Norman Court 1

When you are in yours 60s, nearly in your 70s, then the only thing you look forward to is the past. You start thinking about your life and wondering why it turned out the way it did.

Well, I started with Lord Wandsworth College, aka the London Water Closet, then I wrote a few posts about Oxford, La Sainte Union teacher training college, Perrott Hill and then WHS, Windlesham House School. Now it is time to write about Northaw, aka Norman Court Preparatory School.

For well over a century, the British preparatory schools stood in a distinctive world of their own – shaping generations of pupils, demanding discipline, and ‘preparing’ them for their public schools. Many prep schools flourished, others faded, and a few, like Northaw (later Norman Court), lived several lives across different names and settings. Norman Court finally lapsed into extinction in 2012.

Like most prep schools, Norman Court had the familiar rituals of boarding prep schools – their rural locations and the beautiful old buildings, ethos and traditions, timetables and routines, music and worship in the school chapel, food, discipline, dormitories, games and the arts – and it is sad to think that it is all gone, an educational butterfly that proved too vulnerable to survive the changing (and chilly) social and economic climate.

What do I remember about Norman Court? Well, there was the actual building. On one side it was (and no doubt still is) a large and imposing brick façade, three sides of a square, and on the other side it was yellowish plaster with powdered glass mixed in, so that it looked white from a distance.

I had to “live out” in my first year at Norman Court, but then the obnoxious Mr Baker, the Geography teacher, left and I was offered his flat and his role as a housemaster.

Once a teacher, name of Baker,

Then became an undertaker.

Not so much his trade reversing,

Since for him it was just rehearsing.

Mr Baker was not amused when I recited this little poem to him.

My flat in Norman Court was a bit Spartan, more or less empty and huge: a large kitchen, bathroom, a long corridor, a small sitting room, bedroom and a study with a large oval window. You can see the front door of my flat up the fire escape on the left in the photo. Somehow or other, I managed to get a copy of the key for the roof, so that my guests could go right up onto the roof of the main building and survey the Wiltshire countryside. It was all rather splendid.