Perrott Hill 6

It was great to have some comments from old PHS pupils, so I thought that I might write a little bit more. 

I have not said much about the headmaster of Perrott Hill, Mr Derek Hoare. At my interview, he smiled and said, "I see you got a Third Class degree at Oxford. Well, I won't say anything about yours if you do not say anything about mine." Well, Derek, I have kept your secret for more than forty years, so I hope that your ghost will forgive me.

On the whole, I found Derek Hoare to have a sense of humour, as did his wife, Lydia. There was a scandal at a well-known public school, as the headmaster and his wife had been appearing in some pornographic photos. Very daringly, I suggested to Lydia Hoare that she and her husband might do something similar! She laughed and said, "Well, I did suggest it to Derek, but he did not think it was a good idea!"

It was at Perrott Hill that I really started reading the books of Roald Dahl. I often shared my enthusiasm for Dahl's writing with my students. In the first part of his autobiography, Boy, Dahl describes (and discusses at some length) the experience of getting beaten. 

So what about the cane and the gym shoe at Perrott Hill? Yes, Derek did use both of them and he made no secret of this. As an adult, we might well disagree with corporal punishment, but I think that it is very important to look at this issue from a child's perspective. I never, ever heard any child at Perrott Hill, boy or girl, say something to the effect that  "Nobody should ever hit a child. Corporal punishment is completely wrong!" Bizarrely, those boys who got whacked the most often were the ones who argued the loudest in favour of corporal punishment or "free central heating", as they jokingly called it. There was a rumour that Derek's study sometimes smelled of hot rubber, as he used the gym shoe a lot more than the cane. 

Those of you who had read my posts about the London Water Closet will know that my own experiences with "six of the best" were not quite so positive. Beating with a cane is usually a lot more serious than a whack or two with the gym shoe. Wounding and injuring a boy is too cruel, too Dickensian. I had the impression that Derek was very reluctant to hit any of the girls (and we only had a few of them). He explained to me that often girls do not perceive corporal punishment in the same way as the boys. I remember one boy saying to me, "The gym shoe is no worse than a hard tackle in rugby."

So why did I leave Perrott Hill after four years? There was a rumour that I had died in a car crash (a false rumour, in case you had not guessed) and it seems that there were other lurid tales to explain my departure. Well, schoolboys do love to exaggerate and embellish, but I was definitely not sacked. In fact, Derek Hoare must have written two quite good references for me, so that I was able to go to La Sainte Union College for my teacher training and then get a teaching job at Windlesham House School.