Bradfield 1958

Amongst the many things I have found which my mother kept in the old Arab chest is the slip of paper my parents received announcing the results of my Common Entrance examination - the test taken by all those seeking a place at a public school. Although both my maternal grandfather and my mother's brother had gone to Harrow, I had been put down to go to Bradfield College in Berkshire where cousins of my mother's, the Humphries, had gone. The results surprise me in their variability - 98% for geometry yet 47% for algebra - and in how well I did in subjects I hated, such as Latin.

So in the autumn of 1958, at the age of 13, I started at Bradfield. After Glengorse, it seemed huge, but from the moment I arrived I knew I would like the place. That said, life there for the first years was tough. Bullying was rife, some of it violent. The prefects wielded the cane. First years were assigned to a senior boy as his 'fag', to clean his shoes, lay the fire in his study, and do just about anything else he told us to. The common room in which we existed was bare and cold, the dormitories freezing, but the food was much better than at Glengorse, and in our own time we were free to roam in a way we'd never been allowed to there - we even brought our bikes and rode around the countryside.

The picture shows the 'House' to which I was assigned, 'D' House, consisting of some fifty boys aged from 13 to 18. It shared with 'G' House a large building on top of a hill about half-a-mile from the main school buildings. Our housemaster was Andrew Gimson whom I always found very fair.

We participated in some sort of physical activity on six afternoons of the week. Some of the sports were compulsory. This included cross-country running, which led up to the annual steeplechase in which, as well as fighting our way across muddy fields, we ended up climbing a weir of the River Pang which flowed through the school grounds. A large range of other sports was available, including squash, fives, tennis, shooting - at which I always did well - and archery.

The school was a soccer school and I worked my way from the house teams to the school teams, ending up in the second eleven. In the summer cricket and athletics were compulsory but I spent as much time as possible....

....at the school swimming pool. The contrast to Mombasa was stark: the pool was filled by the River Pang flowing in at one end and out at the other, so the water was permanently cold. Despite this, I made the school swimming team.

The school pushed its more able pupils hard. At an early stage someone decided that I should specialise in the sciences, so at age 15 I took five 'O' levels - English Grammar, English Literature, Maths, Latin and French - and then started three 'A' levels, Maths, Physics and Chemistry, taking them at age 17. As a consequence, I ended up with no qualification in subjects which would later interest me, and which I would teach - particularly History and Geography.