School in the early sixties and various crazes
When I look back at school in the early sixties I am amazed by the freedom we had. As far as I can see there was no supervision. At break and dinner-time we were free to do what we liked. The teachers went off to the staffroom to grab their coffee and natter and we ran riot.
The boys ran about like idiots while the girls stood around in groups or sat in the classrooms. Apart from all the usual games of football – either played on the big open fields in summer or on the hard tarmac enclosed tennis courts in winter – we went through a number of crazes.
When I first arrived at the school the craze was ‘kingy’. This was sometimes played in the tennis courts or in front of the old music rooms which were now used for storage. They had no windows to break and a concrete covered walkway with pillars coming down. You could hide behind the pillars. The game consisted of some older boys throwing a tennis ball at you as hard as they could. You could fend it off with fists and forearms but if they hit you on the body, above the knee, or the arm, above the elbow, or the head, you were out. We loved it. It was very popular and I used to go home with a variety of bruises from tennis balls that were breaking the sound barrier. The older boys also delighted in trying to inflict pain on the little first years.
It lasted a while then we moved on.
Rocket caps were fun. These were little metal rockets with fins. They had a metal plunger at the tip. You lifted the plunger up and were supposed to put a cap under it. These were little packs of gunpowder. You could buy them in long ribbons of fifty caps, which you tore off as required, or buy them in packs of round single caps. The single ones were more expensive but packed more of a punch. The object of the exercise was to throw the rocket up in the air. It would come down and as the plunger hit the ground the cap would go off with a bang. Of course we loaded them up with loads of caps to get a bigger explosion and threw at each other. When you were hit with a metal rocket it hurt.
That moved on to spud guns. Everyone had a couple of big potatoes in their pocket and we had these metal spud guns to fire plugs of potato. You could get quite a force on them. At one stage we had pitched battles at break and dinner in the old music room, building barricades out of the old desks.
Spud guns eventually became banned. I think the cleaners made a fuss over the amount of potato debris.
That enabled the pea-shooters to come into play. Everyone came to school with pockets full of dried peas which we gleefully fired at each other at every opportunity, including lessons. Floors were covered in peas.
After they were banned we moved on to the more surreptitious biro paper shooter. You chewed a wad of paper, pulled off a chunk and fashioned it into a pellet, took the workings out of your biro and fired the pellet at each other, the teacher or the blackboard. You quickly stuffed the workings back so that if accused you could show that you couldn’t possibly have done it. You could make the pellets gooey so that they stuck on the board or hard so they pinged off. That was part of the skill. Every time the teacher turned round to write on the board a hail of pellets hit him or the board. Some teachers ended up with blackboards plastered though there were others that you wouldn’t have dared.
We had a phase of firing rice through the biros. That was good because if you were proficient you could actually fire it like a machine gun.
Another craze was magnifying glasses. One summer it seemed that everyone had one in their pocket. We would direct the sun’s rays down on all things imaginable, burning holes through fabric, leaves, wood, plastic and each other. A favourite was the old tree stump out at the side of the field. You could cause them to smoulder for hours.
Eventually the Head put a stop to it. For some reason he took exception to the burn holes appearing in desks and furniture.
I tried to remember much about the actual lessons but nothing came to mind. They were hazy. It was the extraneous activities that have stuck.
They all came to a halt when we reached fourteen. You could not waste your time playing silly games. There were girls to impress.
Your school was a lot easier than mine
Yes it probably was although some of the teachers were monsters.
We had a few of them too.
A lot of ours were traumatised soldiers.
Yes they would be, when you are young you don’t see that in a Teacher or anyone else come to that, you just think what’s out there.
I think the Second World War did terrible things to people. Some never got over it.
Reblogged this on Opher's World and commented:
An era that is gone.
Haha we used to shoot papers in biros too! It was fun!
Great days when all you had to worry about was having fun.
Yup the good old days!
They are not so old for you! Mine are ancient!
Haha mine feel ancient.
But they are not!
We called the projectiles of paper, spitballs! In some classrooms, the blackboards and the ceilings were rife with these messy decorations. Some guys would just chew a wad of paper until it was nice and juicy and then just toss it by hand at the board. Ah yes… education at its finest!
That sounds terrible. Ours were not as messy as that. I remember we used to use rulers in the cracks of the desks too – as catapults.