Schooldays

Willow Lane

After my shaky start at Nelson Street School, I moved to the Willow Lane Catholic School, a converted Jesuit Chapel, built in 1828, and converted to a school in 1896. It had an imposing Palladine frontage, and was situated in the narrow twisting lane that ran from St Giles to St Benedicts. It was a picturesque, centuries old street that had been the home of both George Borrow, and Francis Blomefield, legendary Norwich writers. Inside was a large hall with classrooms leading off, and at the side a large, below ground level playground. It was here that I met friends who stayed with me throughout the rest of my school days, and it was here that the hierarchies that are such a part of school life began to be established. I was still very much a loner, and reserved, and didn’t find this school any more amenable than the first, especially as we were taught by nuns. Their scrubbed, pale faces under forbidding wimples were intimidating enough, and my particular form mistress had a sadistic penchant for unexpectedly striking her desk with a large flat ruler with such force that the explosive report echoed into the hall, and jarred my nerves to such an extent that I complained to my mother that it was making my head hurt. My complaints fell on deaf ears however, and I had to endure the banging and bellowing for another two years, although, in fairness, I did have basic skills and knowledge forced into me, however reluctantly I absorbed them.

Most of my memories are fragmentary: I remember waiting outside the headmasters office with other miscreants, to have the ends of our fingers whipped with a springy cane, a searingly painful experience that left our hands burning for the rest of the morning. I can’t imagine what I could have done to earn this punishment, but perhaps it was done on a rota basis “pour encourager des autres”. 

I have a distinct, if rather macabre, memory of the morning of 28thJanuary 1953. I sat at my desk at the start of the school day, and as the City Hall clock struck nine, I had an uneasy frisson as I realised that Derek Bentley was at that very moment being hanged at Wandsworth Prison, for the murder of a policeman in a celebrated case of two months earlier. We had even been singing for the previous few days a little rhyme about Craig and Bentley, the words of which I’ve unfortunately long forgotten. Stringing up imbeciles and lunatics was one of the amusements occasionally provided by the state in those long gone barbaric days, and one they continued with for another dozen, shameful years. 

Another memory, less grotesque, but more distressing to me at the time, was the school nativity play. I had been dragooned into playing an aged shepherd, and as the night of the performance approached, I made my mother promise she would be there to watch. On the night itself I searched the crowd from my vantage point beside the stage, but I couldn’t see her; she later said that she had been at the back, but I never could quite believe her. My moment came, and my speech was delivered, inaudibly I’m certain, and imperfectly I would guess, but also in great discomfort, as the elastic bands holding my beard were too short, and were digging painfully into my ears as I waited for my cue. The extraordinary thing is that some sixty years later, I can still remember my lines perfectly, much clearer than I could on that stressful night, and often recite them to myself, as they linger in my memory , like some persistent tune:

“Oh Lord, if these old eyes of mine,

Could see thy face , What bliss divine;

But I am old, my race is run,

May God’s All-Holy Will, be done”

Heigham House

When I left Willow Lane, it was to go to the Heigham House Catholic School on Heigham Road, where I prepared for my eleven plus exam. It was run by the fierce and fabled Mr Rudd, a large, florid faced bully, of uncertain temper, with whom I had some problems. His particular function seemed to be to enter the classroom at any time, and stand glowering at the front of the class, while some shivering victim had to stand and recite part of the times table, the teacher as nervous as the stammering pupil, in case a mistake was made. My particular run in with him was inspired by events outside of school, and which should have been no concern of his, but inveterate bullies seek out offenses to punish, and Jack Rudd was no exception.

Even at that young age I was already an inveterate cinema goer, usually with my mother, and we took a special delight in Sunday night programmes at the Theatre de Luxe,  which would often feature double bills of  old classics. Cinema going on Sunday was still frowned upon in the early fifties in some families, but especially in the Roman Catholic school I went to. Mr Rudd had somehow got wind of this indiscretion of mine, and one day decided to make an example of me. He strode into the classroom and called me out, then made me stand in the aisle while he questioned me remorselessly, until I finally admitted that I had been to the pictures the night before – a Sunday. He subjected me to a red-faced rant that stunned the classroom into silence, and threatened me with dire, if unspecified, consequences if I ever repeated such sinful behaviour. Although I was shaken by this nonsensical assault, I would have shrugged it off more easily, if he had not also said he would inform my mother that such behaviour was not acceptable in his school, and it was not to be repeated. He carried out his threat, and, although he had no means of enforcing his diktat, it made my mother think twice about taking me again on a Sunday. The pull of the cinema was too strong though, and we continued our excursions, albeit a little more circumspectly, and under strict instructions never to mention it at school.

I had Catholic friends from my previous school, including the irrepressible Ricardo Valori, of the famous Norwich family of fishmongers, who was just beginning to blossom into the cheeky character who kept us all amused through the next few years. We were a miscellaneous bunch, ranging from the very bright to the irretrievably stupid, but all about to be forced through the social sieve that was the eleven plus, and which was intended to determine our place in the social structure for the rest of our lives. 

It was at this time I discovered that I had no place in the hierachy that had established itself: I was shy and unassertive for the most part, and couldn't communicate with the teachers in the easy, natural way that people like Valori could; I had a small coterie of cronies, but not among the leaders, and had no aptitude at that time for sports, mainly due to a lack of confidence. 

At the end of one lesson the master, a generally pleasant and considerate man, read out some names of boys to meet him in his room at the end of the lesson to discuss the football team for the weekend. I somehow got the idea that he had mentioned me, which puzzled me a bit, because much as I would have loved to, I had never been invited to play for the team before. I hesitated before going to his room, but finally plucked up courage and walked through the door. The others were already there, and looked at me with some surprise, and I had a sinking feeling that I was most definitely in the wrong place. I stammered out "did you want to see me sir?", and was met with a ripple of laughter at that outrageous thought; more damaging however, was the unsupressed grin that spread over the master’s face as he waved me away dismissively with a "No, not you Cossey", and left me to retreat in shame and humiliation.

Although I had no particular sense of myself as being intelligent, the work came easily to me, and I approached the exam without any fear or nerves. The night before the exam, my mother asked me if I wanted to go to bed early and read comics, or go to the pictures. I knew the next day was important, but I was relaxed, and decided it had to be the pictures. We accordingly caught the bus and went to the Regent to see "Mogambo" with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. I went to bed late, but the next day took the exam, and breezed through without a care, although it was still some weeks before we got the results. I was not surprised to find I had passed, although it wasn't until I started school in September, that I discovered I had obtained the highest marks in the class, and among the highest in the city.

CNS

The City of Norwich School was built in 1910 on the outskirts of the city, and was an impressive and beautifully proportioned building, of red brick with white stone balustrades. The main building was fronted with an immaculate and sacrosanct lawn, on the other side of which, just inside the main gates, stood the Old School House, a smaller, white painted structure that in my day housed the dining room, and a jazz club for the sixth formers in an upper room. At the rear of the main building was a magnificent expanse of limitless playing fields, veritable “playing fields of Eaton”, where we would indulge in cricket, football, hockey, rugby and athletics. 

In the mid fifties the CNS was the classic grammar school, and the source of much civic pride. It was a fine school in many ways, and being selective, attracted high calibre students and masters. The selective process could still work in the fifties, because the large percentage of the population that were not selected, still had schools that would prepare them for a world where work was plentiful, and those not academically inclined could fulfil their potential in many other productive ways.

The problem with the CNS was that it was still trying to enforce the old hierarchical social structure that had died in the war, but whose moribund corpse was still blocking the way to the new society that was being forged in the rest of Europe and America. It would be another 30 years before this country finally and painfully began to adjust to the new reality, but, in the fifties, we were still trapped in a culture that no longer worked, and it was my first generation of teenagers that uncertainly and blindly stumbled towards the new order, along trails mapped out for us by the rising generation of writers, film makers and musicians. I was at the CNS from the mid to late fifties, a watershed period in the post war world, and one that I responded to, and embraced, too eagerly for my own good: ten years later and I would have been in the mainstream; in 1958 I was battling a crumbling, but still formidable, stone wall.

When I first heard that I had been accepted for the CNS, I was excited; my brother had left the year before, and I knew that this was a privilege and an opportunity. My resplendent new school uniform was paid for by the Anguish Society, a local charity, and every year I had to be interviewed to gain the award for the new school year, and after every interview I was newly charged with enthusiasm, and determined to do well , and was sure that I would succeed in a way that would make my parents proud. My uniform gave me confidence, as it reminded me of the school stories I had absorbed in the books and comics I had grown up with, especially the Red Circle School featured in The Hotspur. This impression was reinforced the first morning I walked through the gates into those splendidly old fashioned precincts, and found myself in the world of Greyfriars. I was awed by the buildings, the imposing lawn, which took the place in my young imagination of the Quadrangle of school stories, the echoing corridors and mahogany panelling; but, most of all, the masters with their splendid flowing black gowns. I was nervous, but felt at home, and was eager to learn, and absorb all that this Brave New World could offer me. 

The CNS operated a remarkably stratified selection system within the school, and everybody was graded according to their supposed ability, and then fixed there for the whole five years, and probably for life; an age old system that I defied by cropping up in all the various grades at times during my stay there, an achievement probably not equalled in the annals of that hidebound establishment. The elite had their own special grade, which after the first year was divided into two equal, but distinct, disciplines: “L” and “S” for language and science; the middle stream, still quite prestigious, but rather patronisingly labelled “A”, presumably for average; and then came the dumping ground, the pit, whose door was already figuratively emblazoned with the legend “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here”. These were the notorious “X” and “Y” streams, the very symbols indicating failure, in the rigorous strata of potential as envisaged by this parochial outpost of academia.

The top stream would provide the university entrants, and the middle class professional jobs, the doctors, teachers and local government officials; the middle stream was for those wishing to get 5 “O-Levels” and work for The Norwich Union, or similar institutions for the aspiring managerial middle classes; the two bottom streams would aspire to the first tier of white collar jobs, still significantly above the lumpen proletariat from the secondary moderns, who would fill the manual labour and factory jobs. This deadening conformity of expectation had worked well for forty years, while society at large had mirrored its ambitions, but the world was changing, and the school’s ossified class structure would be swept away in the next decade.