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FROM PRIMARY TO SECONDARY SCHOOL
There were about 700 pupils, all boys, when I attended St. Philip’s between 1954 and 1961. The playground was comfortably big enough for about 500, so it was always fairly full. This did not prevent several games of football or cricket (depending on the season) taking place at the same time. This involved keeping your eyes open and your wits about you, otherwise you could get hit unexpectedly by a ball from one or other of the neighbouring games. During the frosty winter months, the playground would be taken over by more than a dozen ice slides, often twenty or more yards long, usually crossing the path of at least one other slide and, in many cases, two or three. Each group of sliders would take a run and slide as fast and far as possible with little attention paid to the other sliders hurtling down their own slide. This sometimes led to collisions and piles of bodies slipping about the place. Amazingly, no one ever seemed to get seriously injured, although the same could not always be said for knees, which were vulnerable in the short trousers we had to wear for the first two years of our secondary schooling. However, injured knees could provide the compensation of a scab forming over the wound because picking at this scab was one of the notable sensations of childhood.
