I can recall still quite clearly arriving at Heacham just a few weeks before the autumn half term in 1960 and being greeted by what seemed, to a poor weedy 10 year old, a huge man with a red face and very loud voice!
Formalities and greetings over with, I was allocated to 6 dorm and met my companions for what turned out to be six years for the very first time. Mutual suspicion was rife! Who were these guys, would I get on with them, could we be friends and, on their part, who was this late arrival disturbing the established relationships! Trying to fit in (break in, it felt like at times) when you’ve arrived part way through is very difficult, not just in the dorm but in class as well.
My folks tell me that most of my early letters to them were pretty much, in the words of the old song, ‘take me home oh mother, father take me home.’ But just like Camp Granada things did get better and by the end of term I felt like I belonged and almost didn’t want to leave to go home for Xmas!
To someone who lived within walking distance of his infant and then his junior school the constant bus travel between Ingoldisthorpe, Heacham and Hunstanton was a joy. All that time on buses to be with your mates, tell jokes, plot plots and get up to mischief. Never mind the 4 of the cane for fighting on the bus – just make sure you didn’t get caught.
Listening to Radio Luxembourg and Horace Batchelor after lights out was a constant battle to avoid being caught by the prefects. 6 dorm was above their common room and for the early part of the evening we could hear the music coming through the fireplace. After they went to bed the radios would all come on with earpieces in the ear pressed on the pillow so the ‘tinny’ sound wouldn’t be heard through the door – John Dring had ears as sensitive as a bat! If a prefect entered the earpiece could be gently pulled by the cable out of the ear and down the bed without a sound!
John was so good at silently creeping up to door that after a while we put down very fine gravel that has slippers crunched on to give us advance warning – his ‘catches’ went down amazingly, although I have to say that his bark was always very much worse than his bite and very few of us were ever reported!
I had never been to a school with ‘foreigners’ for pupils; my education to age 10 had been exclusively ‘white’. I remember very few, if any, of what would now be termed racial abuse. ‘Tooks’ and a number of other Africans were just boys to us, not black or coloured; some of the Iraqi’s could be a pain but not because they were Iraqi they just happened to be a pain.
In 12 dorm I can remember poor old ‘Sec’ who very good humouredly had to listen every night to the goodnights culminating in the ‘good night Sec’ to which Geoffrey Nathan always added ‘sy’!!
Then there was the rule that you had to wear ‘heavy macs’ and gumboots to walk/run the 5 yards to the outside loo – we all felt deliciously guilty whenever we managed to dodge the roving prefects when we weren’t wearing the gear! There was also the competition to see who could pee highest up the wall – try as I might I never won!
Dodgy porridge, crispy bacon, awful fish pie, terrific chocolate pud and ‘Thames mud’, the wonderful sarnies for those of us in the cricket teams, the real mud (and cow pats) for those of us in the football or hockey teams. The cold in winter, especially at Gresham House, which seemed to have no heating. The Corona bottle filled with the last of the hot water (usually only warm really) to keep the feet warm until you dropped off. Jonathan, who snored so much I had to change dormitories in order to get a night’s sleep and all those wonderful girls that we boys fell in love with on a regular and sequential basis – the envy of those in my set like Tim Walton, Henry Howe, Michael Donnelly, Robin Shorey who never seemed without a girlfriend throughout most of my time at Potts.
The evenings when we used to sneak out with one of the cars and trog off to Norwich where with Robin Shorey – fluent in French – we all pretended to be French! Another time, aged 15 I had my one and only Vindaloo at a Norwich curry house, still haven’t recovered from that one, burnt the skin off my lips!
‘Borrowing’ the car or the mini-buses to learn (illegally) how to drive taught by those who didn’t know how to drive either. Mind you, with Henry Taylor as a role model – did that matter!
Being hauled in by the Head and the local policeman (was it Knobbs?) because the local newsagent had reported me as a possible communist sympathiser ‘cos I’d ordered Communist Weekly at the then exorbitant price of 6d! For a short time I was the school’s leading expert on the production of Russian tractors that would have looked antique in the 30s!!
The ACF was great fun. Finished up as Colour Sergeant Haslett in the Queen’s Own Sandringham Troop, 3rd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Artillery. The News of the World .22 shooting contests, the .303 Lee Enfield with a kick like a mule if you didn’t press it tightly against the shoulder – ask Mike Smith, who didn’t, I suspect he still has the bruise! The 25 pounders, the drill, Captain Knobbs, the camps where I first came across the delight of tea the colour of brown boot polish sweetened with Fussells condensed mile. The surprise on the faces of the Sea and Air Cadets when they landed against us as defenders of the beach to be met by a hail of rabbit dung shot out by blanks from the .303s.
Being in education now, I own a third of the largest Ofsted schools inspection contractor, and looking back, I’m not so sure that the educational standards at the school were as good as they might have been, but I left with a reasonable clutch of ‘O’ levels and one early ‘A’ level in English Lit, courtesy of Bill Kelly who subsequently helped me through my grammar school RE studies to get a grade C at ‘A’ level.
Whatever it might have lacked for me, and I know that many did achieve very good academic results, it certainly made it up for it in many other ways, some of which I’ve referred to above. The school of life, I guess, which for me gave me a self-confidence beyond and above my years through to when I was about 30 and which was probably responsible for much of my early success in local government. I know that a number of pupils didn’t find St. Mike’s a good experience and I can understand that, too. We did pick on some of those who were less gifted or different from us, pretty unmercifully. Cruelty among schoolboys is not a modern phenomenon!
If for nothing else, I will always be grateful to St. Mike’s for introducing me to Barbara Packer as she was then. I fell in love with her when I was 15 and she was going out with Henry Howe. We met again 3 years after I left St. Mike’s in 1966, when I was a union rep. at a NALGO conference in Blackpool in 1969 where she was training as a nurse. A year later she came down to London and we got married in 1971. 30 years and twin boys later, Paul and Philip aged 23, we are still together and, as she often reminds me, she’d have got a lesser sentence for murder!!
We both are planning to be at the re-union this year after a break of 4/5 years and hope to renew old friendships again and I’m pretty sure that Philip Atkinson and Ian Pennington owe me a beer from last time. Especial good wishes to them, the only two farmers I know, I hope the recent events have left them in good shape.
John Haslett.
