Recreation time

In those days, the school operated a six day timetable, where wednesday was fixed and the other days were numbered 1-5. This meant keeping tabs on what day monday was going to be and making sure that you took the right books in for the day. The benefits of the six day timetable was that some weeks of course, your worst day just did not happen, unless that happened to be wednesday. That was unlikely though as wednesday afternoons was always games.

The day was droken up into seven periods and I can't remember how long they were. Some days they seemed incredibly long. There were four in the morning, divided by a fifteen minute break, then an hour for lunch and three lessons in the afternoon with a ten minute break somewhere in that time.

Breaks and lunchtimes were times when we could mingle with kids from other year groups, play games, have a crafty cigarette, or get up to all sorts of mischief. During the first few years, free school milk was still available for all who wanted it. The milk would be delivered in the early morning and the crates of one third of a pint bottles with their silver foil tops, were piled in the main playground. On wet days, when confined to classrooms the milk would be delivered by milk monitors, and many of us really enjoyed the ice cold milk in the winter. However summertime milk was warm and not too pleasant. Most days we'd just help ourselved from the stack and as there was always a surplus, and boys being boys, there were regular challenges to see who could drink the most bottles. Many a day we'd waddle back to lessons, full enough to be sick.

Baiting senior students could be fun. Generally they were too sophistcated or lazy to give chase and so there was no real danger involved. The problem arose when one crossed invisible lines without being aware of that, and they remembered you.
I was caught one day by a group of students, who, on some recent occasion, I had caused offence. It was early summer and we were enjoying access to the fields instead of the asphalt playground. I suddenly found myself surrounded by a group of large hairy lads, who picked me up and deposited me onto the top of a hawthorn hedge. Of course I sank into the prickly branches and was trapped. It took me a long time and a lot of pain to extricate myself; I learned a good lesson that day - Don't get caught!

As I grew up, breaktimes ceased to be for silly games. They became times for smoking cigarettes, and later a time for association with girls, although I only had one girlfriend at the school. More about girls another time.

Generally break times and lunchtime were a good thing, and of course the time when friendships were forged. Gangs would gravitate together and rivalries would sometimes, but rarely lead to conflicts. Even though we were ebullient, we were not uncivilised and fights were very rare.

Supervision was very low key, and although there were staff on duty, patrolling their beats, mostly we were supervised by prefects, who although they had their own common room, would share the duties and had the same power as the staff. I never became a prefect, it was a role that one had to aspire to and also was dependent on a clean record. Red socks were not seen as a recommendation.