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My formative years! I started here in January 1965 and entered class 1 with the teacher Mrs Massey. She was very pleasant - far better than the dragon who took her place a few years later. End of the year and I was joint top of the class with Lindsey Moore - the only time I achieved this high status! Other memories are from drinking sour milk - 1/2 pint each day until Thatcher the Milk Snatcher ended this perk in the late 70's. Some of the kids I met here I stayed with right through to leaving high school and a couple to 6th form. Alison Walters, Susan Williams, Alison North, Christine Smith, Lindsey, Paul Cox, Matt Spilletts.
Then it was class 2 with Mrs Emmett, another pleasant soul. Here we were introduced to music notes and had stories about "The Crotchet Family"! I could never get on with this - had I listened I might have been a better person, having good musical knowledge, in hindsight a good introduction but I didn't see it that way then and took no notice of it. At the end of this year, some of us "jumped a class". As there were 8 classes and 7 years at this school brighter students were able to miss a year and jump to a higher level. Thus everybody in class 8 had jumped at least one year. That was me and the other people mentioned above hence we missed out class 3. Class 4 teacher was a Miss Brown, a lovely lady I really liked her. Anyway Miss Brown had her own punishment for the baddies - she stood you on a chair and slapped the back of bare legs with a plastic ruler. This was reserved for the really bad kids. There were a few who also happened to be the ones who were undernourished and were poor learners, going nowhere.
So onto class 5 and we had an awful Welsh bloke teach us who was into rugby. This was the first and only time I had the cane - can you believe for holding a paper fan (it was a hot day). Talk about assault! I shudder to think how this monster was able to teach, certainly these days he would be strung up for these kind of offences. I wish I could meet him now and dish out the same punishment in retribution. At this time I was beginning to get interested in football. I don't know why, maybe it was to please my dad - I suppose I liked it for a while, I can remember enjoying some of the games, the competition to beat the other team and the team playing. It was very competitive. More later...
Class 6 we had I think Mrs Brown, nothing to do with Miss Brown in form 4. She started us with French. A shame this stopped when we left her class because in later years I recognised some of it and always thought it would have been much better to have kept it up in prmary school.
The Royal Jester, my last school play in 1971. (scanned from a newspaper cutting)
Again at the end of this year, the same ones of us jumped a class which landed us in class 8 for the last 2 years. The teacher here was Fred Courdrey who was ok, dead keen on football. As I think back his passion for it blotted out anybody who wasn't interested - at the time I was football mad so it was to my advantage. Thinking back now though in 2011, that was a terrible way to behave for a teacher, here we get into the realms of narrow-minded school sports - football & cricket, something which really gets up my nose these days. Anyway, Mr Courdrey was a good help to my education, always critical of me and my friends who were to spend 2 years with him "the worst lot of jumpers ever" he would call us. Still, we all made it to grammar school. The school play was a load of fun, everybody in the classroom getting ready into costumes and make up. This picture, above is of the whole cast, that's me 3rd from the right in the shiny Court Astrologers costume.
So, the football...I was dead keen but only made it to the school team on 2 occasions, I was the reserve all season and was never given the opportunity to play a full game. I was sure I could perform better than some of the team but Fred never allowed me to play. Not really fair, he had his favourites and I wasn't one of them....and so endeth my football career when I left Perryfields because I had no chance of making the grade at grammar, there were loads of good players when I went there and then I just lost interest. Perryfields were top of the Warley league and had been for years, our only competiton came from Moat Farm who frequently shared the top spot with us. Pretty well all of the Moat Farm team ended up at the grammar!
Next stop: Oldbury Grammar School