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brought disgrace to the school. I found out afterwards that the reason things had gone so wrong was because the benches were different heights. I had picked a bench that was higher than the one I had originally stood on, hence the whack. Instead of impressing the rest of the boys with my daredevil stunt I was now looked upon as something of a nutcase.
    Another piece of training gear which we were all encouraged to become good on was a structure in the shape of a ship’s mast complete with crossbars and rope ladders. We were taught to shin up the ladders, walk along the crossbars and then take up positions where we could work on imaginary sails. Each boy had a rope harness attached to his body, but as soon as a boy could climb without the safety harness he was awarded a badge with a picture of the mast on it, which he had to sew on to his best church parade uniform. I was in the youngest class so we were only allowed to climb up to the first beam, but we thought it was very high. I never heard of any boy falling off though.
    Another sport we did was boxing. There was a full-size ring in the corner of the gymnasium. The same master who trained us on the vaulting horse taught us to box, how to keep our guard up, how to put the full weight of the body behind the shoulder when aiming a punch, that sort of thing. He drilled it into us that it was no use getting into the ring unless you intended to hurt someone. During my stay at the home I took some painful knocks. The sports teacher never let things get out of hand, and I used to enjoy those sessions in the ring even when I came off second best.
    Once two of the boys did something wrong (I don’t remember what), and we were told that we could not go to the gym. Instead we would polish the floors. We were all marched down to the cellars where the caretaker issued us with huge, heavy ‘bumpers’, iron plates with stout handles to which a polishing cloth was fixed. The rest of the boys got on their hands and knees to apply the wax polish. Those with the bumpers pushed them up and down, buffing the boards. The exercise ended when the prefects deemed that the floor had the necessary shine from corner to corner. Then we marched off to the showers to clean off all the sweat and grime accumulated in the exercise. I was surprised the boys took all this without a murmur of dissent; back home at school at Prospect Terrace there would have been a wholesale bundle.
    After I had been there some few weeks I and some of the other boys were paraded in the main hall and told that we were to be moved to the next class. To mark this new status we were to be issued with new hats, to be worn whenever we were outside the walls of the school. These turned out to be like the hats worn by the sailors of the Royal Navy – ‘and always to be worn straight across the forehead with the bow of the ribbon dead centre at the rear of the head’.
    Once we had this new ‘outside gear’, the class was allowed to take part in the weekly Sunday morning march to the local church. To attend the service we formed up in columns of four, about fifty or sixty boys, with the prefects marching outside the ranks shouting ‘left, right, left, right’. All us boys enjoyed playing at soldiers and we made sure our hats were on dead straight. It must have been a fair-sized town as I remember that we had some competition from the local Scout Group and a company of the Boys’ Brigade who had a band and so always led the parade. I was already familiar with the Boys’ Brigade as they had a company in Wakefield Street back home. Seeing them next to me on those Sundays got me to thinking about my mum and John and little Emmy. It made me very unhappy.
    Sunday afternoon was visiting day and the boys used to gather at the windows waiting to see if their parents were going to appear with a bag of goodies. If the day was fine they waited at the gates. It doesn’t need a big brain to