In those days the walls over the stairs were clad in Zulu shields and spears, we wouldn't have dared touch them, but Health and Safety would be having kittens nowadays.
I came across this photo since I wrote that:
I'd forgotten about the guns, or perhaps they were already gone by the time I got there.
A lot of glum faces there
Like me, you mean?
I've just had a flashback to the boys in the row in front of me connecting their Bunsen burners to water taps instead of the gas supply, then turning them all on simultaneously to spray the row in front of them!
Blowing into the gas taps was our speciality. Then watch the Bunsen burners all around the lab go out one by one.
40 years later, I went to visit my sister and walked past the school just as the afternoon school run started... Absolute traffic chaos! There were jams for hundreds of metres in both directions.
Every morning on the way to work I used to sit in a mile long queue that was entirely due to mums taking the kids to school in the car.
Pouring sulphuric acid on your mates exercise book and watching it burn a hole right through.
When we arrived a our school the benches in the chemistry lab had bottles of chemicals lined up on them. Not for long though, after a couple of months of us dropping miscellaneous bits & pieces into them, they took them all away. I recall that a copper coin in concentrated nitric acid got whisked away into the fume cupboard PDQ.
he frequently staggered about a bit
We had a maths teacher whose walk looked like he was drunk, the word was that he'd had a head injury in a car crash.
Aha...
When I broke up our old garage base I used a home-made punner borrowed from the guy over the road who'd made it from an old 18 pound artillery shell.
Our headmaster was a senior interrogator assigned to Nuremburg after WW2 ended- he taught German- never had any discipline problems...
We used to have a maths teacher who was ex-RAF, and nobody dared breathe when he was in the room. You could hear a pin drop.
for example having to have your billet immaculate and everything laid out on your bed box perfectly, only for the Corporals to fling the whole lot up in the air for the tiniest indiscretion, mugs thrown on the floor and broken because they're allegedly dirty, painting coal white, then black again, etc etc
With the army, there's more to it than just ordinary discipline though, they're out to break people like horses so that they have instant unquestioning obedience.
They are as nice as pie when they are not in a position to control you but pure vindictive poison when they are.
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Lord Acton.
If we forgot our swimming trunks we had to swim naked!
There was no swimming at all when I was at school, I didn't learn until I was 25.
The biggest crime in sport at school was trying.
The biggest crime at ours was not being good at sport. A lad in my class got a trial at Chelsea, but they rejected him for hogging the ball too much apparently, although he went on to play for the local team. The teachers used to call him Footbrain.
