Sutton High School 1978 - 1979

I started at Sutton High School at the end of August 1978, and finally escaped from the bullying of Salisbury Road - both teachers and pupils.

I wouldn't exactly say I was popular, but I got on fine - at least in the first 3 or 4 years. SHS seemed to have no bullying culture at all. I don;t know if this was deliberate, or accident. If any kid was going to be bullied it was me. But I wasn;t and neither was anyone as far as I know.

I spent my first few days at SHS with my arm in a sling. I'd been trying to get my sister out of the bathroom at home on the Sunday before the first day...but being clumsy and not knowing my own strength i put my hand straight through the window and cut myself - thinking i was bleeding to death with blood pumping out of my wrist my parents wrapped my arm into a towel and rushed me up to A&E. I was lucky - i'd missed my main artery and the blood loss slowed down pretty quickly. They bandaged me up and put my arm in a sling. This was a pretty cool way to start a new school, i thought.

One poor sod had his early days at SHS made miserable - he was ginger which was bad enough, with a freckly face, but he was also called Gordon. That August "Gordon Is A Moron" by comedian and actor Graham Fellows alter ego Jilted John, reached number 4 in the charts.

Pasty shop

The closest I had to a bully was a couple of the teachers - funnily enough both of them taught French and both had taken agin me very early on - one, who was only at the school during my first year, frequently took the piss out of me during lesson and at the end of the final lesson took me to one side and told me that I'd amount to nothing. Luckily I was able to put that to one side, and put I put the subject of French to one side too.

large pasty

We had a speech from the headmaster about rules and that - the one i remember is not eating in the street. He said that walking around eating a huge Cornish Pasty was not allowed - we all laughed, it seemed preposterous that we'd do such a thing, but once the idea was in our heads that's just what we did, every day.

I got dragged out of assembly in the first week and caned - can't even remember what for - talking, not singing, or looking at a teacher funny. Who knows? Anyway - this set me against the headmaster who luckily retired at the end of the first year.

Site of the classroom huts: now gone

Other teachers: Ms Meers - who seemed quite old and very batty to us. She'd look at us in the face and exclaim "bodmas! bodmas!"
Mr Sumeral who taught Geography and as every geography teacher ought to be - he was down with the kids, into the new music, and tried to be very trendy in his corduroy trousers.
Mr Tomkiss - the art teacher. Very camp indeed, and had a terrible temper - quite unexpected really - but I found him to encouraging and supportive - he knew his subject.
Mr Axel who taught chemistry...and I used to see at PAFC. I liked him, and did well at chemistry when he taught us.
Taffy the Welsh history teacher...again, another terrible temper.

Drake's Circus: a short walk from the school

Mr Floyd who we called Pinky - though it took me a while to work the reference out, not being into music particularly at this point - at least not in to anything earlier than 1977 that wasn't the beatles or johnny cash. He taught English and RE.
Mr Bracher - I have nothing but praise for this guy...taught english.
Mr Hobbs - woodwork, mr Penton, metal work and TD
"Pinky" Floyd was also our form teacher - he was a bit wet, but aren't Christians always a bit wet? That, or a flaming hellfire lunatic. Pinky was of the COE comfy chair, tea and biscuits, wet and best of intention type...so I liked him and might have been the only kid who took RE seriously. even so - I didn;t do that well in the exam, though one of the better marks.
The form room was a hut....there were quite a few huts - about 7 or 8 if I remember correctly (see photo, above left).

Sports at Marsh Mills - a site reclaimed from the Laira estuary and occasionally the river made a bid to take it back - meaning no field sports and we were sent off on a cross country run through Saltram - I hated this to begin with, and was useless at team sports. I hated sports. Again - no bullying - I was just more or less ignored by the sporty kids.
Rugby was forced upon us....i'd never encountered it before and didn't intend getting involved now either...remember watching videos explaining the rules and tactics but i never understood them and this seriously impacted on my ability to play - even when i was briefly in the main team..luckily my burgeoning sports career ended in a couple of months once it was clear that i had absolutely no drive and no interest when it came to homo-erotic, macho, testosterone led sports.
I enjoyed football (aka soccer), alone among all the sports, but I was crap and always chosen in the last two or three - usually it was me and Stephen Northy left at the end. We would both usually end up defending or in goal - a pretty tedious business.

Musically I was pretty naive - my Dad's records and whatever I liked from the Top 30 up till then. that was all about to change. First some kids at school were way more into music than I was, and this would soak into me by inevitable osmosis. The first edition of Smash Hits appeared in November 1978 with the delectable Debbie Harry on the cover. I didn't buy it but noted that other kids were - and I remember a singing session, in the classroom, during a break, involving certain kids - Barry Palmer among them - doing the songs from Grease that had been a hit through the summer. They were using the lyrics as printed in Smash Hits.

One of the earliest shows I listened to on Radio One was the chart show on Sunday evenings – presented by Simon Bates when I started listening (2nd April 1978 to 26th August 79) and later, by Tony Blackburn who took over until 3rd January 1982.

I also liked to listen to Noel Edmonds on Radio 1 - Sunday mornings in 1978. I'd cycle out to my Grandparents house and then sit in the front room listening to the Noel Edmonds show which actually was not bad apart from the awful music!

'Butterflies' by Carla Lane began on BBC2 again, I watched this with my mother. I found the boys to be irritating but Geoffrey Palmer was very good. There was discussion about this programme at school. No one found the boys to be believable characters. They were way too confident and successful with very attractive girls to be believable, and only one of them was particularly good looking in classic terms.
Fawlty Towers made a welcome return in 1979! So funny!! Not so funny was To The Manor born - dreary, predictable, safe. And who the Good Life was enjoyable from having good and likeable characters, this had none of that. The tensions of the aspiring Margot in a little suburban house trying to better herself was gone, now we just had Margot rich, title and in a big house. Boring! Parents watched it though.

the fireplace my Dad built, in our "posh" living room

A general election on 3rd of May left us all completely buggered for the forseeable future.

The house renovations were going great now; we now had an upstairs living room that, for some reason only I seemed to use, or my Dad when he wanted to watch football. Colour tv, nice comfy sofa, cold though - all the heating was in the sitting room below where the family watched shit and yabbered endlessly about crap.

That said with the coming of regular foreign students, who my parents took in for 3/4 years running, the downstairs got turned into a little flat for them to live in and we all ended up using upstars. I also ended up with a reconditioned black and white tv in my room. Life was never better!