In my final year of infants school the new Middle School was being built just across the playing field. We all watched the construction taking place knowing that this would be our destination after the summer of 1973.
Looking back this was a time of as much change outside school as within it so there will be more of that in this piece.
It wasn’t just a new school for us but a “new new “ school ( thanks Micky Flanagan). Almost all of my infant school classmates went up there but the catchment area was wider so we were only about 50 per cent of the intake. Kids from other infants schools – one in the town but also from more rural areas nearby. Somehow they filled the three years above me so there were a lot of new kids to deal with and get to know.
It was a time of change. My world expanded from home, family and school. I joined a local cub pack of which there were a lot in my town and seemed de rigeur for any young lad with any semblance of social abilityl. Standing in a circle dressed like Baden-Powell chanting allegiance to Akela may seem trite in 2026 but I enjoyed the camaraderie and met many new lads. The cubs and school both fielded football teams in which I played a prominent part. Some of the pitches were quite bad. There was one that was used for cows most of the time so weaving in and out of the large maggot filled pats was as tricky as avoiding some lumbering centre half whose main talent was brutalising those with a bit of skill.
How did this influence my reading?
School was much more structured. There were workbooks for maths and English and designated times to work through them. There was a set desk position often next to someone you despised or at best tolerated but the occasional rotation meant you interacted with the girls a lot more and learned from them. I’m not quite sure what they learnt from us boys other than the ability to burp and fart loudly and use that word starting with “c” that remains taboo to the female half of society even to this day.
Comprehension was part of the English curriculum. Reading a passage from a strong author and answering questions on it made the 8 year old me think about underlying meanings and I think this helped no end. We also had regular sessions in the afternoon where books were read out and broadcasts played. Everyone was supposed to sit still and remain silent at these times to the extent that one poor girl was too afraid to ask to use the bathroom and consequently deposited a large pool of urine below her chair while we listened to the Nutcracker. 8 year old kids can be thoughtless and a bit cruel but no one teased her about this at all – probably we all thought that it could have been any one of us.
Mrs B was in charge of us in that first year. A short trim sporty late 20s woman she also played the piano in school assemblies and seemed to be able to do everything I couldn’t. Showers had become mandatory after PE ( suppose we were becoming a bit sweaty and smelly) and she patrolled the boys change rooms without fear or favour. Probably the last woman to see me naked until I lost my virginity.
The first book she read to us was CS Lewis “The Silver Chair”. It’s an odd one to start the Narnia series with not least because the Pevensey kids don’t feature at all and it’s in the middle of the series.. It opened my eyes to Narnia though and I read them all over that year – I did not like The Magician’s Nephew but the rest of them I devoured. The underlying themes about Christianity were lost on me at that age but Lewis was an entertaining writer and I read some of his other works when I was a bit older
John S. Murray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I started making friends with the girls that year. They read different stuff to me. Some of it was interesting and some meh. Outside school I read stuff like The Wind in the Willows, Swallows and Amazons and Winnie the Pooh.
The key addition to my external reading though was the Hardy Boys series by Franklin W Dixon. Extracting one of the volumes I devoured it in about a day. Once I realised there were about 50 books I was set for a good while. The action was more adult than Blyton involving men with guns. The boys drove cars and actually had girlfriends.
The next year I was placed in the class of Mrs R. A formidable 20 something busty bottle blonde whose usual attire consisted of a low cut top, short skirt and knee high boots. If nothing else she certainly improved the attendance of Dads at parents evenings. A tough taskmaster ( mistress?) but also a good character and I think the vast majority of my classmates enjoyed being there.
Reading of fiction didn’t move on much during this time though – still doing Blyton, Price, Walters and Buckeridge with Dixon now joining them. I had a bash at a couple of my Dad’s favourite thriller writers and while I could read the words they weren’t quite for me at the time.
Grosset & Dunlap, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The main thing I remember is my parents started to buy me reference books for birthday and Christmas so I came into possession of tomes about world history, the animal kingdom, geography and science. Highly informative and a change from reading about thinly disguised nonces hanging around the local playground. I think the history stuff was particularly interesting for me. While I’d heard of the Romans and Greeks peoples like the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians and Macedonians were very new to an 8 year old. This was the start of my lifelong interest in history and the people in it. Oddly enough I didn’t study history at O level, A level or university. It has always been very much a personal interest (much, much more of this in future episodes).
The other main expansion of my reading at this time was newspapers. I’d been looking at the football results and reports for a few years but now I read from the front. We took the Birmingham Post daily and the Sunday Mirror.
The period was tremendously interesting – Watergate, Vietnam, Yom Kippur War, power cuts, 3 day week – and a lodestone of information for a kid just awaking to the world. People like Mao, Richard Nixon, Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, Giscard d’Estaing, Brandt, Begin, Sadat and Brezhnev became familiar figures to me. Of course the sport was tremendously captivating as well – Pele and Muhamed Ali were the pinnacle but people like George Best, Jack Nicklaus, Mary Peters, Gary Sobers, Gareth Edwards and the like were also up there. A world of wonder really and the whole time was a far better education than I got sitting in a classroom with a bunch of low wattage kids whose ambition extended no further than learning to tie shoelaces and wondering where their next Kitcat was coming from.
This all drew to a close in the hot summer of 1975 when we emigrated to Australia.
© ArthurDaley 2026
