Perrott Hill 5

 

This is probably going to be my last blog post about Perrott Hill. Yes, it has been rather enjoyable to look back on my four years at PHS and perhaps it has brought back a few happy memories for one or two former pupils.

 

I have always hated organised sports, as anyone who has read my blog posts about the London Water Closet will already know. However, at Perrott Hill there were two school sports that I rather enjoyed.

 

At PHS, all the children (or certainly all of the boys) were allocated to the “four games”. “First game” was a bit serious, for those who could be playing in the Under 13 matches against other schools and “third game” was for those who might be playing in the Under 11 matches. This meant that the “second” and “fourth” games were for the oddbods, those who would not be playing in school matches, those who were a bit physically challenged or (like me) did not really want to be there.

I really enjoyed playing cricket with the fourth game. A sunny afternoon, a group of enthusiastic but pretty clueless young cricketers (mostly about eight or nine years old) and a wonderful view of the glorious Somerset countryside: that is a marvellous combination. I even went to the trouble of marking out a pitch and brushing up on the rules of cricket in my free time.

The other sport (if indeed it can be called a sport) that was a bit of fun was croquet. Next to the main building was a splendid lawn that must surely have been designed as a croquet lawn, but no one was using it for that purpose. I decided that someone should re-introduce the glories of croquet to Perrott Hill.

My friend Richard very chivalrously and generously paid for a new croquet set, while I bought a small silver cup. Thus was born the Perrott Hill School Inter-House Croquet Competition.

What makes a good school? A beautiful setting in the countryside is a good start, but you also need some enthusiastic and talented teachers. Derek Hoare was, on the whole, a kindly and avuncular head. Yes, he did use corporal punishment, but I think that I would have done much the same in his position. Mr Hoare always wrote to the parents of any boy who was caned. I never heard of any pupil or parent complaining about the discipline at Perrott Hill: quite the opposite, in fact.

A good school also needs some good pupils. (Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?) A lot of the students at Perrott Hill were some of the funniest and nicest children I have ever met.

In some ways, it was difficult to leave PHS. Four years is quite a large chunk of a young man’s life. The positive reason for leaving was that I was going to teacher training college and at last I would have a certificate to say that I was professionally qualified to do what I had been doing for the previous four years. When I left Perrott Hill, I took something with me, something that I had not possessed when I first arrived: a career, a vocation, something that I would follow for the rest of my working life.