Old School/New School

I'm going with a literal approach to theme this week in blogging about my old school - which also happened to be a new school in premises barely three years old when I enrolled, as I'll explain shortly.

First a bit about me and how I got to go there. When my family arrived back in England from Nigeria (where I was born and spent my formative years), we lived in Peterborough for some time. My dad was a Methodist minister and I went to infant and junior schools in the city between 1958 and 1964.

Methodist ministers move parish about every six years (it appears to be a bit of a tradition to keep things fresh) and so in the summer of 1964 we were about to move to Cambridge.  My parents were faced with sorting out a secondary school for me in a new city. I'd recently turned eleven and had just sat the 11+ exam, as all children in their final year of primary education did in those days. (I believe it was finally phased out in 1976.) It turned out I did quite well. I not only passed but earned a county scholarship into the bargain.

When my dad enquired as to what the best secondary school in Cambridge was, he was told that it was The Perse School. The Perse was originally founded in Cambridge in 1615 by a wealthy benefactor, Stephen Perse. Born in Norwich and educated at Norwich School and then Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Perse became a Doctor of Medicine and a shrewd businessman. In his will he left money for the founding of a Free School in the city, originally in Free School Lane (as it came to be called) from 1615 until 1890. Free School was a bit of a misnomer as it was a fee-paying school. The fees per pupil when it relocated to newly acquired and built premises on land in Gonville Place in 1890 were £3 per term. 

From 1945 until the mid-1970s, although still a Public School it was also classified as a 'direct grant grammar school' meaning that though the majority of buys were fee-paying, it also offered free 'assisted places' to bright boys from poor families -   and that's where my county scholarship came in handy as it entitled me to go there, covering the fees that a lowly paid Methodist minister would simply never have been able to afford. 

Off to the Perse I went, in September 1964 in my purple and black striped blazer and purple and black cap, a new boy at literally a new school, for The Perse had recently relocated again away from its cramped site in Gonville Place in the centre of the city to its current spacious location in the outskirts, to elegant but functional premises designed by the architect Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, set among acres of playing fields, and officially opened by Princess Alexandra in July 1961.

artist's impression of the new school façade

I think even at the time I realised how very fortunate I was to benefit from such a good education in such well-appointed surroundings. In addition to the relatively small population (approximately 400 pupils compared to the 1,000 + that many schools contained) we had small class sizes in clean and bright classrooms and well-equipped labs. We even had our own theatre for drama lessons complete with sound system and lighting console, a lecture theatre, a music room, a library, a geography room complete with wave-tank, a  gymnasium, a hall with a balcony, a refectory, a cloistered walkway and a vivarium in the grounds, plus the usual playing fields (with cricket pavilion), tennis courts and a parade square for those who liked to march about.

It was a privileged education, but were school days the happiest? Probably not. For all the setting and facilities, I had to go nearly four miles to get there and back and sometimes envied my brothers who could just walk around the corner from home to their Secondary Modern school. I went by bus (two of them, changing in the city centre as I lived to the north of it and the school was to the south), and sometimes walked home if the weather was good - but never walked to school as that would have meant getting up an hour earlier than I already did. Even so I was quite often out of the house before anyone else was up.

The only real downside was school every Saturday morning, on account of us having two games afternoons in the week...and if you ended up playing for a school team as well, as I sometimes did, well that was your Saturday afternoon gone as well. Oh, and it was a rugby school, so football (as in soccer) was not an option, though it was rumoured that headmaster Stanley Stubbs had once been on the books of Stoke City. 

fresh fodder in the refectory ;)

It was also quite a regimented existence and I think there was quite a bit of bullying, not that it really impacted me but I used to hear fairly macabre stories of stuff that went on in the boarding houses (for although I was a day boy, the school had quite a large number of boarders). And there was sometimes a subtle divide between cliques of fee-paying boys whose parents were obviously wealthy and the rest of us. 

Curiously though, The Perse was probably more like the soon-to-be Comprehensive Schools that would arrive in the 1970s than the other Grammar schools in Cambridge in that there was a true mix of abilities. Yes the 40% of non-fee-paying boys who, like me, had come in on 'assisted places, were all academically minded, but among the 60% of fee-paying pupils, there were more than a few perfectly pleasant but not terribly bright youngsters who were only there because their parents had money, and they struggled - though we all got along fine and they certainly benefitted from challenged and opportunities they wouldn't have got in a Secondary Modern school.

The regimentation wasn't too irksome while we were young, green first and second years, but as we grew older and the permissive ways of the sixties began to hold an attraction us, issues around length of hair, dress code, illicit smoking and drug use caused conflict with the establishment which wasn't kindly disposed to change or challenge. I was never compliant enough to be a prefect and would probably have declined the offer if it had been made, but in my upper sixth year I was chairman of the school council, a consultative body that had recently been established by a new headmaster, (Stanley Stubbs having retired  in the summer of 1969). So we passed through and out into the wider world, in my case to read English at university and then to become a teacher of English and drama in my own right at a London Comprehensive school.

Since my time there, The Perse has undergone more significant transformations. From 1976, when the 'assisted places' scheme was ended and state funding ceased to flow, it went completely independent. It also went co-educational in the 1990s, expanded both its intake and its facilities with more classrooms, a sixth-form block and an arts centre, and is now ranked regularly among the top independent schools in the country. It holds reunion events for Old Perseans, though I have never been tempted.

an imposing skyline

I've not had time to write a new poem this week, though ideas are percolating. I was planning to do so today, buy I've ricked my right knee somehow and spent the afternoon in bed  asleep, dosed with painkillers and with a hot-water-bottle pressed to the knee (probably should have been an ice-pack but I couldn't face that idea).

I've gone with this poem by John Clare because the first poem I ever had published was something I wrote back in 1964 in that junior school in Peterborough as part of an English project marking the centenary of Clare's death, as he was local to the area. I don't have a copy of what I wrote. Neither do I have copies of any of the poems I wrote at The Perse and which appeared in issues of the school magazine 'The Pelican'. When my parents moved on from Cambridge, I was away at university, and they just threw out boxes of my school magazines, exercise books, project folders, essays, notebooks et cetera without even asking me if I still wanted them. Brutal.

I never walked to school, for reasons I explained above, but here is John Clare's delightful poem about doing so...  

Schoolboys In Winter

The schoolboys still their morning ramble take 

To neighboring village school with playing speed,
Loitering with passtime’s leisure till they quake,
Oft looking up the wild-geese droves to heed,
Watching the letters which their journeys make;
Or plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed,
And hips and sloes; and on each shallow lake
Making glib slides, where they like shadows go
Till some fresh passtimes in their minds awake.
Then off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow;
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride huge giants o’er the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.

                                                         John Clare (1793-1864)

Qui facit per alium facit per se. Thanks for reading, S ;-)