I started high school in early 1977. A very different place. You went from being a 12 year old at the top of the food chain to some insignificant squit. There were people with pubic hair and beards. When our First XV ran down the grass bank on to the pitch it was like the second coming of the Mongol hordes and the subsequent game was often worse than that. Thursday mornings I often used to see one of the forwards outside the headmaster’s office waiting for an interview about his behaviour on the field the previous afternoon.
Down to more prosaic matters though.
School became much more structured and the staff actually divided into departments. The science lot were a collection of hippies and the maths lot generally good guys. English however was quite a mixed bag. Ranging from nearly retired characters straight out of the Wackford Squeers or Mr Pecksniff casebook the lower end were extremely camp and made Larry Grayson look like Reggie Kray. I got on with all of them.
In the first year we had Mr K. A short slight version of Stephen Fry he devoted the two English lessons on Friday to letting us bring our own books in and read them. His wispy moustache looked like it might disappear the next time a strong breeze got up. I now know this was extreme laziness as he didn’t have to do any actual teaching. In between there was a science lesson taken by a stoner who didn’t like people continuing to read the books while he was trying to explain why F=ma. He confiscated a load and parked them behind a screen above the blackboard.
Mr K turned up for the next lesson and queried why people didn’t have books. He was about 5 foot 2 and spent most of the lesson standing on a chair trying to poke them down with a ruler. He was a very good teacher though.
After I couple of years of Mr K I was bestowed with Mr H. Another one who made John Inman look like he belonged on Unlimited Fight Club. Sporting an Abe Lincoln style beard we were all staggered when he managed to impregnate a married woman in the same department. H was a good laugh though and usually after the annual exams teachers made the lessons fun. He was no exception. At the end of that year we were doing stuff out of Joseph Conrad’s book “The N of the Narcissus”. Like all Conrad’s books it’s actually a good story. There’s a bit though where the captain of the ship is described as moving his jaw like someone masticating a lump of India rubber. This was clearly a trap for young players and I could see H’s eyes pretending to look at the book while scanning the room for someone who got their pen out and made the obvious adjustment. Sure enough a classmate was caught in the act and spent an uncomfortable 10 minutes getting a dressing down while I tried not to laugh out loud.
At the end of every school year there was a really loose day when those about to do the HSC (sort of A levels) got free rein. We featured in the national press pretty much every year.
The sixth formers normally scoured the bins behind the local supermarkets for rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at us. Dressed in cheap overalls like Alex Defarge in A Clockwork Orange it was bloody terrifying. The first year I was up our six formers spent two months posting leaflets advertising (I shit you not) a gay dance at our local rival school on all the nearby telegraph poles and giving their headmaster’s direct line as a booking number. He must have really enjoyed those calls.
They took revenge . Our rugby posts were sawn down and the school bannisters were covered in the kind of gel that would make Sir Les recoil in horror.
We were better than that though. It was a school based around agriculture with a 25 hectare farm attached and – we had tractors!!!. Our lot nicked one late at night drove it a few miles down the road and turned their first XV pitch into something resembling a smelly bog in Lincolnshire or Norfolk.
A few years later we introduced the poo pit to polite society. This was created by erecting a 15 foot square 10 inch deep child’s paddling pool on one of the school’s grassy areas. Our enterprising 6th formers then got one of the tractors, attached a trailer to it and filled the said item with as much cow shit as they could find from the farm. The odd dead eel, cat or bird was thrown in to ramp odour levels up, Dante’s 7th Circle of Hell doesn’t even begin to describe this,
If your older brother was in the 6th form you were going to get rolled in this come what may. Ever seen someone the colour of dark chocolate because they’re covered in cow shit from head to foot? School sent you straight home which was only the start of your bad day. Try boarding a bus covered in shit. People were having to walk 4 or 5 miles only to be greeted by a mother who hadn’t been close to a fresh one for over a decade and hadn’t had marital relations for about 9 months longer. You’d also interrupted her while still on the first bottle of Beefeater and made her hide the naked milkman in the spare bedroom
After the first year we all wore our oldest clothes. After the second year I stopped attending school in the last week. My preferred method of rounding off my activities in the school year was to get my school bag and completely remove any items related to educational activity from it. Mostly we carried sports bags – some were in the school colours with the badge on it. I did not carry such an item – too likely to attract the attention of big thick vindictive kids from a neighbouring school. On the day I’d identified as the last one I would attend I waited until just after the lunch break when everything was quiet. The bag and I then toddled down to the school farm and did a bit of unauthorised harvesting. Peaches were usually in season at the time and one year I collected 120 or so. The trees had started to look like a swarm of locusts had recently passed through so I climbed over the fence and left. You had to be a bit careful with this though – a few kids had nicked some fruit just after the trees had been sprayed with insecticide and spent a week vomiting and regretting the error of their ways.
High school was my proper introduction to books. Dad’s favourites of Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley I went through in no time. Maclean has been much underrated – the books were pretty short but always interesting at least to the 13 year old me. Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare are well known but I really enjoyed Night Without End, The Satan Bug and Puppet on a Chain. Both Bagley and MacLean died early when I was still in my teens so I needed other outlets
Incorporates artwork by Howard Terpning, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I discovered Wilbur Smith, Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins, Jeffrey Archer and Stephen King. The school library even stocked some of this. Reading popular authors is by no means a bad way of introducing yourself to reading adult books. They tend to be well written and not too complicated.
The library at high school was huge – about 3 times the size of the primary school one. It was presided over by Mrs S – affectionately known by the whole school as Auntie Shirl (NHRN). Like all librarians I ever met she was kind and generous and not likely to come anywhere near my friends and I outside of school hours. Her main offsider was Mrs I – a 40 something haggard old buzzard whose hairstyle appeared to have been created by Rod Stewart after a bad night on the drink and drugs. I got into trouble for winking and waving at her while Auntie Shirl was explaining the Dewey system of cataloguing books. It didn’t help when one of my mates shouted “He thinks you’re sexy”.
That incident got me a long lecture after school.
It was in the days before mobiles and the internet and the school had provided a number of bottles of glue in old shampoo bottles dotted around the shelves. I don’t think many people I knew at the time needed much help in sticking the pages of anything together. One of my more thoughtful classmates had taken the trouble to go round labelling the old plastic tan bottles of S73 containing this stuff as Mrs I’s shampoo.
I read William L Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich and Albert Speers autobiography. I was introduced to authors like Orwell, Dickens, Austen, Huxley, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Henry James. It was a good time and I learned a lot.
See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There was this funny section of the library featuring books like ”Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know” I don’t know about you lot but if I was a teenage girl I’d want to know about Johnnies and spitting it out fast enough so Mum couldn’t smell it on your breath.
I enjoyed the school library and spent a lot of time in there during breaks. It always had that day’s Sydney Morning Herald (our version of the Times or Telegraph) so I could read all sorts of stuff. The cricket writers were particularly good – Jack Fingleton and Bill O’Reilly were two I remember. There were small rooms where I spent a bit of time playing chess and poking fun at the Dungeons and Dragons lot.
I know these pieces are meant to be about reading but they’ve morphed into more of a recollection about my younger years. When I read back through them I realise I had such a good laugh with people I haven’t seen for decades now. I’m going to have to do another piece on high school because I haven’t even started on some of the funnier stuff involving the staff and what went on in the farm area.
© ArthurDaley 2026
