I have been musing about my life, as one tends to do in one's dotage - and I thought about my life BEFORE WHS. Yes, our school was extraordinary in many ways and introduced us to many new activities and ideas, but there were a number of things that I NEVER did again after starting in 1B in September 1958. I didn't miss them at the time as I was too busy and excited by everything that was new, but in hindsight I look back with huge nostalgia on some of the things I did as a primary school kid.

Once I started at WHS, I NEVER AGAIN:
	read "Biggles", "Billy Bunter", "Just William", "Jennings", "Black Beauty" or "Treasure Island".
	read any more editions of "The Wizard" or "Hotspur" - which I voraciously devoured as a kid. They were almost all TEXT compared to "The Beano" and other comics of the time, and I am convinced that the large vocabulary I learned reading them was a key to passing the 11+. One reason I never read them again is that when I came home from WHS after the first term I found that my Dad had thrown all my old carefully-preserved copies away.
	played with Meccano, Bayco or train-sets.
	played hop-scotch and "knock-down-ginger".
	rode a home-made scooter running on ball-bearings around the pavements of Camberwell.
	completed any of those old "I Spy" hobby booklets.
	made any more Kiel-Kraft planes out of balsa wood.
	played on the old bombsite at the end of our street, Southampton Way in Camberwell.
	collected stamps and matchbox tops.
	played cricket on a tarmacked school playground with those stumps that had springs on them!
	went to Camberwell swimming-pool, which was not far from where we lived.
	rode my bike all the way from Camberwell to Kingston-on-Thames where my paternal grandparents lived.
	went for Sunday walks with my uncle and his dog on Ham Common and in Richmond Park near where he lived with my grandparents.
	went to any spiritualist meetings with my maternal Grandmother.
	stayed with my Mum's parents, who used to take me to Charlton Park, the sublimely wonderful Greenwich Park and on the Woolwich Ferry.
	went to watch Charlton play at their ground "The Valley", which my maternal grandparents' house overlooked.
	played draughts with my Grandad, whom I never managed to beat. watched "Bill & Ben and the Flowerpot Men" - or indeed "Andy Pandy" and "Sooty and Sweep" on a 12" B&W tv.
	ditto "The Buccaneers" with Robert Shaw or "The Adventures of Robin Hood" with Richard Greene - two absolutely wonderful children's tv shows of the 50s.
	did country-dancing, which we did at my primary school - not really macho enough for WHS!
	went with my Mum up to the South Bank and Tower Bridge, where I played on the old cannons now fenced off.
	bought fish and chips in an old newspaper for hal a crown.
	went on holiday to Cornwall and swam in Sennen Cove.
	went camping on a farm in Guestling near Hastings, where we fed the pigs, helped with the harvest, collected millions of blackberries and where one year the farmer let me drive a Little Massey-Ferguson tractor!

We didn't have much money and lived in a first-floor flat with no bathroom, but looking back I had an extraordinarily rich childhood thanks in particular to my Mum, who always tried to find interesting things for me to do and encouraged me in everything. My Dad was not in any way unpleasant, just not really so concerned about bringing me up - and he never played with me much. I guess he was also very busy trying to make ends meet. But THEY SENT ME TO WOOLVERSTONE, which of course utterly and totally changed my life.

Rest In Peace, Mum & Dad

My PRE-WHS Toys and Activities

My father worked for a publishing company called Iliffe in London, and for some years mother worked in the evenings at Sun-Pat peanut processing factory a short walk from the flat. I remember often (I must have been about 5 or 6) trying to keep awake until she got home around 22:00, but usually I fell asleep well before that. Money was always tight. I desperately wanted a bike and also some meccano. I got a proper bike eventually when I was 9, but I never got any meccano. There was a building kit called Bayko which was cheaper and good for building houses and such. I played with it a lot, but it was less technical and engineering-oriented than meccano, which had MOTORS and PULLEYS for making CRANES!!

I had toy trainsets over the years, for most of which you had to wind up a dynamo to get the locos moving. Actually, I didn’t play with toys a great deal, but I read a lot - especially comics with text such as “The Wizard” and “The Hotspur”, and of course all the usual boys’ adventure books: “Biggles”, “Jennings”, “Just William”, “Billy Bunter” and “Hornblower” and lots more . I have never enjoyed reading as much as when I was a young kid. When I was 7 or 8 it must have been, I remember I joined the local library down by a canal. The first day of my membership I took out a book in the morning, read it and took it back to change in the afternoon, only to be told by the librarian that taking a book back the same day wasn’t possible and anyway I obviously hadn’t read it!

Here are the covers of the FIRST book in each of the series so popular at the time - except for "Treasure Island", of course, which I include because it was my all-time favourite book, along with "Black Beauty", by Anna Sewell, about which Wikipedia movingly says: "

"Black Beauty is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time. While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, it also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect."

There were two particular hobbies I had in common with most kids of that generation: making model planes and filling-up “I Spy” books. The model planes mostly came in Keil-Kraft kits and you had to cut out the shapes from sheets of balsa wood and glue them together with a really smelly glue. Years later that kind of glue was banned because people kept sniffing it, but my generation were far too sensible to do anything that stupid.

When you had glued all the wood together you had to stretch a sort of film over the fuselage and wings and then “paint” it with some special stuff called “dope” to seal it. If you had managed to do all this and it looked vaguely like a plane you could just launch it and fly it a few feet, but if you were a profi then you fitted some sort of propulsion to it. There were two types as I recall; for profis there was a combustion engine using something called “glow fuel” - and for the rest just a propeller and elastic band. I have to confess that I never actually got a proper petrol-driven model to fly, but I was pretty good with elastic bands.

“I Spy” was the title of a large series of little booklets, each devoted to one theme, for example: “I Spy creepy crawlies” or “I Spy in the Street”. There were pictures of all kinds of things within each topic and you were supposed to look for them and tick them off when found. These little books were very informative and also taught kids lots of vocabulary. I checked on the internet and was amazed to find that you can still buy them. I had thought that mobile phones and music-players would have killed them off by now!

Train-spotting ... was popular with some kids, but never really appealed to me. Collecting Things: Kids of course love collecting things, and I made a half-hearted attempt to collect stamps and the playing cards that came with cigarette packs (lots of adults smoked, including my parents). My biggest collection, however, was matchbox-tops. In those days there were hundreds of different brands of matches, each with an attractive image on the top. Today’s matchboxes are MUCH less fun. Sadly, to this day I have no idea what became of my collection.

I also had a large collection of comics: the text ones “The Hotspur” and “The Wizard”. These went with us when we moved to West Norwood, but the first holiday I returned from boarding school I found that my father had thrown them all away - which tells you a lot about our relationship and his interest in my pastimes.

OTHERWISE

swimming	playing on bombsites	cinema	we had a mangle like this
So, the above is what I did at home (I don't remember playing with my sisters that much), but actually, I spent a LOT of time out of the house from a fairly early age. I had a few friends from primary school and we would meet whenever possible at the park to play football or go on the swings. Or we would go to Camberwell baths and town. We played conkers, set off bangers around November 5th, played on bomb and building sites. We played hop-scotch, made scooters using ball-bearings, met up to make model planes. One thing I especially enjoyed was "Saturday Morning Pictures". The Camberwell cinema used to put on a special programme for kids, always with one or two adventure stories. Years later, "Indiana Jones" reminded me of them. Often there was a series of short films which always used to end on a cliffhanger.
You probably couldn't do much of this these days, not outside the house alone aged 7 .......... but it was normal for the times, different times. My Mother asked me once if I was happy as a child; I think her children's happiness was her greatest concern - and so remained till the end of her life at 97. Our family had money worries from time to time (and we were rather poor in the early days after the war), but I told her not to worry as I remember my childhood with great affection. I was never bored, cold, hungry or really unhappy - and I loved school. It's what every child should feel and experience, but I was probably lucky. My father wasn't affectionate, but neither nasty: I guess he just didn't seem to feel that we kids were really special in any way - just a sort of accident of marriage. But he was as he was, and we just got on with it.