgarity.  Certainly no-one had a crush on her, and if she had one on any of us she kept it well hidden.  Had she been on the other hand young, single and attractive (or even two out of the three) I can think of several of my ex-classmates who'd have been more than willing to test the water to see if they were in with a chance!  Taking that line of thought one stage further, I'm willing to bet that - then as now - if a 15-year old boy had run off with a 30-year old married female teacher, the level of outright condemnation and frankly rather judgemental criticism would be much more muted.

Perhaps rather tantalizingly if cryptically, Jeremy's lawyer has indicated that we can "look forward to the full story emerging".  Fair size chunks of it already have, courtesy of some determined ferreting.  Some of it scrupulous, some less so.  In my schooldays this would have seen the light of day in the form of a scandalous 'exposé' in the now-defunct News of the World.  Now, thanks to the magic of the internet, considerable material can be amassed and pieced together bit by bit: a tweet here, a photo there, a wish list, a diary entry, a link.... there's a reason it's known as the "Web", you know.  Everyone can play at being detective: forget privacy settings, a picture of sorts can still be assembled.  It may be incomplete or inaccurate: stuff uploaded in all innocence or with the best of intentions can appear to assume a sinister significance far removed from the one its owner or author may have intended.  The finger of guilt will point.

And maybe that's the moral in this story for all of us.  If you're ever accused or suspected or wrongdoing, the thing that will hang, draw and quarter you - even if you're innocent - will be your Facebook page.

... and crushes on 'Miss'

"Childhood is a time of innocence" used to be the old saying.  Much or most of what I remember doing as a child was innocent enough, and although I don't particularly recollect having a schoolboy crush on any of my Junior school 'Miss-es' (or anyone else either) it certainly wouldn't have been looked upon as unusual - almost a rite of passage, you might say.  Going to an all-boys secondary school with (until I was in my O-level year) all-male teachers effectively then ruled out crushes anyway.  In fact we never knew anything much of what our teachers did in their private lives - even those whose own sons were at the school: it was regarded as bad etiquette to tittle-tattle or indulge in slanderous gossip.  And in the days when "social networking" was decades into the future, when phones were things on the end of a wire fixed to the wall, and when "grooming" meant nothing more sinister than making yourself look presentable with the aid of a brush and comb, it was all pretty harmless anyway.  The doodles on the cover of your exercise book and the names on the inside of your satchel or pencil-case weren't plastered all over Facebook and Twitter for all the world to see.

So I can't help feeling a little sorry for Megan Stammers and Jeremy Forrest, the story of whose 'crush' and subsequent 'elopement' to France has been plastered all over the papers this week.  I make no judgement on the rights and wrongs of this, save to say that basically tradition has it that the guy always cops the blame, because whichever way you slice it, he's old enough and supposedly mature enough to know better.  There is some probing and much apparent obfuscation over how much the school, the police and the parents knew beforehand about what had been going on, and what they were doing about it - the net result of which is probably going to make it more awkward for the star-struck lovers to return, if that in fact is what they eventually intended to do.

So far, almost a week after they were spotted on a cross-channel ferry to Calais, the couple seem to have disappeared without trace, although they could now be practically anywhere in Europe.  I've seen it reported that the usage of CCTV and ANPR on the continent isn't anywhere near as extensive as it is the 'nosey' UK, and the fact is (a) they're not armed bank robbers being pursued by a manhunt and (b) no-one really knows where to start looking.  In a way the romantic in me hopes it all works out for them, but the harsh reality of life is that it's far more probable to all end in tears.  Compared to all the missing teenage runaways who disappear every day of the week without anyone much even bothering to start looking for them, 15-year old schoolgirl Megan has at least had a bit of a head start at being found.

The onward march of progress

After a hiatus of almost three years, during which my old school lay empty and deserted, the rebuilding work is evidently progressing in earnest.  Today I came across a further set of photos, apparently taken over the weekend.  Although the science block has now been demolished, and everything else is covered in scaffolding, I spotted this photo of my old form room!

Although now stripped of furniture and fittings, Room 12 of Leamington College for Boys is just as unmistakeable as it was nearly fifty years ago.  Our desks were in rows across the room parallel to the beams of sunlight shining through the bay window, facing the blackboard on the wall at the right of this photo. The photographer was standing in the doorway, and I sat on the far side in the front row, probably just this side of where that ceiling beam is.  I was 15, in Form 5A and taking my O levels.

Looking at it now - I'm glad once again of the opportunity to do this bit of reminiscing.  It's something I never expected to see again, and I'm thrilled to have found it - and to have discovered it was all just as I'd remembered it.  It's been quite sad for me seeing the old school steadily crumble and disappear: I have very happy memories of those seven years, and I guess that's why probably why I remember the detail as well as I do - though I never imagined at the time that I'd be sitting here, five decades later, writing all about it!

Déjà vu

They say that some of the nicest discoveries are those made unexpectedly.  When in late 2009, I found out what had happened to my old school, the following spring I contacted the developers to whom it had been sold, with a view to taking some photos of the deserted interior as a sort of souvenir of my schooldays there.  Although initially quite receptive to my request, the upshot was that, sadly, they weren't keen on giving me the run of the place, nor conducting a supervised tour, and I therefore resigned myself to just a mental memory of what it had all been like.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I came across three sets of photos - more or less succeeding where I'd failed, or more accurately boldly going where I'd feared to tread.  It made my day!  A virtual tour of Leamington College for Boys, reliving my days as a schoolboy: the stage in the now-deserted hall where I'd looked up every morning at the Head taking assembly; the empty bookcases in the library which I'd helped to run as a sixth-former, the very characteristically 50s-style stairs in the science block, the basins in the boys' toilets where I'd washed my hands at the age of 12 (I'm sure they're the same ones!); the old rusty cast-iron radiators that got treated to odd lick of paint occasionally during our holidays; the long dark wooden benches in the laboratories which were almost new when we sat at them; the gas taps where I'd attached the rubber hose of my bunsen burner in the Chemistry lab and the little sink where I'd washed out flasks and test-tubes when I was taking O level Chemistry - even the dreaded clothes rack in the changing rooms (eek!).  It was just as I'd remembered it all from fifty years previously.

At the same time, I was a little saddened by the desolation of it all.  The buildings have been empty for something like three years now, but that doesn't entirely account for what looked like decades of neglect that appeared in places on some of the photos.  In the thirty years after we'd all left and the sixth-form students took our places, the place had obviously been rewired, as I don't recollect there having been strip lights anywhere.  I'd gathered that alterations had been done to reflect the change of use, but I didn't see much evidence of any apart from an odd noticeboard or two.  Whatever had been done by way of maintenance could hardly be described as "pushing the boat out".  Soon, though, it'll all be gone: the conversion work is apparently going ahead in earnest now.  So I'm grateful to the photographers for their efforts and for providing me with such striking final souvenirs of seven years of my life.   

A rose by any other name

I was fascinated to spot a "leaked" article in the news yesterday, reporting that the Education Secretary apparently plans to scrap GCSEs and bring back O-levels!

Thirty years after the demise of the O-level, it's at least being recognized and acknowledged that the standard of GCSEs is nowhere near comparable and the pernicious creeping influence of grade inflation is rendering them almost useless as a true indicator of any real ability in the subject.  Predictably, the plans have drawn howls of protest from the teaching unions and also from the Lib Dems, who I suspect are mainly just miffed because they weren't consulted about it first.  It's perhaps rather bad timing for the thousands of kids sitting their GCSEs at the moment, who are understandably not going to be best pleased about the idea of their exams being 'too easy'.  We're told there's also to be a new-style CSE exam for the "less able" pupils, so everyone should - at least in theory - have the chance of coming away with a qualification of some description, and if the end result of all this is a system that actually matches the pupil's real ability it's got to be an improvement on the present rather shambolic state of affairs.

I rather hope the actual terms O-level and CSE are re-introduced, although early indications are the acronyms themselves might not be.  But millions of people know what they stood for, would be pleased to see the return of the standard of education that prevailed when they were last used, and are going to be disappointed if it all turns out to amount to nothing.

Seconds no more?

I hadn't actually been following it regularly, but on the couple of occasions I'd seen it mentioned somewhere and taken a look, I was quite impressed with the NeverSeconds- the nine-year old Scottish schoolgirl's daily account of what her school dinners consisted of.  I can't actually remember what I had for school dinners at her age, but I will admit my recollections of school dinners at secondary school are not particularly favourable ones, and I can't help feeling today's kids get a better deal overall than we did - aided and abetted by Jamie Oliver's intervention, no doubt.  Nevertheless, some of "Veg's" meals looked pretty dire, and at £2 apiece not outstanding value for money - although at least she had a choice, which is more than we ever got.

However, it was very enterprising of her, I thought, and at the same time quite supportive of the school, since the photos were apparently all taken with their consent if not encouragement.  Sadly, the school catering service which is run by the local council, came in for some hefty criticism from an article in a national daily paper, and the aforesaid council  chose to metaphorically shoot the messenger in true council jobsworth style by banning the taking of any more photos: the reason given being that the catering staff were upset and "feared for their jobs".  As far as I can make out, the photos simply recorded what "Veg" chose to eat that day from what was available: there's no suggestion that the photos or comments were doctored or chosen to present an unfavourable or unfairly biased representation, and indeed some of the fare looked (and was reported to have tasted) quite good.  Not only that, she raised a staggering amount for charity via the blog.

Anyway, the ban apparently generated so much criticism and bad publicity for the council in such a short space of time, that I see they've now done the decent thing (and probably the only sensible thing under the circumstances) and promptly rescinded it.  Common sense prevails!  

Oh, and we never got seconds of school dinners either - except when the food was so unsurpassingly awful that there was loads of it left over.          

   

Alive and kicking... at a school near you

A surprising revelation came today in the form of a survey report suggesting that streaming, far from having "pretty much died out", is still practised in schools - to the extent of one in six UK pupils aged 7. I must admit I'd been under the impression it had fallen into disfavour along with the 11+ and grammar schools, and so, it seems, was the report's author.

I remember so little of my infants' classes at Corsham County Primary School that I've no idea whether I was streamed or not by the age of 7. Being a small-ish village school, I would suspect not as there probably wouldn't have been enough of us to make more than one class. Minden Row Junior School was a different story, where my school reports show that from the 'Reception' class, I was put up a year, to Class 2A and then 3A and finally 4A - bearing out the report's finding that autumn-born children are 'over-represented' in the top stream. That isn't altogether rocket science, though, as because of the way school years and initial start dates are set, autumn-born children will normally - unlike me - be the oldest in the class.

Going on to Leamington College for Boys, I was in a non-streamed First Form, but thereafter once again in the top stream - although in the 4th and 5th Forms (the modern Years 10 & 11) for most of our O level subjects we were taught in 'sets', made up according to the number of pupils wanting to take that particular subject. Only for English, Maths and French I think were we taught as a Form.

Without reading too much into the report's conclusion that pupils with "behavioural problems" are more likely to be in the bottom set, it has to be said I think that an awful lot of difficulties arise if you try and teach a mixed-ability class with a wide differential between the most able pupils and the least able - because straightaway you start with a mismatch between teaching level and ability, the frustration and boredom from which is liable to make the problem worse. And everything gets dumbed down to the average - or in the worst cases, to the lowest common denominator.

It's been suggested that 'setting' for areas like literacy and numeracy (aka English and Maths) is a good idea. Possibly. I started off, according to my Junior school reports, having a reading ability in advance of my age group, but at one stage was getting only D or E+ for Maths. Whereas by the time I took my O levels, I got a Grade 2 for Maths, but only a 6 for English Language.

It'll be interesting to see how the pupils who were studied in the survey have fared in ten years' time.

Learning life's lessons

This story was originally broken in the local rag on the day it happened, but has since I see been taken up nationally. Whatever you may think of school uniform requirements, refusing to remove incorrect footwear and thus missing an important exam is a remarkably counter-productive move to make, especially as 13 of the other pupils evidently swallowed their pride and sat the exam in their socks - which we incidentally wouldn't have been given the option of doing when I was taking my GCEs. I think I possibly detect some slight embellishment by young Patrick and his mum of what actually happened, as he's probably now feeling just a little crestfallen. My mother would've given me very short shrift if I'd pulled a stunt like that - and no way would she have countenanced making excuses for me or defending my behaviour!

As is usually the case with these stories, some of the comments people have made are quite interesting. I think it's fairly common for pupils to have to wear correct school uniform when sitting exams - we certainly had to, and after all, the school is normally paying the fees. 'A' level candidates generally don't any more, but then few if any state schools nowadays require the wearing of school uniform by sixth-formers.

In all fairness, it does seem as if the school may be a little guilty of enforcing its uniform policy inconsistently. To get into the situation where upwards of a hundred pupils had to be sent home to change shoes, as reportedly happened back in February this year, seems to denote a fairly widespread disregard for the rules which went unchecked for a term or more. While the exam season may perhaps not be the best time to pick to have a clamp-down, pour encourager les autres is nevertheless a valid enough message to send out.

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.

Schoolboy in a skirt

A story doing the rounds at the moment is that of 12-year old Chris Whitehead, who apparently turned up to school the other day wearing a skirt in protest against his school's ban on boys wearing shorts during the hot weather. There's no denying he's got a certain amount of guts - although personally I thought the skirt suited him and he looked kinda cute in it.

When I was his age, it was the norm for boys to wear short trousers all through Junior School, only graduating to long ones as first formers around the age of 12 - in something almost akin to a rite of passage. So I doubt if any of us would've wanted to revert back to being little boys in shorts, however hot the weather might've been. And skirts were not an item of uniform in an all-boys school!

I noted with interest that his teacher was quoted as commending his "independence" and "individuality", and it was rather innovative of him to have spotted the loophole in the school's uniform policy which didn't specify that skirts could only be worn by girls. Nevertheless, whatever she may have said to him in private, her public stance on it made a refreshing change from the clumsy ineptitude with which schools generally seem to handle pupil protests. On that note, it does occur to me to wonder who's been orchestrating the publicity which all this seems to have attracted?

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime

This one caught my eye earlier in the week. Leaving aside the implications of the "crackdown" element, the list of transgressions - complete with sock inspections - is very similar to the school rules which prevailed when I was a schoolboy - with the exception of mobile phones, which hadn't of course been invented then. Depending on the circumstances, some of the infringements might've been punished by lines (or 'pages' as we had them) rather than a detention - but at the other end of the scale, rudeness towards the staff was likely to have earned you a caning.

It's not entirely clear whether the school *oops, sorry, "community college"* didn't previously have the rules or just wasn't enforcing them. But it's hard to actually find fault with a clear basic framework of what is regarded as acceptable standards of behaviour, and my mother certainly never showed any sympathy if I was punished for doing something I knew I'd been told not to.

Here's lookin' at you, kid!

I was browsing through some updates on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed some new scans of the 1962 panoramic school photo... and there I am! Forty-nine years ago in April 1962, I was a 13-year old third-former - looking shy, timid and a perhaps little apprehensive. I wonder what I was thinking? Certainly not that one day I'd be sitting here remembering back almost five decades to my schooldays. I was never given to introspection, nor particularly to casting my mind forward to what the future might hold. I was always a "let's get through today" sort of pupil, young for my age and anxious to keep out of trouble.

It's odd in a way that I now think back so nostalgically as I'm certain I didn't feel like that at the time. I just wanted to get through school and get out of there,which is probably why I never really gave it so much as a backward glance: I don't think there ever have been any "reunions" as such anyway, and I didn't keep in touch with anyone much after I'd left. Whatever the line of reasoning, I do now enjoy looking back with some affection: my education had more of a lasting effect on me that I ever gave it credit for and it's certainly nice to swap reminiscences with other ex-pupils albeit coloured with the benefit of hindsight.

Grade A student!

I was surprised (as I hadn't been keeping tabs on the dates, and Easter is some weeks off yet) to find that yesterday was the end-of-term on my Italian class. the previous week, we'd all had to do a "test" consisting of some aural exercises, a composition, some grammar exercises and a comprehension piece. We all, I think, found it more difficult than the previous term's one, but I was pleased to discover that despite a few very careless mistakes, I'd scored 61/67 or roughly 91%! That's slightly lower than the marks I used to get at school when I was studying languages, although I always used to reckon that anything over 90% was a reasonable enough performance.

I also got given a set of "competence statements" - something which is a cross between a certificate and a report card, with a list of 25 possible attainments out of which I managed 22. Those which are not ticked are:
-I can write a simple note or letter to a friend to accept an offer or invitation, thank someone or apologize
-I can fill in a questionnaire giving an account of my educational background, my job, my interests
-I can use the imperfect [tense]
Of those, I could in fact manage the first, as I've exchanged emails with people in Italian a couple of times on that sort of theme. The second I would probably struggle a bit with depending on the level of detail the "questionnaire" required. But the third is plain sailing: I learned how to use the imperfect tense (and the pluperfect as well) when I was learning Italian before and even after 45 years I haven't forgotten it - though I didn't really have occasion to use it when doing the various homework exercises we were set.
Anyway, the score was enough to earn me a Grade A pass and while I hope I'm not going to sound conceited when I say I'd have been disappointed with anything less, the fact that I've enjoyed doing it so much has definitely been the icing on the cake.

The next term starts in May, when we'll apparently be doing a lot more oral work!

The Greeks Italians have a word for it

This week, in my Italian class, we got round to expanding our vocabulary a bit by looking at various articles of clothing. In contrast to my experiences as a schoolboy linguist, I was gratified to find that things have moved on quite considerably, and thus I learned that skinny jeans are "jeans adorenti". But what of stiletto heels, I wondered - after all, stiletto is an Italian word, is it not?

"i tacchi a punta" we were told is apparently the correct way of expressing it, coupled with the height of the heel in centimetres. So.. given that I absolutely love wearing 5" stiletto-heeled knee-boots... I reckon I'm going to have quite a bit of fun doing this weeek's homework!

Trip back in time

I very much enjoyed writing about my schooldays last year, but one of the most gratifying things I've found since is the steady stream of emails from people who've seen my site and enjoyed looking at it: they've been coming through at the rate of about one a fortnight, including four now I think from ex-pupils I actually knew! But an unexpected bonus last week came in the form of an offer of some scans from the 1962 school panoramic photo. I'd always half-remembered that I hadn't got a "full set" of these: this one was missing, and I can't recollect why. Maybe I was absent from school on the day the orders were taken, or maybe having looked at myself on it, I decided I didn't want that particular souvenir! Nonetheless, 49 years later, I was especially glad to take the trip back in time as I posted the pictures on the site, remembering all the once-familiar faces, albeit struggling now to put names to some of them.

I was in Form 3L at the time, at the age of 13. I almost didn't spot myself on it: I seem to have quite an earnest expression for some reason. Maybe it was the thought of the haircut that my mother had obviously told me to get beforehand! Whatever the background to it, I don't suppose for one minute that I was envisaging that I'd be reflecting on the significance of it all some five decades later!

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.

A rose by any other name

Into December, and I'm now coming to the end of the first term in my Italian course. I sense that I'm doing pretty well: I'm enjoying it tremendously and picking up the grammatical concepts really quickly - or should I say refreshing my memory, as the deep-seated recollections of doing it some 45 years previously are coming back thick and fast now. The homework is falling into place too, as I'm regaining the intuitive ability to recognize when something looks right and sounds right. Having had as a schoolboy a definite aptitude as a linguist, it seems that it's something I evidently haven't lost.

Nonetheless, it was with some trepidation that I found out last week that today the tutor would be giving us a test - or a "progress check" as she hastily rephrased it. I did do some revision, or at least tried to fix more clearly some of the things which I'd been finding I'd mis-remembered (or which I possibly never learned the first time round). But it's not as if I were going to get a detention for not having paid attention properly in class!

The 'test' kicked off with a sort of aural/dictation test - listening to a recorded spoken passage and filling in the missing words in a transcript. I'd anticipated this as being the most difficult bit, because it's something I've been having trouble getting used to again - mainly I think due to the dialogue being played at normal conversation speed rather than being spoken deliberately slowly and clearly. But with filling in blanks, there's a surrounding context to give clues, which I've always found is a big help!

Onto the test proper: no looking things up in textbooks or dictionaries! Some grammar exercises (things like rewriting present tense as past tense) and then some comprehension exercises which consisted of four 'holiday postcards' and answering questions in Italian on which of the four holidaymakers had done what. A bit of intuitive guesswork with the vocabulary, but apart from my briefly wondering whether in a couple of instances there was more than one correct answer, it was otherwise fairly straightforward.

The big difference, I noticed, from the type of O level tests I'd done at school was the tendency to use multiple-choice answer format. With four possible answers to choose, blind guesswork will statistically score 25%, while eliminating those answers which are clearly and obviously wrong can easily improve that to a 50/50 chance. And that became even more apparent in the final set of questions which simply required a true/false answer to a statement. In fact the only time I did approach something of a total guess was in wondering if nuotare meant to swim, which I either didn't know or couldn't remember, but it seemed as if it might fit.

As far as I know we get the answers back next week. I shall be surprised if I haven't made the odd careless mistake or two: it's easy just to get a temporary mental block and give a wrong answer to something simple and basic which you actually know. But I reckon the grounding I got as a schoolboy linguist was a very solid one and I hope my old Masters at Leamington College for Boys would not be too disappointed with my efforts today.