THERE have been some interesting letters recently, concerning school days of the past, and a general synopsis of behaviour and conditions in days gone by, appertaining mainly to the past 60 or so years.
The people writing these letters I presume are by definition writing about their own experiences.
Well that's all well and good, but I have my own experiences to call on, from the same period, and they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the stylised arcadia of which they write.
I went to Samuel Southall secondary modern school, at Merrimans Hill. There was nothing merry about the place. Bullying was the order of the day, and was on a huge scale, but sometimes, when I have thought back, the thing that stands out most was the sheer violence and destruction. I remember teachers threatened with razor blades. One teacher lived on a boat in Diglis Basin and I remember about 10 lads from the school going down there and breaking every window on his boat.
We used to have a daily bottle of milk in those days and it was delivered to the main gate where monitors would load it on to a hand cart then pull it into the playground, which was elevated and over looking the playing fields.
I remember distinctly a group of lads commandeering this cart one day, running it down from the playground, where it quickly gathered speed and smashing it into the field at the bottom, breaking every bottle on the cart.
Another incident and a favourite of the creatures that I had to share my time with at this abysmal establishment was to collect all the wire waste baskets dotted around the school, put them in the middle of the playground, and jump on them until they were destroyed. Once this actually happened on a school open day.
We often had visits from the police, truancy was rife and none of the above were isolated incidents, but by far the most horrific was reversing or turning round the brake blocks on people's cycles.
This resulted in the brake blocks jumping out when the brakes were applied, nice eh! We were a segregated school at this time, girls were completely separate from boys, and I remember boys creeping over to the girl's side and performing this heresy, with the result that one girl spent three months in hospital.
Boys were caught and punished for these atrocities, they were caned profusely sometimes in front of the whole school, and occasionally with their parents present.
It made not the slightest difference to their behaviour. Some even went to borstal. Looking back, I cannot recall any of them being changed by there experience of punishment, they were trash then and probably still are.
PAUL WILSON,
Worcester.
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