A myriad of memories. 1963-68

A myriad of memories - shared by many, I'm sure. With the passage of time, half-remembered, confused or idealised possibly, but worth recalling:-

- the trepidation on that first day (Sept '63) as you congregated in small groups outside the school waiting for your mate from primary school to turn up, wondering whether the (now) 2nd years would very shortly be pushing your head down the bog and pulling the flush as a ceremonial welcome, and knowing that nothing would ever be quite the same again once you went through those green iron gates

- playing 'hide-and-seek' with the prefects, as you hid in the classrooms during breaktime in Form 1. (It ceased to be 'fun' anymore after that year, a portent of things to come.)

- trying to appear as unobtrusive as possible as you were eating your dinner in the 'old' hall (or sandwiches in the 'new' hall) when you spotted the dinner monitor prefect with his little notebook looking for some 'volunteers' to pack the dinner tables and benches away or rearrange the chairs and clean the place up afterwards. (Seem to recall tidying up the 'new' hall took bloody ages!)

- the magic of that deeply moving first school carol service attended that made at least one little boy's Christmas extra special that year (1963)

- (1964) - sitting in the gym changing-room, aged 12, listening to Ivor Jones (PE teacher) giving an introductory talk to us all before we started gym proper the following week, becoming completely baffled at one stage when he said "...and it would be a good idea if the 'bigger boys' amongst you wore a pair of swimming trunks or a jock-strap under your gym shorts...". (Why's that, I thought? We're not going swimming. And afterwards, we'd have to have a shower in the nude, we all knew that. Am I a 'bigger boy'? A 'what' strap? What's that? Shall I ask him? Better not. He might think I was 'taking the mick' and belt me one! He was like that, was Ivor.) I didn't stay baffled for long though. All was revealed, in more ways than one, the following week when I took my first nude shower after gym with the rest of my class, when the penny 'dropped', so to speak, as to what Ivor had been talking about! And I also twigged that when he mentioned the 'bigger boys' earlier, he certainly wasn't referring to me! And talking of school showers.....

- what about that dreadful first nude shower you had to take with the other boys after games, when you parted company with your last item of clothing more reluctantly than a Scotsman parted with a ten-bob note, and then proceeded, oh so self-consciously, 'sky-clad' like the rest of your classmates, into the showers, wishing the earth would open up and swallow you whole, desperately wanting to cover your embarrassment with your hands, but knowing you couldn't since you noticed (discreetly!) that nobody else was covering theirs, and then becoming aware, to your great suprise, that you were suddenly completely at ease with the whole exercise, so much so in fact, that you felt you wouldn't really mind having another one next week (and you did, and on many an occasion following. It was 'fun'!)

- the 'Prefects' Play' (1964?)- the funniest thing you'd ever seen

- doing your bit for good community relations by shouting " Micks! " at the girls from that Catholic school (whose name escapes me) that walked past us across the road as we sat on the steps of Guildford Crescent Baths waiting for our weekly school swimming session (Forms 2 and 3[?]). (I'm afraid we weren't always 'gentlemen', were we, gentlemen!)

- 'Nobby' Bolaire's (?) very strange looking French motor car

- that environmental hazard zone known as the 'Common Room', where the master who answered your knock on the door seemed to emerge suddenly like Dracula out of that thick foggy mist of teachers' cigarette smoke

- playing 'King Ball' on a Tuesday or Thursday dinnertime against the gym wall in a now almost deserted playground with an also unfortunate mate and maybe another boy or two from different years who you otherwise would never have got to know, as you filled in time waiting for the detention hour to commence

- our unwelcome visit from the burglars, when they trashed the art room and poured acid over the school grand piano

- morning assemblies in the hall of the 'new' building, where, as you sat on those light-brown-coloured varnished wooden chairs, you could see many friends everywhere you looked; and then praying for the (usually unexpected) arrival of the 'University Trio' requiring the cancellation of the first two lessons that day, which you hoped for, in my case as I hadn't done my homework for either of them (as usual!)

 

-  writing down the word  'virgule' at least fifteen times during your first of 'Ollie' Goldthorpe's occasional French dictation exercises, before it gradually dawned on you that it meant ","

- bending over in the headmaster's study, absolutely TERRIFIED, for your first ever (and probably only) caning from Mr Maland, and then getting up shortly afterwards when it was all over, thinking "Is that all it is? Was 'ardly worth the effort!"

 

-  risking life and limb crossing over the increasingly busy 'Newport Road' outside the school to get to Roath Library in order to examine that UNEXPURGATED version of Shakespear's 'Twelfth Night' they had on one of the shelves there to see if it could shed any light on that joke about ' her C's, her U's and her T's', not of course forgetting 'her great P's.' (I soon gave up, and read one of those bound copies of the "Boys' Own Paper" they had on the shelves instead. Much more interesting!)

- 'flashing for the school' when we were fifteen during those inter-school competitive 'strip-tease' sessions some of us engaged in with some similarly pubescent boys from Kings College in the changing room of the Wales Empire Pool after our afternoon swims there. Ah.... those golden days of good clean (and innocent!) adolescent homo-erotic fun! And much more interesting than reading the "Boys' Own Paper"!  (I'd better not say any more, and draw a veil - I mean a towel - over it!)

 

- 1967 - the long overdue revolt against our obligatory contributions to the 'Jubilee Fund', led by, if memory serves, John Stanley Perryman-Burgess, as he liked to be called (and what an unforgettable  'larger than life' - in every sense of the phrase - character he was)

 

-  1968 - 5A vandalising their classroom (naughty, naughty!) at the same time as 5C were decorating theirs

 

- 1968 - July. Joy of Joys! Taking off your school tie and throwing it into the forecourt of the 'Hodge Building' as you past it going home after your last day of school EVER, knowing you'd NEVER be needing it again. Wonderful! I'd been waiting five years to do that! 

 

Actually, I enjoyed my time at Cardiff High School immensly, but there was a whole new and exiting world beckoning me, and I couldn't wait to become part of it...... My God, that first day at work! What a shock that was...the filthy language [soon copied by me, I'm afraid to say - well, my mum wasn't around to smack my 'botty' anymore!]....and that 19 year-old girl on the switchboard...Did she HAVE to wear 'hotpants', me sitting beside her, as she showed me how to operate the switchboard?! I was 16 after all, and not a little boy anymore.......but all that's another story!

 

Ray Aldridge

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________