Steve at Eleven.

In the September of 1959 Stratford’s Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School felt more like Stalag Luft III than a place of education. It was run like a German POW camp too, which, thanks to such films as The Wooden Horse, we, as the new intake of prisoners, I mean pupils, were all too familiar with. All we could expect was brutality and bad food. Our duty was to harass the enemy in every way we could, and if given the opportunity escape to the newsagents across the road to nick sweets, fags, and gawp at the latest edition of that pornographic masterpiece, Tit Bits!

On that first day of term, forty-seven years ago, we were all lined up, in our grey blazers and short grey trousers, ready for inspection by Herr Kommandant Darlow, who looked like a bad imitation of the 1930s film star, Will Hay. But this was a Will Hay with a difference. Gone was the befuddled attitude, askew spectacles, and the inherent kindness. No, this camp Kommandant meant business, violent business. I can remember fear washing over me (and I didn’t frighten easily) as he walked up and down the ranks of new boys, stopping every now and then in front of a quivering lump of a boy to shout out instructions for the poor wretch to straighten his tie, or pull up his socks, or comb his hair. The sound of nervous farting echoed around the quadrangle like Gene Krupa on bad acid.

Then, once the inspection was over the smiling, oh so confident, Kommandant, flexing his whacking cane, addressed the assembled new intake thus:

“ Fer u zee varr iz offer.” At least I think that’s what he said.

“ What did he say?” asked my friend Denver.

“ He wants to make us an offer.”

“ Sealonce!”

” Sealions?”

“ Is he a Kraut or somefink?” asked Denver.

“ Sounds like a ponce to me,” I replied.

“ My dad reckons all teachers are ponces,” added my other friend David, whose father had landed on D-Day and survived.

“ My dad reckons your dad’s a nutcase,” added Denver whose father had survived a Japanese POW camp and was still terribly thin.

“ I’ll tell him you said that.”

And so on…

You have to remember we were all country lads, and most of us had been at work on the land, or as butchers errand boys, since we were eight or nine years old. There wasn’t much that bothered us, least of all poncy teachers…

Crack! “ Ouch! What the…?”

Thwack! “ Er….”

Smaaaack! “ That soddin’ hurt!”

Then we spotted him, Peter Fred Kite Sellers, walking down the ranks whacking each boy on the back of the legs with his cane.

Crack! Thwack! Smaack! “ Take that you heathen swine! I shall turn you into men who respect authority. Rest assured I will!” Thwack! Smaaaack! Crack!

It was at that moment we all went very quiet. We knew we had a job to do, and silence was the order of the day. We could sort the likes of Peter Fred Kite Sellers out, no problem. We’d seen all the films and were graduates of the RAF Kinema just down the road in Wellesbourne (where the Canadians, God bless them, had ruled the roost for most of the war years) where anyone, at any age, was allowed in to see anything. Bugs Bunny was our leader, and our inspiration.

“ Er, what’s up Doc?”

What was up was that we were at the mercy of men who’d had - one way or another - a pretty rough time during the war. Well, they weren’t going to take it out on us.

One of the camp guards (sorry, teachers) went by the name of ‘Killer’. He taught chemistry and loved (and I mean loved) to take out his considerable anger on the boys who came into his ‘care’ with a T-square. And it didn’t take much to make him angry either. Just a cough at the wrong moment from one of the POWs and he’d have the boy’s trousers down and then give him a good going over with the blunt end of the aforementioned technical drawing implement. I don’t think any of us got away without a dose of the ‘Killer’s’ remedy for indiscipline. But unlike the other guards ‘Killer’ took far too much pleasure in what he did. We decided to teach him a lesson.

‘Killer’ had taught us that sulphur, once taken out of water, will combust. He’d shown us some exciting, and very smelly, experiments. We remembered that lesson, and one day when ‘Killer’ had left the classroom to discuss that afternoon’s football fixture a couple of us unlocked the chemical storeroom and emptied the water out of two jars containing sulphur, and, tipping the yellow and already smouldering sticks onto the floor relocked the storeroom door (putting the key we’d taken from ‘Killer’s’ coat pocket into his desk drawer) and returned to our desks. Within minutes smoke was billowing from under the storeroom door, followed a few minutes later by a very flustered ‘Killer’ - who couldn’t find his keys - desperately trying to break down the storeroom door. It wasn’t a very serious fire, not a fire at all really, just a lot of very smelly smoke. No one ever pointed the finger of blame and ‘Killer’ never used that T-square again, ever. We were never victims you understand, just youngsters who knew how to handle men like him.

Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School didn’t have much time for theatre, didn’t rate theatre at all in fact. Oh, it paid lip service to Shakespeare, just. An old English teacher ( his name escapes me) used to get us to read a play a week with each POW reading half a dozen lines before someone else took over. It didn’t make any sense of the play of course, but the teacher was happy to let us gabble on while he read the newspaper, or caught up on some marking.

In 1961 a new teacher arrived who changed everything. His name was Mr Jones, he was very young (just out of college) and very Welsh, and we made his life a misery until one day he started reading Bulldog Drummond stories to us. We were hooked.

The adventures of Captain Hugh “ Bulldog” Drummond DSO (created by H.C. “Sapper” McNeile, and Gerald du Maurier) were an exciting eye-opener and we loved him, and his long-legged birds, with a passion. From there our fiery Welshman took us on a journey that included Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene ( you can see what he was doing), Ernest Hemingway, and by some strange circuitous route back to Shakespeare, especially the more gory plays. Mr Jones was one of those angry young men who were passionate about literature and theatre and wanted to share their passion. It was their aim in life to instill into such country yokels as myself a love of words. He succeeded too.

What Mr Jones could not do was get us down to the RST to see a show. He did the next best thing though and arranged a private screening at the local cinema of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. You’ve never seen thirty smelly schoolboys so fully engrossed as we were that Wednesday morning back in 1961.

Mr Jones is retired now but can often be seen in town absentmindedly wandering around Waterstones, or sitting by the theatre reading a scrappy old volume of something or other (probably not Bulldog Drummond) and mumbling to himself. The man was an inspiration, and if I believed in God I’d ask Him to bless the old Welshman.

The Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern school was knocked down a couple of years ago, with a new school built just a few hundred yards away. The old site is now a small housing estate with streets named after those old guards, including Herr Darlow who, incidentally spent most of World War II behind enemy lines sending back weather reports to Bomber Command. It never pays to judge people too harshly does it?