The Class of 63 Reunion
Linda Hutchins asks "Where did the last 40 years go....?"
If you cannot recognise a face, then hold your mouse over it for the name to appear.
The old prefects room door was locked and the window obscured with a curtain so you couldn't see inside, as it is now the caretaker's office, but it couldn't obscure the memories...
...of chocolate digestives wrapped in red or blue foil, endless cups of coffee and easy chairs which made you itch.
...where the old wireless crackled into life, just about managing to locate the new pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio London where they played our kind of music - Stones, Beatles, Righteous Brothers...
...where earnest discussion about politics and literature was interlaced with the gossip about who'd snogged who on the bus back from the economics trip to the LSE and who was going to
Pete Markstein's party. What brilliant parents Pete Markstein had - going out and giving over their precious home to a crowd of testosterone-fuelled teenagers. Remember that one party where under cover of a having a good snog outside the school gates on the way home
Jim Boughton and some others managed to padlock the school gates shut?
They had to bring bolt cutters and hacksaws to get in that Monday morning - if only the pupils at Jim Boughton's present school could hear that one.
That prefects room was a haven.
Opposite was the boys' changing room "you'll never have been in
here", John Child told me - It hasn't changed in 40 years. And he was
right! Still the same benches and coat pegs and huge heating pipes with
chipped paint and the showers with bright yellow tiles - except that now some
health and safety directive had decreed that a non-slip mat should be put in
front of them.
Dave Monk remembers the showers and Garry Grimshaw bawling at the boys to be
quiet. Dave's voice it seems could be heard above the rest and he ended up with
a slippering on his bare backside.
He was a hard task master that Grimshaw, especially with cross-country running. Reckoned he used to stand at the top of the Tower Block with his binoculars and watch as the lads ran the course. Although he can't have done or he'd have known the tricks they got up to...
According to Jim Boughton and Dave Thorneycroft they'd set off and once they'd cleared the Romany and lit up their first fag, it would be straight to the homes of the ones who lived closest to have a kick-about and watch the telly until a suitable time had passed for them to run back to school. Sometimes they got back too soon and were sent off to run again.
Terry Bream remembers another trick when they would set off then dodge down into the hollow outside the nudist camp behind the trees and stay there until the last lap, when they'd pop up and join in again.
And there were more important things to do instead of running - like having snowball fights in the winter and seeing what you could find on the tip which was on the route.
Sid Sharman rather wishes they hadn't found that old bit of carpet - the lads decided to roll him up in it and tip him into the water-filled trench.
John Buckingham was on the famous cross country run when Russ Perry and another lad were shot as they ran near Kingsthorpe golf course. Two ex-pupils had decided to use them as target practice. It was an exciting time for John who was hauled into
Gunner's office to make a statement to the police. He thought he handled it very well until after the police had gone and Gunner told him: "You did one thing wrong lad - you kept saying yeah - the word is yes!"
Pete Chillingsworth was there as well, running alongside Russ, but he missed out on the glory: Didn't see a thing! he said.
Then there was the swimming at the baths at Midsummer Meadow in the shadow of the old power station, which took its water from the river and was so murky that you could never see to the bottom. John Buckingham remembers dropping aniseed balls into the water and creating a highly-realistic blood effect which had the teachers wondering if someone was lying injured on the bottom.
At one swimming gala Tiger Timms banned Pete Chillingsworth from wearing his
school cap: "He told me it was the most disgusting article he had ever seen
- I could see his point. I'd had it since first year, it had no peak and was
split up all the seams and just clung to the back of my head."
Back at the reunion it was away from the changing rooms, out in the sunshine again and across to the workshops where the woodworking benches stood silent: "I'm sure I learned car mechanics in here," Dave Monk recalled. "I wanted to get my own car so I could pull the birds. "He moved on and thought he'd found the room but it was filled with banks of computers...an ironic new use of the space since nobody learns to service their own cars these days - it's all done by computer diagnostics.
Onto the science labs where deep discussion about which was physics and which chemistry was interrupted by the sudden recognition of a face from the past: Angela Peto!!!! Nostalgia took over and no-one seemed to care anyway.
Not like Stan Guffog all those years ago when
Robert Jones who was
particularly bright at chemistry
carried out a little experiment of his own.
Pete Chillingsworth remembers him boiling nitric acid in a crucible and rolling
a ball of potassium into it. It glowed for a minute and there was an almighty
bang which would probably have blown out the windows had not it been summer and
they were wide open. Apparently it was so loud they heard it right across
the playing fields. "I shall never forgot, Stan sat us down and said
"Sometimes in life lads there are times when you just have to say Don't be
such a bloody fool...I remember we were more shocked by the fact that he'd said
bloody."
Tiger Timms managed to shock his pupils too by conducting a hitherto unconducted experiment involving a cast iron bolt, a cylinder and some freezing water. The aim was to demonstrate that water expands when it freezes; the outcome was a massive explosion which launched the bolt into the ceiling leaving the teacher with a puzzled look: "I didn't expect it to be that aggressive," he admitted.
Leaving behind the science block and heading for the bridge we passed the place where years ago some of the lads were caught idling rolling coins under the door and hauled off to Gunner's office and accused of gambling by playing shove halfpenny! More punishment.
Time to inspect the Tower Block - still the same number of steps and no
excuse to use the lift. 
At the top the large classroom where Mary Evans learned
her typing skills from Mrs Taylor, had been split into three and was
unrecognisable. But the other classrooms in the block were the same...and
probably haunted by the ghosts of 
Pete Fellowes and Nobby Clarke.
`
Both teachers had a tendency to leave the room during the class, recalls Dave
Thorneycroft and when they did it became a battleground: "We used to up-end
the desks and hurl things at each other - chalk, board rubbers, anything. Unfortunately on one occasion several of these missiles flew out of the open
window and landed on the flat roof. We persuaded Jock Ward to climb out
and fetch them, and while he was busy out there we closed the window and
pretended Nobby was coming back. He managed to get back in eventually and
Nobby was none the wiser, which is perhaps just as well since they had no sense
of humour in those days and it would have been an expulsion offence!"
Then there was the time that Pete Fellowes left the room - probably for a crafty fag - and they decided to put his desk in the store room. Unfortunately it was too wide and got wedged, and as we were trying to get it out someone shouted that Pete was coming back I was left stuck in the cupboard behind the wedged desk. I got a double detention for that!
Not all the teachers gave pupils the opportunity to misbehave - and some
actually gave them the chance to learn...like the blustering Harry Hartwell, who
wrapped his academic cloak around him and did a passable impression of Charles
Laughton playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was brilliant teacher who would
describe in horrific detail the symptoms of the Black Death so enthusiastically
that his shirt would pop open revealing a hairy chest poking through his string
vest... at which point he would wrap it all up again in his cloak.
Then there was a Welshman called Matthews who taught English.
He offered
half-a-crown to anyone in the class who would learn the poem The War of Dinas
Vawr and recite it to Taffy Newall. Martin Verity (or Farting Merrily, as
Terry Jackson reminded him) took up the challenge learned the poem, recited it
and won his money. Whether it was the money or the poem that had a 
deep effect
on him, but he - and indeed Terry - can still remember it to this day.
The day they all fooled Gunner - not an easy thing to do - was something they
remember too, at least they did when Jenny Heard reminded them! 
Mr Bennett was
away and Gunner stepped in to take the Latin class. Martin Verity had not done
his homework, so some quick thinking was called for: "I asked him how we
knew Latin was pronounced the way it was, and we managed to keep the debate
going until the end of the lesson."
Away from the classrooms and back into the main reception and the hall which
held so many memories. For Jon Malin and Pete Miller it was scanning the balcony
to see the legs of the girl prefects as they walked into assembly, for others it
was getting the cane for having the temerity to eat Smarties during Speech 
Day.
And then of course the famous "Goodbye" - with Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore chortling away while the music master tried to drown them out on the piano and Buzzer walked back to his office his face more peuce with every step...
So what DID happen to the last 40 years???
PS I've tried to include everything I was told at the reunion, if I have missed anything or anyone, or - Heaven forbid - got anything wrong, then I'm sorry. I'm not as young as I used to be!!
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