Bulgaria with Noodles

The rather impressive front entrance of Windlesham   After finishing my PGCE course at La Sainte College, I arrived at Windlesham House School in September, 1987.  A “windle” is an old English word, probably Saxon in origin, that means a basket, maybe woven out of twigs. A “sham”, of course, is something that is fake, not real, a pretence. At Windlesham House School, however, there were some real little baskets, children who displayed an appalling mixture of laziness, rudeness and entitlement. Yes, there were (thank goodness) some lovely, sweet and polite children as well, but unfortunately it is the junior scumbags at WHS that stick in my memory. In particular, Master Mark Coutts stands out, as he came up with the most offensive and obscene sentence I have ever heard: “F*** your dead mother’s a***!” For a ten-year-old, I think that deserves the gold medal in the Profanity Olympics, for squeezing so much verbal foulness into only five words. Mr Charles   The principal...

I have always thought that someone ought to change the lyrics of that well-known hymn: O hear us when we cry to Thee For those in peril on TP. My first view of Mr Smith's classroom    Teaching Practice, aka TP, is (or was) an important element of the Postgraduate Certificate in Education. As a PGCE student, you do not get any choice about what you are going to teach, where or when. And you do not get much choice about which teaching resources you were supposed to use because usually there weren’t any. You had to buy them or make them yourself. On one occasion, I did ask the school secretary if she would mind if I used the school photocopier to produce some worksheets and she looked at me as if I had slapped her. When I suggested to the deputy head that the school should refund the cost of making the teaching resources I had been using, he replied that they were now my resources and I could keep them, so why should the school pay for them? The good news was that La Sain...

My PGCE year was pretty horrible, on the whole: long, tiring, stressful and a lot of hard work for not very much achieved. I do not have many happy memories of this period of my life and thank goodness it only lasted a year. On the other hand, there were some pleasant bits too. I had not been back to Oxford for a few years, so of course I wanted to go up for my degree ceremony. In most sensible universities, a Bachelor of Arts degree comes first and then you study for another year or two and get your Masters. At Oxford, they don’t. It is all rolled into one: do the BA and get the MA thrown in free.    The Sheldonian Theatre is a rather splendid and eccentric place and that is where the degree ceremonies are always held. My mother came to see me get my degree, but my stepfather didn’t. While we are on the subject of things theatrical, an amusing event at LSU was having a role in a rather silly comedy. I played a very crusty military type, maybe a retired colonel or something ...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Well, if you know the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities , I will not bore you with all of the rather long opening sentence. My PGCE year certainly had its ups and downs. It was not a holiday, alternating between pretending to be a student (not too difficult), writing three long extended illustrated essays and Teaching Practice, aka the dreaded TP. However, it all started rather well. Rufus was a lovely Red Setter/ Labrador cross. Well, that is what my parents seemed to think he was and they adored him. Rufus appeared in our lives quite by chance. I was walking home to our house in Alma Road and noticed a reddish coloured dog without a collar. He was very friendly and we all liked him immediately. We decided to adopt him or maybe it was the other way round. In 1986, I still had my old Morris Traveller that I had acquired while I was at Perrott Hill, so Rufus and I could go for some more interesting walkies a bit further afield. ...

After I left Perrott Hill, I returned to Southampton. That city is one that I have been coming back to for a long time: from boarding school, university, Perrott Hill and then teacher training college. In the Autumn of 1986 I started my one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at La Sainte Union College of Higher Education (LSU). My room in a rather grotty Victorian house on Archers Road was not luxurious, but LSU itself was okay.  It was a Catholic foundation, so there were still a few nuns wandering about the place. All of the buildings have now been either demolished or repurposed, as LSU was closed down in 1997.   In some ways it was fun to pretend to be a student once again. Most of the LSU students were two or three years younger than I was and no one else on the PGCE had actually done four years of teaching. In some ways this was a big advantage, as I could compare and contrast what I learned on my PGCE course with my experiences at Perrott Hill. Of course,...

    From my previous blog post, you may have received the incorrect impression that every boy at PHS was constantly being whacked with the cane or walloped with the gym shoe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perrott Hill School was a happy place, for most of the children and for most of the time. Good, firm and consistent discipline was part of that happiness.      As the name suggests, PHS was on a hill and that meant lovely views of the Somerset countryside. There were also the woods, the location for many of the boys' "dens", their camps that they spent many happy hours constructing. Derek and Lydia Hoare also had a special knack for encouraging and developing the talents of the less academic students.      Mark Mabey, I remember, had the most dreadful spelling and perhaps he was not gifted academically. (His handwriting suggested a future medical career. ) However, the whole school came to the Grundy Hall to watch and enjoy his amazing...

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...