I started at Thorpe Grammar in 1969, only a few weeks after man first walked on the Moon. As I write, recalling those days is the equivalent of somebody at that time looking back to before the Second World War, but it really doesn't seem very long ago. I suppose we just have to accept that our perception of time passing changes as we grow older, and I've been told it gets worse!

In my first year I was in 1L, and our form room was the mobile classroom - the only one, situated on the edge of the playing field next to the netball court and renamed M1 the following year as the school started growing. Several of us were destined to remain classmates throughout my five years at the school. Names that spring to mind are Steve Myhill, John Bourke, Paul Leared, Margaret Allison, Angela Barrett, Kathleen Watson and Heather Skipper. Sorry if I've missed you out! Mr Lewthwaite, the woodwork master, was our form teacher. I was at a disadvantage when I joined TGS in that I knew no one, having come from a private prep school [Langley Junior] rather than one of the state primary schools. This isn't the place to debate the wisdom or otherwise of my parents in not letting me attend Hillside School [which was literally at the bottom of our garden] when we moved to Thorpe in 1965, but I can remember being unhappy about it at the time. Whilst my four years at Langley turned out to be pleasant enough, I am convinced that the isolation I experienced as a result of not having friends in the neighbourhood had a long lasting and not particularly beneficial effect.

Few people seem to remember that at this time we didn't put the clocks back in winter. I can clearly recall arriving at school in the depths of winter at 8.30 just as dawn was breaking. Another early memory is of sitting right at the front of the hall in assembly [on the blue padded chairs that seem to have survived to this day] at right angles to the stage, girls on the left, boys on the right.

There were five classes in my year. The following year's intake was much larger and the number increased to seven. Suddenly there were mobiles everywhere, and my new form was allocated M5 on the west side of the school. A new teacher, Mr Copson, took charge of us. Perhaps that's not an ideal choice of words! I have a memory of one occasion when most of the chairs and desks from inside M5 were piled up outside the door, effectively locking out our hapless form teacher! He was a genuinely nice man who just didn't have what it took to control a class of disruptive 12 and 13 year olds, and from what I've heard, others gave him a far worse time than we did. But there were moments we all enjoyed. This was the era of power cuts and in one English lesson the usual rowdy behaviour had resulted in the fluorescent strip lights down one side of the room being switched off. "Turn those lights back on", yelled Mr Copson. I think it was Lee Gladwell  who immediately responded "It's not us sir, it's the electricity company. They switch the power off in different areas at different times!" Even he laughed at that.

Although Mr Copson was our form teacher, we weren't 2C but 2L, the Latin class. At the end of the first year I had done reasonably well, and had been put into one of the two forms that would study a second language. The choice was Latin or German. I simply cannot explain why I chose Latin, and  I wouldn't mind betting that several others would now say the same. Although I'd got on reasonably well with French I showed no aptitude for this dead language and in the regular tests scored perhaps two or three out of twenty. I can remember one occasion when I got zero! This probably wasn't the fault of Mr Wiard, who most people will remember as possibly the most eccentric of all the TGS teachers. He lived in Cambridge, catching the train to Norwich very early in the morning and arriving at school on his bike. Apparently he kept two bikes, one at each end of his train journey. His classes could be quite entertaining -  we once had quite a long discussion about Frankie Howerd's 'Up Pompeii' which was being shown on TV at the time and he seemed to enjoy the programme's bawdy humour rather more than one might have expected.

We left M5 in the summer of 1971 and moved to Room 10, upstairs in the old block, overlooking the entrance which Mr Spathaky rather grandly referred to as the west vestibule.  Miss Manning, a new member of the RE department, became our form teacher for two years. We all rather liked her, and had great fun sending up her pronunciation of the word 'to' as 'toe'. She left the school at the end of those two years but I know one or two members of the class kept in touch, and one day when we were in the fifth year, she came back to see us. Years later when I was working at Radio Broadland she presented our 'Morning Reflection' for a week, but sadly I missed her when she came in to do the recording.

At the end of the third year we had to make decisions about 'options'. That mark of zero out of twenty was reason enough to give up Latin, as well as two other subjects I hadn't got on well with, chemistry and art. I have never been able to draw anything, and I'm sure Miss Baines [later Mrs Aspland] was pleased to see me go. I do have one memory of her lessons. In our third year, she was form teacher to a first year class. One day, one of them appeared and asked if he could fetch a book he needed. "Yes Benjamin", came the reply, and  for some reason several of my fellow art students found this amusing and made little secret of it. When the boy had gone they were quite rightly told off for causing him embarrassment. I never knew Ben Bradshaw, and he probably doesn't even remember this incident, but for some reason it has stayed in my mind to this day!

The school  required that we continue to study several core subjects, and the law required that we still do PE and games. A number of us did nevertheless manage to avoid playing football for much of the time. As Mr Howes was perceptive enough to realise, it was better if those of us who had no ability or interest in the game were not involved. So we were happy to go cross country running!  Everyone had to do this a few times in the Spring, and then it was left to us 'enthusiasts' to keep the tradition going. The course we ran [I use the word in its loosest possible sense!] is unrecognisable as such today. I should know - the field which formed part of the course has now been taken over by houses, and I live in one of them! I can't recall  the identities of too many of the regulars on these little excursions. Paul Day was one, and I believe Andrew and John Yaxley were amongst our number on several occasions. I think Andrew Bentley also came along until he found another alternative to kicking a ball around  -  rifle shooting in the spinney. Thankfully this was not on our route!  Our destination was, more often than not, the trees near St Andrews Hospital which provided plenty of cover. We would often stop there for a while before returning to school, but we did sometimes go on to complete the course which took us up Green Lane and almost into Thorpe End where Mr Howes lived. One day his wife saw us, and when he found out, he seemed genuinely surprised that we'd been where we were supposed to be! He'd once greeted us upon our return with the question "whose house have you been round for tea today then?" Oddly that never happened, though I can't explain why as at least two of us lived nearby.

It was during the fourth year that I went on the school trip to Devon in April 1973. Mr Howard, Mr Spencer and Miss Lawton accompanied the group, which was from my year and the one below. I shared a big family sized room in the hotel with Jeremy Housden, Mark Santo, Andrew Chaplin and Andrew Hearn, and it was as a result of this trip that I finally became friendly with a number of people from the year below who lived very near to me. I had obviously been aware of them but hadn't really got to know them up to this point. None of my own year lived as close. Graham Phillips was on the trip, and so was Richard Cole. I subsequently became friends with several more near neighbours  including Paul Cheetham and Jonathan Rosby.  Others from that select residential area in Thorpe, where my parents still live today, were Paul's younger brother Dominic [and he had another brother, Mark, who went to the school after I had left]  Georgina Benison and  Robert Harrowven who was two years down from me. There were two others who lived there for a while but moved away from Norwich during their school years, Paul Bruce and Phillip Grylls.

By the fifth year mobiles were everywhere and again we found ourselves in one of the new ones. My memory, usually so good with useless information like this, lets me down here, but I'm pretty certain it was M12. In any case it was at the front of the school near the biology labs. Mr Spencer was our form teacher. He had joined the school on the same day as me in 1969, though he stayed rather longer! I was in his biology class throughout my time at TGS. The only other teacher who taught me for the whole five years was Mr Hall, head of the music department. Music was one of my options. His wife was also at the school teaching violin. Obviously she was known as Mrs Hall, but take a look at a programme for one of the school's music productions from this time and you will see her in the orchestra going under the name Miss Joan Mackerras. I only ever heard it mentioned once that she was the sister of the famous conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. I have no reason to disbelieve this. They were a secretive lot in the music department - Miss Teggin, who also took us for music in the fourth and fifth years once reluctantly confided that she had been a singer with the highly respected D'Oyly Carte opera company, but on no account was Mr Hall to be told this. I only hope it's safe to reveal it now!

Since I wrote the original version of these memories I have recalled a rather bizarre part of our fifth year timetable which I had long forgotten - a weekly period with the Headmaster usually in the Large Hall. I have barely any memory of what we did other than that he did not use the time as one might have expected, to talk about some of the issues that we would shortly be confronting in our adult lives such as managing money, jobs, relationships, etc, but instead asked us rather pointless questions and set puzzles which you would now be most likely to encounter on daytime television. There was one brilliant occasion when, with a perfectly straight face, and seemingly no idea of what he was saying, he asked us to think of as many words as we could that began with the letters p. e. n.  I just wonder whether this really was a display of staggering naivety which could surely never happen today, or are we underestimating him? Was it a subtle test to see how much sniggering there would be, and if anyone would dare say what we were all thinking? I doubt it, but we will probably never know for sure!

By this time the school had grown so much that we couldn't all fit into the hall for assembly so one day each week we stayed in our form rooms. I believe we were expected to conduct our own small scale assembly but I have no recollection of actually doing so!  It was also impossible to provide school lunches for all [despite there being a split period 5 - remember we either did 5A before lunch or 5B afterwards] so one day in every three weeks we either had to bring a packed lunch or go home. As I lived nearby I took this option and it did feel very strange walking out of school and along a deserted Laundry Lane in the middle of the day. At that time no one ventured beyond the school gates without a good reason. Anyone who ever passes Thorpe St Andrew School these days will know that this is definitely no longer the case!

School dinners are, of-course, often the butt of jokes but  I thought the food at TGS was OK and I don't remember there being a lot of negative comments from others. The worst bit was probably the queueing, not just for the meals but also the weekly ritual of buying the tickets. How much were they?  I can't be certain but I seem to remember the price was one shilling and sixpence in 1969. Five years and a conversion to decimal currency later, and I think they'd gone up to 15p. Well done if you've already worked out that this was an increase of 100%. Not unreasonable as these were years of rampant inflation. I believe I'm right in saying that offering a choice was a new development on my first day at the school. This was obviously a welcome move but what I couldn't understand was why, even five years later when I left, it seemed that equal amounts of each dish were prepared even when it would have been obvious from past experience that one would be in greater demand than the other. If you happened to be in for lunch late you often didn't get a choice. In the fifth year, in my capacity as a member of the school council [a body so useless it once spent an entire meeting discussing its own procedures] I sought an audience with Mr Howard, who was responsible for organising lunches.  I can't remember his response to that point, but I do recall going on to enquire why the option of cheese and biscuits with coffee was only available for those taking lunch early. The answer apparently was that the dinner ladies thought it was too easy to prepare and it made them feel they weren't doing their jobs properly! Why offer it at all then?

In fairness it must have been a logistical nightmare with so many people to feed. Each day of the week we were given a different time at which we had to report for lunch. We would normally have to queue outside and were let in to the dining hall a few at a time by the prefect on duty at the door who had to try and ensure that you hadn't turned up too early. This can't have been easy as each day there would be small groups that had priority to allow for lunchtime activities like choir practice. No wonder Mr Howard became so confused during one assembly that he told us we had to report at the correct time to eat our dinner tickets! Anyone else remember this?  

By the end of my time at TGS, whilst I remained basically well behaved [I have a vague recollection of one single table wiping assignment but I genuinely can't remember what the offence was] I had become somewhat disillusioned with petty rules and regulations. I haven't changed much since! The Managing Director of the radio station where I now work told me recently that he enjoys my 'cynical style'. It's good to know that the time I spent at school learning this skill was not wasted!  In common with so many others it probably began with a desire to follow the fashions of the day, and in this respect perhaps we can now say that the 1970s was an unfortunate time to have been a teenager! As early as the first year I began a war of attrition with my mother about the length of my hair. In the end I won [see the 1974 photo elsewhere on this site] and in common with quite a few others, I started wearing flared school trousers. I don't think these were against the rules, but in the fifth year I took to wearing jeans - or perhaps they were loons. Well whatever their name at least they were the right colour which was more than could be said for my black shirt!  It didn't stop there. There weren't any regulations about underwear but quite early in my days at TGS I can remember it became incredibly important not to wear white pants. In fact the more brightly coloured they were the better. I had some that were purple, and another pair that were so orange they probably glowed in the dark, and I made sure I saved these for the days we had to get changed - how vain is that!  And remember the rule about footwear - 'outdoor' shoes to be worn to and from school and 'indoor' soft soled shoes for the rest of the time including, inexplicably, when we were outside at lunchtimes. I think by the time I left, my indoor and outdoor shoes had turned into a single pair of plimsoles! All these and a non-regulation polo neck sweater in winter yet never was I reprimanded for any of these transgressions, despite almost daily encounters with Miss Bowles who taught me French. I led a charmed life!

I now find it very hard to believe I left Thorpe Grammar at the end of the fifth year. I passed eight out of nine O Level exams, I lived nearby, and almost all my friends were staying on. In fact I ended up doing A Levels for the next two years at Norwich City College. It was the right decision though - these were the days when the environment at college was very different to school and it suited me better.

It was during my two college years that I started doing radio shows, initially in Ipswich, and I doubt that would have gone down very well had I stayed at school - I can imagine the Headmaster talking in a stern voice about my lack of committment to my studies! So it all worked out for the best. Against all the odds my luck has held to this day, through fourteen years at Radio Broadland, four years as an announcer at Anglia Television, and for the last three years I've been working at The Beach in Lowestoft. I found Norwich too nice a place to leave. Inevitably many friends did, and we have lost touch. If you're one of them, now's your chance to put that right.  e-mail me - paultonline@btinternet.com