I'm going back, going back to be young again.
To find the time to develop my mind and be kind.
To really see, to really hear, to really live, to really love
And be kind
(The Nice: The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack)

Aeons ago I went to King Edward VI Grammar School, Norwich courtesy of passing the 11 plus test as it was. (I think being a great reader I knew plenty of synonyms for the word nice.) The opportunity came for me to visit the school in session, courtesy of the kind support staff at the school. The school is part of me, my history. Norwich is my Heimat. I wanted to see how it was now compared with what I remembered. I’m interested in how things work, schools can be considered both as elaborate mechanisms and also as living organisms which adapt to their environment. Necessarily Norwich School has adapted to the modern times in the UK. So I wasn’t surprised to see posters celebrating coloured women mathematicians.

I arrived in Cathedral Close to find a lot of school children milling around, it being break time. The school now being co-educational both sexes were well represented. If I had arrived on a Saturday there wouldn’t have been any milling around - the school on Saturday I knew was scrapped some years ago. I remember going to see Norwich City play at Carrow Road after school, and a fellow schoolboy sharing apple squash on the bus back home. It was like nectar.

Also gone were the Cathedral boarders from my day, and the playground we used to play soccer in during break times using a tennis ball. I went through shoes a lot in those days. The noticeboard area which was the information hub before there were information hubs has gone. One year they were defaced with an offensive version of what SMA stood for. There are new to me buildings on the site, and the school has expanded into existing buildings on the Cathedral Close site. Rooms have been reassigned so what was a gym to me was now a drama area.

Art and good art at that was very much in evidence, along corridors and staircases and in old ossuary chapels. The school is developing talent which I believe is a strength of independent schools. There is plenty of equipment around including computers. There was even a large Ethernet router in a toilet which bemused me. IT is now a subject undreamt of in my day, pupils experimenting first with Python then web technologies. Class sizes are smaller than I remember, and the style of teaching has really developed.

I had the chance to attend a concert given by a tenor in the Chapel where so long ago I had to dress up in ruff and white surplice (as my mother thought I should sing as she liked singing). I wasn’t very good but being in the Chapel Choir had the perk of a yearly trip up to London to the Worshipful Company of Dyers who had an annual service. The singer was really proficient, classically trained, amazing how musicians and actors can memorise so much. The singer was also another ON (Old Norvicensian), and currently a teaching assistant at the school. I got the impression quite a few of the staff at the school were ONs.

Latin is a language
As dead as dead can be
It killed the ancient Romans
And now it's killing me

The classics (Latin and Greek) are still inflicted or inflected on hapless school children. I was amused by knowing some poor unfortunate was named Tarquinius Superbus, but gerunds and gerundives finished off my Latin education. I successfully petitioned to be excused. Now I happily invest time into learning Japanese, and I wish I had read languages at University, but then languages were just another penance.

The past is still alive in many ways. Boards in various places list names from decades past. Staircases befitting a stately home. A yearly ritual is still held at the statue of the most famous ON Nelson - even if he ran away from the school. Jerusalem is still sung at the end of some services, stirring stuff to Parry’s music. My guide pointed out Blake’s poem was lettered on a colourful Hare statue outside the refectory. I enjoyed a good Katsu Chicken in that well thronged refectory - school lunches have definitely been upgraded. I remember that the pinnacle of school dinners was having a block of white ice cream drowned in chocolate sauce.

I learnt things I didn’t know at the time I was at the school. Underneath the main playground is a set of air raid tunnels, I almost asked to see them. Long ago we played with contrivances of cotton reels and rubber bands and match sticks, impressed by their moving by themselves. Organising ON activities is a vital part of school life. The school rents the ground it stands on.

At the end of the day I was asked for my memories of school life. I wish I could reel off stories galore but my memories are few and far between. I’m not like Salvador Dali who remembered being in the womb. I wasn’t in the sixth form at Norwich, and also I’m not in touch with those I was at school with. Reminiscing over shared memories is the way to preserve those memories.

But some things I do recall. Listening to the wonder of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s version of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in a music lesson in the Bishop’s Palace, when Bernard Burrell allowed it to be played. That opened a whole new world to me, to progressive rock and beyond. So thank you my music teacher for teaching me to love the rich and strange, to seek the farthest shore, though I don’t think you meant to.

I remember the joy of receiving a new rough book at the start of a new year, all clean and full of promise which in my hands was never fulfilled. Watching Noye’s Fludde sitting in the now inaccessible galleries in Norwich Cathedral, performed along with girls from the girls high school in Norwich.

I stayed in touch with a school friend for a year or two after I left, and went back once. He showed me the sixth form common room, and a special chair which was both pinful and painful. Tacks had been hidden awaiting unsuspecting sitting ducks. Another masculine rite of passage was there were coat racks beneath Dyers Lodge? Boys would have themselves tied upside to the coat hooks by the feet and try to extricate themselves.

Other memories are more complex. School affected me in ways it didn’t intend to. To some extent when I say school here this is school generically not specifically. I was inoculated against Shakespeare (or Marlowe if you’re a Marlovian), and only fatally infected when I saw “Twelfth Night” on the TV and realised it was great. This inoculation was partly because that plays and much else was taught piecemeal, tree by tree, and you never saw the wood as a whole. Partly because that teaching focussed on technique and not on developing a love for the subject.

Art and sport repelled me. It was important for school that the teachers develop those talented, and that in itself I agree with. But what do you do with the untalented? My memories of art classes are being left alone in a corner to be autodidactic with a lump of clay. Pointless and paintless.

Sport was worse. I’m grateful to be cured of any affection for sport, but that again isn’t what was intended. Cricket was pure boredom. I never batted or bowled, and either I was sitting around or vainly wandering the wide open spaces. One time the ball somehow came my way, and entered my hands as I sought to defend myself. Of course I dropped it. I once tripped over a bag left on the pavilion, and kicked it in disgust. As the bag belonged to the games master I had a rare encounter with a cricket bat.

Teachers usually let the best pupils choose two teams. Being always picked last reinforced one’s place in the sporting world. There was an annual cross-country ‘run’ over Mousehold Heath. A March for No Reason to quote King Crimson. One year I forged a letter from my parents to avoid the ordeal.

Nevertheless I am glad Norwich School existed in my day and exists now. I believe in diversity. I believe in fulfillment. I believe each generation has something to teach the next.