OK Dennis, here goes
September 1959.
So there we were Johnny Morrow and me, Donald Wright, standing a the 18 bus stop at the top of Parsons Hill, Kings Norton to go to Cotteridge and then to get the number 11 to Vicarage Road. Johnny and me knew each other from the cubs and so at least we each had someone to go with, as mommies and daddies didn't accompany their 11 year olds to their first day at grammar school then. I was the first boy from Broadmeadow School to pass for Camp Hill and Johnny was from Bell's Lane school. Don't really remember much about the first day, though we quickly found out that last years sherrins were out to give us what they'd got. We were both put in Tudor and into IM and classroom 7, at the top of the stairs leading down to the staff room and at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the music room. Our for master was Mr V C Brown, aka Greasy VC, Holy Joe, Holy Hovis or the one which stuck most of all 'The Punk!' who was the scripture teacher and it didn't take us long to figure out that he wasn't a very likeable chap. I remember my mom getting mixed up once and calling him Mr Hovis! For history we had Mr D I Thomas whom we soon discovered we had to be wary of, and my first memory of him was when we were being introduced to rugby and he was showing us how to take a penalty kick. When he put the ball straight through the posts and we all cheered, he just lost it and shouted at us to shut up, and where did we think we were anyway, 'Villa Park!?' My next recollection of him was when he started hitting Dave Mallett for some possible slight, and when we were all asked our names in class.
After coming from junior school and arriving at camp Hill as it was then it was frightening ..... particularly since some of the older boys looked to us like men. Tom Rogers put the fear of God into me so I was really pleased one day to see when he called a boy from the fifth form out in assembly by screaming out his name 'Fogarty ....Alan I thing his first name was, and as he came to the front of the hall you could see that he just didn't care one iota. He was my hero after that. We had the head for scripture and when he was going though the Exodus story, one little chap didn't understand how when Pharaoh decided to kill all of the male children born, this would prevent the Israelite population increasing..... to which his reply was 'You idiot..... don't you know that women can't have children without men?' when of course being 11 and it being 1959, none of us knew that this was the case since it was a closely guarded secret.
So as it goes in Latin, 'Quae cum ita sint .... since this was so..... we all, as everyone else had to, learned how to swim and not sink..... to keep our mouths shut with the bully boys and to wreak our revenge however we could. Right at the beginning in maths we were introduced to the concept of the right angle by our teacher one Mr. Hurst, aka Hairy, since he had fingers like a bunch of Fyffes all covered in hair, and when he bisected his straight line he indicated the right angle by placing it on the right hand side, when a little later on he indicated the corresponding angle on the left hand side, and asked what it was I though, this is easy, I know this one, and told him it was a left angle, he thought I was taking the mick, and promptly came down the row and battered me one. So I go my revenge thereafter by splashing ink from my fountain pen up the back of his jacket as he'd gone past me continuing to check all of the other boys work. It was great and caught on and we all had great fun until some bright spark put a bit too much effort into his ink flick and it went right up his back and over his bald head and of course he felt it. Epic.
I never got on with maths, because nobody ever told me what I could do with x when I found out it was -2 and it all just seemed like pointless puzzle solving to me when those who were good at it were considered geniuses, and all the rest of us who couldn't give a toss anyway were regarded as either lazy or idiots.... and what was the point in using letters when we had numbers. French came easy to me on the other hand, though I never liked having to speak it. I remember much later on Dennis Marsden Getting angry with our Birmingham pronunciation of j'ai with our elongated dipthongs shouting at us 'it's not jaaaai, its je [e acute] .... much to our enjoyment! Dennis was also pretty frightning when we were first formers, but later on we found out that he was a pretty good bloke. Dennis was the careers master and detention was held in the careers room . We all had to stand facing the wall in silence for an hour and once when I was undergoing my sentence I was looking at a careers letter on the wall addressed to M. Dennis Mardsden, B.A. ....... and some wag had added the letters S.T.A.R.D. after the B.A...... I found it hysterical and was hard put not to laugh.
To be continued: