John McGuirk 3Ed King speaking what seemed to be very good French, mainly because his great Dad was in the wine trade (and who introduced me to my love of wine, which led on to my career in the industry) or was it because we had a very attractive French teacher, she was one of two female teachers the other being the Art mistress, there was a rumour that Paul Jolley had been locked inside the store cupboard with her at some point.
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were sports. I was in Lincoln, but really wanted to be in Padley as the shirts were red and I supported Man Utd. Andrew Yurksaitis was dazzling to watch with the ball he always seemed to score, I was left back and me and Coups just used to chop everybody down that came our way. I remember Charlie McCall with his curly (permed) hair he was the lad who always looked windswept and interesting, slightly scruffy in a cool sort of way, but on the football field it was like tackling a brick outhouse he just used to run through everybody.
Cricket was a bit of an enigma, if you were not batting you were stood around in all sorts of weather just scratching bits, the sports store on the fields was a good meeting place along with the squash courts for fights.
I was at one point assigned to library duties; this was a great alternative to manual labour, which always seemed to involve weeding the gravel path down to the lake. The library duties mainly involved covering all the new books with a clear sticky film which had to be cut in a specific way which I could still manage to do today, and filing books which had not been put back properly. The great thing about this job was the proximity to the chapel and more specifically the chapel store cupboard, extra food in the way of Host’s was most welcome, too many at one go though, stuck to the roof of your mouth and made it impossible to talk for at least 15 minutes, eight was just the right amount.
