The interview at the Education Office was pleasant and informal.

"Mr Clark?" smiled the Deputy Director as he shook my hand. "Please sit down."

I took the edge of a chair and glanced around the drab little office as the Deputy Director of Education leafed through some papers on his desk. I must have been the thirteenth or fourteenth candidate he had seen that morning.

"Now, Mr Clark, you've just completed a three-year teacher-training course at St Giles' College?"

"That's right," I agreed a little nervously.

"And you'd like to work at any school here in Ironthorpe?"

"Yes."

"Good. We're always pleased when people from the local college decide to stay and work for us. Are you living in Ironthorpe or at home?"

"I'm living at home," I replied.

"That's near Durham, isn't it? That's a long way to travel."

"Well, I have a small car which I bought when I left the Army."

"Ah yes."

The Deputy Director's head nodded in understanding. His somewhat forbidding, angular countenance broke into a smile again.

"You didn't go to college straight from school. Good. Well, you're secondary trained, so we'd better put you into a secondary school, hadn't we?"

His finger traced down a list, and he looked enquiringly at me.

"How about Nile Street Secondary Boys'?"

I cleared my throat.

"Yes, yes, that's fine."

"Good," replied the Deputy Director. "Mr Henderson is the headmaster. We'll arrange for you to visit him. Probably some time next week."

He smiled again and held out his hand once more.

"I hope you enjoy working for us, Mr Clark."

And that was it. As I walked down the cream-and-brown corridors of the decaying building and out into the June sunlight, I reflected that I was now a fully-fledged teacher. In 1968 it was as simple as that.

Well, not quite. I had completed a three-year course at St Giles' teacher-training college. I had undertaken three years of lectures, seminars, teaching-practices and exams, and had finally gained the Teacher's Certificate, or Certificate of Education, as it would shortly be renamed. Today, aspiring teachers must take a degree-level course, either a B. Ed. (Bachelor of Education, which was being piloted in my student days), or a first degree with a one-year Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) added on. In the sixties, the Certificate was not recognised as being equivalent to a degree, and this fact tended to exclude certificate teachers from the grammar schools. The irony was that most grammar school teachers, although better qualified academically, were untrained.

As I had just discovered, finding a job in 1968 was not too difficult. The post-war baby boom meant that schools were still expanding, and teachers were in short supply.

As I got into the battered Mini I had bought for £50, I turned the name Nile Street over in my mind. Surely it was in the dockland area of the town? I pulled away in the usual cloud of blue smoke. Turning down King Arthur Road, I headed for the docks, and the school where I was about to begin my career. Eventually I found it. Squeezed into a rectangle bounded by a railway line, a council housing estate, a brewery and a paintworks, there stood Nile Street School.

It was a gloomy complex of brown brick, darkened by years of salt-laden, industrially-polluted air. As I slowly chugged past the school I could see four doorways marked Infants, Juniors, Girls, Boys. The words were deeply chiselled into stone lintels that looked as though they had resisted the weather for centuries. But they hadn't, for another doorway bore the date 1935.

The doorway marked Boys interested me most. That was the door through which I would very soon enter as a teacher. The road crossed the railway line by means of a hump-backed bridge, and as I drove on the school seemed to sink from view behind its high wall and I went away, anticipating my first visit.

Two or three days later a letter arrived from the Education Office. It informed me that Mr. Henderson, headmaster of Nile Street Boys', would be pleased to see me on Monday, July the first, at eleven-thirty.

It was raining on the day that I made my visit. This time I approached the school from the other side of the railway bridge. Over the roof of the paintworks I could see the sea, grey, heaving sullenly and occasionally flicking scraps of foam across its leaden surface.

I pulled up opposite the gates, and as I surveyed the dark-brown brickwork a wave of apprehension flowed through me.

A few cars were parked in a cramped driveway. Some overhanging trees dripped rain-water onto the roofs of one or two of the vehicles. The door marked Boys was almost opposite the gates, but the door with the date over it, a little further along, seemed to be the main entrance. A short flight of steps led to a glass-paned door. I mounted the steps, pushed the stiff double door, and entered.

It was almost like being in a time machine which had come to rest in my own childhood. The entrance-hall smelled of sandy floors and dinner, and a clatter echoed through the corridors as kitchen staff unloaded dinner containers from a van.

Memories of my own schooldays came to me. The schools where I had done my teaching-practices had been newer, but this one smacked of the place I had attended as a boy. Perhaps that added to my nervousness, which surprised me, for at twenty-four I thought I was past all that.

The entrance-hall was tiny and two doors led into the school. I chose the right-hand door and entered a bigger lobby. A middle-aged secretary was busy at a desk in the corner.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Yes. Er, my name's Clark and I've come to see Mr Henderson."

"Oh. You want the boys' department, through that door. This is the girls' end," she smiled. She took me into another lobby next door.

"I'll just see if he's free," she explained, knocking at a white-painted door marked T.W.Henderson, Headmaster. After speaking to someone inside, she turned once more to me.

"The headmaster is engaged at the moment. He shouldn't be long."

The lobby smelled of polish. A tank of tropical fish formed the centrepiece of the wall opposite the headmaster's door. It was flanked by ancient-looking potted plants, and on the walls were framed team photos of days gone by. Lines of boys stared at the camera, arms folded across their open-collared shirts while their baggy football shorts reached to their knees. Solemn teachers, clad in ill-fitting tweeds or crumpled demob suits, stood solemnly at each end of the rows.

Above the team photos a huge round wooden-cased wall-clock ticked with steady dignity, the ornate pointers standing at eleven-fifteen. In one corner stood the trophy-cupboard, its glass-fronted shelves filled with silver cups of all shapes and sizes. What athletic feats had secured such a formidable array? My mind filled with pictures of sports days: the cheering children and applauding parents, the beaming headmaster indulgently shaking hand after clammy hand....

"Mr Clark?"

A tall, well-built man of about sixty had emerged quietly from the headmaster's room.

"I'm Mr Henderson," he smiled. "Would you like to come in and sit down?"

"Thank you," I replied, and he ushered me to an old wooden armchair in his office.

"I've just been looking over your college report," he began as he lowered himself ponderously into his chair behind the massive desk that dominated the room. "You're a St. Giles' man, I see. That was an all-women's college when I was your age."

As he read the report again I had the opportunity to examine him. He was my idea of a typical headmaster. The charcoal-grey suit, light grey tie, and black, highly-polished shoes combined with the silver hair to give him the air of a benevolent absolute monarch.

"Well now," he said, putting down the file and sitting back in his wooden armchair, "you want to teach history and geography. You'll probably do more geography for a while. Would you mind taking some PE?"

"Not at all," I replied. "In fact, I'd like to get as much experience as possible with different subjects."

"Good. Now there are only three weeks of term left and I suppose you'll have no objection to starting on the supply system and earning some money. Officially you're still a student so you won't pay tax. You'll get twenty pounds a week." He chuckled. "The Director of Education didn't get that when I started."

He smiled at me and opened his desk diary. I smiled too. Twenty pounds a week for three weeks! It would come to more than my student's grant for a term.

Mr Henderson mused over his desk diary.

"Today's the first. Mm, yes. Wednesday morning, July the third?"

"Yes," I stammered. "That's fine."

"Good. You'll be on half timetable and the staff you'll be relieving will already have some work set for their classes. They're always happy to have people like yourself starting on supply. It gives them a bit of a rest."

He rose from his chair.

"Come up to the staffroom and meet some of the staff. Perhaps you'd like to stay for lunch?"

As he moved to the door, it was with something of a start that I noticed the trembling hands, the slow, ponderous movements, and the shuffling gait. When I first met him his ponderous movements had struck me as merely a sign of age. Now I began to suspect: had forty years of teaching done that to him?

We clattered along the bare concrete and red brick corridors and up some dingy stairs. Very correctly, Mr. Henderson knocked on a brass-handled white door, opened it and peeped in.

"May I come in?" he asked.

I followed him in. To my relief I saw two familiar faces: Dave Brown and Jim Ewan, two lads I'd been at college with. At least I'd have someone to talk to.

Dave and Jim were as unlike each other as could be. Dave, beefy and red-faced with a mop of thick blond curls, had been engaged to teach boys' PE. He was tough and jovial, easy to get on with, but, as his pupils were to discover, he would stand for no nonsense.

Jim was a tall, thin, bespectacled neurotic who was already beginning to go bald. His own hardest taskmaster, his ascetic appearance revealed a tendency to worry about getting everything right. He was to teach English.

Both had started that Monday and were sharing a flat on the other side of town.

I went with Dave and Jim to the dining hall that lunch-time. As we threaded our way among the formica-topped tables I began to realise that things might not be as I had imagined. A large number of boys filled the hall. Some observed me with curiosity as I passed, but most were intent on stuffing as much food into their mouths as they could. They were eating something with fried rice, and here and there the air seemed to be thick with particles of rice as the boys champed noisily at their meal. There were grains of rice on the floor, on the tables, on the boys' clothes, in their hair. Dave Brown caught my eye and grinned.

"Aye," he remarked. "1 wonder what we're letting ourselves in for!"

The first three weeks of my teaching career were the most hectic and informative of my life. Everything was new and challenging and I learned an enormous amount about the school, the staff, the boys and, not least, myself.

After attending grammar school in County Durham I had left at sixteen without any clear idea of what I wanted to do. I joined the Army but realised that I would never make a career of Service life. When we were on joint manoeuvres with the Territorials I met one or two teachers and decided to apply for a training college place. I was accepted at St. Giles' College, in the town of Ironthorpe, a seaport on the North-east coast. I had travelled enough in the Army and returning to my own part of the country suited me well.

I followed a three-year course and emerged at the age of twenty-four, ready and willing to pursue a worthwhile career.

In those first three weeks at Nile Street I met some of the men who were to influence me in my job. They were what my lecturers at college referred to with a sneer as "formal". That is, they ignored the methods promoted by those who dominated the education system in the sixties and followed tried and trusted methods.

Every teacher at Nile Street had his own peculiarities, the headmaster as much as any. In the thirty-odd years I have been teaching I have served under seven different heads. The head is the automatic target for staff criticism. Some deserve it, some don't. Partly because of his old-fashioned manner, Mr Henderson came in for his share. I soon got to know some of his ways.

"Good morning, Mr Clark," he would intone. "Another damp and dismal day."

I would make some reply, collect the keys to my classroom, and go, newly depressed by the greeting. I often felt that it would have been nice to have a cheery greeting on the odd fine morning, but Mr Henderson seemed not to notice such days, or not to think them worthy of comment.

Mr Henderson was unfortunate in that he suffered from a nervous disease. He was approaching retirement, and that year, his last in office, the school underwent two major changes which sorely taxed him. The separate boys' and girls' departments were amalgamated, and Nile Street had to accommodate the children from Ropery Lane School which was closing down. Mr Henderson, in his conscientious way, prepared for the changes as well as he could, but even he was unprepared for the Ropery Lane children.

Nile Street produced some tough eggs, but in Ropery Lane and the surrounding district, they started where Nile Street left off. Mr Henderson, despite valiant efforts, found the upheaval difficult to cope with and began to rely increasingly on his deputy, Mr Ayre.

I met Mr Ayre on my first day in July. It had gone well for a first day in a new job. Each lesson lasted seventy-five minutes and there were only four in a day. I had taken first and second year classes up to the afternoon break, classes of twelve and thirteen year-old boys, and they had been reasonably pleasant and hard-working. Some were scruffy, others stank of stale sweat, dirt and urine, but I had been forewarned about such things and I wasn't particularly worried.

In the last lesson, however, I had to try to interest the fourth-year leavers in geography. These boys were all fifteen and leaving in three weeks. I had never before been alone in a room with thugs. There were twenty-five of them; mercifully ten had left at Easter.

"Keep them down," Mr Ayre had said, his glasses flashing. I was taking over his timetable for the last three weeks of term, while he drew up next year's timetable and helped the head to prepare for the administrative changes.

"Show them you mean business," he said in his crisp manner. "A lot of them are on probation, you know. They might try it on a bit because you're new."

As I entered the classroom his words rang in my ears, especially the bit about them being on probation. I am not small, but several of these boys were bigger than I was. They lolled in their seats, their open-necked shirts and rolled-up sleeves displaying a rich variety of the tattooist's art, some done professionally, some cruder efforts done themselves or by their mates.

They leered and nudged one another as I stood before them and I sensed that they were out for a laugh at my expense.

"Ye just outa college, eh, sur?" rumbled one huge lad, grinning, but not amiably, more as if he had sized me up and found me wanting.

"Thank God it's not that Ayre!" shouted another. "Aa'm sick o' him. Aa'm ganna fill 'im in when Aa leave 'ere!"

"Open your books and put this title," I said, trying to keep a quaver out of my voice. My mind flashed back to Army days, hours of drill, bayonet practice, "playing soldiers". How relatively simple it had all been, and what might I have to face here?

I wrote the title "London" on the scarred and pitted surface of the blackboard. Scarred and pitted by what? I wondered.

"Ye been ter London, sur?" squeaked a weedy little boy, the runt of the class, by the look of him. He somehow seemed out of place among the towering hulks surrounding him.

"Aye, Aa've been," boomed a denim-suited lout who reeked of tobacco smoke and whose chest displayed a great tattooed eagle. "It was great! We seen aall the strip clubs. Wooaahh, sur! Ye shoulda seen aall the pitchers outside."

"Whooaahh! Corrr! Wheyhey!" came the chorus.

"Eh, Jacka!" shouted one of the frequenters of the fleshpots. "Wait till Aa tell yer ma!"

"Hadaway, man!" squeaked the runt. "Jacka's ma was one o' the strippers!"

The class erupted again. Jacka swung round in his seat, his desk lifting on his knees.

"Hanson, Aa'll knack ye!" he bellowed, brandishing a fist like a leg of mutton. Hanson replied by flicking a paper pellet at him. In a moment the air was full of pellets.

"All right, all right!" I bellowed. "Shut up and get on with the work!"

They took no notice. I doubted whether they could even hear me. Suddenly, what I had dreaded most of all came to pass. Through the glass-paned partition separating the room from the corridor I saw Mr Ayre approaching. In his grey tweed suit, his spectacles flashing, he was nonchalantly strolling down the corridor. I had no doubt that he had come to restore order before these thugs destroyed the school. As he took hold of the door handle all noise ceased as if someone had turned off a switch. As he opened the door and entered, a startling change occurred in the room. Every movement stopped, every paper pellet, ruler, comb and all the other paraphernalia of disorder vanished magically, and the whole class snapped to seated rigidity. Every face assumed an expression of vacant awe.

I myself was awed at the way in which one man's entrance had transformed these disorderly boys. Mr Ayre had first struck me as an efficient and amiable man. His sprightly energy belied his fifty-six years and his full head of iron-grey hair. Behind the tortoise-shelled spectacles were two piercingly bright eyes. Mr Ayre seemed unaware of the riot that had preceded his appearance by only a moment. He smiled at me.

"Excuse me, Mr Clark"

The voice was precise, the false teeth lending it a tinny quality. The classroom windows mirrored themselves in his spectacles as he looked searchingly about the room.

"D'you mind if I see someone?"

Even as I mumbled the formality of assent, Mr Ayre's searching gaze located the boy he was looking for, a huge gorilla at the back of the room.

"Come here, Whitworth."

Whitworth rose, his chair falling back against the wall and his desk tottering away. Six feet tall and broad in proportion, this fifteen year-old dwarfed the deputy head. Yet Mr Ayre took him by the collar, and like a lumbering dancing bear the boy was led from the room.

Seizing the opportunity I attempted to reassert my now dubious authority.

"Right! Unless some of you want to join Whitworth, get on with your work quietly. And I mean quietly!"

Again, they took little notice. They went through the motions of work, copying a map from a sheet I had prepared, but their attention was on the door. Through the glass we could all see Mr Ayre, fingers stroking his chin, his elbow supported by the other hand. The boy, a picture of abject resignation, stood with bowed head, face red as if with shame, hands behind his back and the weight of his great body on one leg.

Mr Ayre proceeded to jabbing at Whitworth with one finger, leaning forward, at which the hulking boy shrank back. Suddenly Mr Ayre put his head round the door.

"May I send a boy for the cane, Mr Clark?"

Twenty-four hands shot up and a hiss of "Sir! Sir!" filled the room. Mr Ayre selected the nearest, nodded amiably at me, and dispatched the messenger.

"Get on!" I ordered the class, but they either put pen listlessly to paper, or took no notice. All attention was on the little drama outside. Presently the boy returned with the cane. Mr Ayre took it and signalled to Whitworth to hold out his hand.

Not since my junior school days in the fifties had I seen anyone being caned. At grammar school the cane was used by the headmaster alone; the deputy head used a strap. To be sent to either of them was a serious business. I had never got that far, although I had had my share of cuffs and smacks, or a slippering across the backside for some trivial offence in the gym.

This punishment was to be public, albeit unofficially so, and even if I had dropped dead it would not have distracted the audience from what was about to happen outside.

Mr Ayre balanced the cane and swished it at Whitworth's outstretched hand Twice on one hand, the same on the other. Mr Ayre seemed hardly to raise the cane more than a few inches, and flicked it rather than whacking it. Yet Whitworth, all six foot of him, eyes glistening, bent almost double. Wringing both hands he stumbled back into the classroom and resumed his seat, keeping his head down and his hands out of sight. Mr Ayre, with another nod at me through the partition, strolled quietly away.

I was stunned. The silence in the room affected me so that I crept quietly about. I tried to look at Whitworth's hands but he crouched in his seat and kept them out of sight. After a while he silently picked up his pen and resumed his work. The only sound that invaded the room was the clinking of empty milk bottles as they were stacked in the yard. The sun stole round the corner of the building and slowly lit up the room as if it, too, was afraid to disturb the silence.

For the rest of the lesson the thugs in open-necked shirts with their tattooed chests worked like beavers. As I surveyed them from the front of the room I pondered on the event I had seen. At college the line on corporal punishment had been that it would scar pupils for life, mentally rather than physically. Yet there was no doubt that what had happened that afternoon had been effective, the most effective method I had ever seen of bringing to order a crowd of rowdy boys, although that was not why the punishment had taken place. I pondered long and hard on what I had seen.

I never found out what Whitworth had done to merit his punishment. He was already on probation for robbery with violence and was adept at handing out his own form of corporal punishment using fists and Dr Marten boots, aiming blows at groin and ribs. This kind of attack was known as "kickin' 'im aall ower" or "kickin' 'im in".

I expected the caning to provoke resentment as predicted by my lecturers. To my surprise, next day I saw Whitworth chatting amiably with Mr Ayre about cricket. They were both fanatics, and Whitworth had set his heart on playing for the school team against the staff at the end of term.

"I suppose the staff will stroll home?" quipped Mr Ayre.

"They might as well, sur," riposted George Whitworth. "'Cause they're nee good at cricket!"

By the end of only the first week I felt that I was stating to fit into my new job. I soon discovered that I had made a good start to my career by being appointed to Nile Street. Lucky is the young teacher of today who has as colleagues such master craftsmen and true professionals.

George Meadowes was one such man. He had been at Nile Street for thirty-six years, apart from war service in the RAF. He had actually taught a couple of the staff, for Nile Street had seen its day as a good school, and had proudly sent pupils into different colleges. It had once, George assured me, produced a boy who had become a very successful ballet dancer.

George was a small, slightly-built man with a reputation for discipline known throughout the Nile Street area. Older people still spoke reverently of "Mr Meadowes", and how, as a young teacher, he had mastered even the toughest boys in those tough years of the Depression.

George had no illusions about education. He was a good teacher who was genuinely liked by staff and boys alike. An excellent cricketer, he had always taken a keen interest in the game, and was prepared to put in hours of coaching after school and on Saturday mornings.

He was as conscientious in his science teaching, and knew exactly what he was doing when handling some of the tough nuts we had at Nile Street. "Five-fingered Jack" was the name he gave to his small strap, which he could wield with terrifying effect.

"It's the only thing some of them understand," he would say in a matter-of-fact way. "What you've got to realise is that kids need training - discipline. You can't expect them to teach themselves or to fit into society unless you discipline them first. It's all very well your educational theorists saying they'll do it themselves. They won't. All young animals need to be trained and kids are no exception."

What George was saying sounded like flat heresy to me. For three years I had been told by lecturers at college that discipline was only one step removed from torture. Children needed freedom to develop, and any form of discipline, such as George Meadowes advocated, would merely blunt their development as human beings. Only as time passed did I realise that the lecturers had been wrong, and experienced teachers like George Meadowes had been right all the time.

Like it or loathe it, it appears to be a fact of life that children will home in on a weak individual, like sparrows after an escaped budgie, and make his life hell. Many of the nervous breakdowns I have seen among teachers are due to this unpleasant truth. As George Meadowes would say, "If people want to let kids run all over them, then that's up to them. But I don't have to bloody well put up with it, and I resent people who know nothing about the job telling me that I should."

George's long experience had made him a raconteur. He would regale us with anecdotes of all kinds: of the bearded teacher just after the war who had been a hero to the boys because they thought he's been in submarines, when really he'd been a conscientious objector; of the deputy headmaster in the days of austerity and fuel shortages who'd kept himself, his family and friends in coke from the school bunkers.

His favourite story came from his early married life. George and his wife had acquired a council house on what were then the outskirts of the town. At the back of the house were fields, from which one day George heard the noise of small children playing. Glancing over the fence he saw a group of little boys and girls.

"Howway," commanded one little girl, "we'll play houses." Rapidly she organised "households".

"Tommy, ye be Da. Mary can be Ma. Ye lie down in bed, Mary. Tommy, ye get on top of 'er an' wobble about. That's what grown-ups dee, 'cause Aa've seen me ma an' da dee it."

As George said, what must they see?

The technical drawing master, Harold Williams, seemed at first a forbidding man. His sandy, Brylcreemed hair, neatly trimmed moustache, and florid, somewhat stern face reminded me of some of the teachers I'd been wary of as a boy. Harold usually wore a sober suit or sports jacket and his shoes were "bulled up" like a soldier's on parade.

I could not have been more wrong about his personality. Harold, as I came to know him, turned into my ideal of a teacher, someone to try to imitate. Although quiet, he had a twinkling sense of humour with staff and boys, and a steely resolution which belied his placid appearance. Like many of the staff, he was a strong disciplinarian, and I used to wonder at this because he hardly ever raised his voice or used the cane.

The truth was that he did not need to. He had put in years of hard work and was in a position to reap the benefits. How I envied men like Harold; I still had my ground work to do.

Like himself, Harold's classroom was a model of order. Drawing boards and T squares were all neatly marked and stacked in sequence, the floor never had a single scrap of paper on it, and the desks and chairs were so straight that a surveyor might have lined them up. Harold had inherited his methods from his teacher father.

If a boy showed interest in his subject, Harold would go out of his way to help, and his boys tended to show a quiet maturity that others lacked.

In those early days I often wondered why such an excellent teacher had not been promoted to deputy head or beyond, and it was Harold himself who helped to explain it.

He often told the story of the time his father applied for a post at a prestigious school and went to see the appropriate town councillor to find out more about the job. At that time, in the thirties, canvassing for jobs was quite in order and the done thing was for teachers to make their wishes known to one of the school governors, who were usually councillors or their political associates.

Mr Williams senior called on a councillor at his home. The man was sitting in front of the kitchen fire. He had his stockinged feet on the fender and made no attempt to rise as Harold's father was shown in, but remained slouching, his braces dangling over the arms of the chair.

"What ye after?" he enquired gruffly.

"I've come to ask about the head of maths post at Grange Farm School."

"Oh aye? Well, what ye got to offer?"

"Well, I've been teaching maths for a number of years ... "

"Naw, naw! Now howway! What ye got ter offer ME?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why, ye see the chair in the corner? That clock on the mantelpiece? That copper vase in the winder? Them was aall bought for me by men like yersel', lookin' for jobs. See warra mean?"

"Yes," said Harold's father. "I do see what you mean. Good day!"

I was incensed at the injustice of it all.

"It must have been terrible in those days," I said. "Thank goodness that sort of thing doesn't happen now."

"What do you mean?" asked George.

"Well, it says on all the application forms, 'Canvassing Disqualifies'."

Gales of laughter filled the staffroom.

"By gum," chuckled Austin Noble. "You lads have a lot to learn. Listen, in this profession you can have any job you want if you know the right people. My uncle was a councillor and he asked me where I wanted to teach. I asked him about canvassing, and he said, 'You must be joking. Tell me where you want a job and it's yours.'

"Mind you," he added ruefully, "he died soon after. If he'd lived longer I might have taken him up on it."

Among teachers it is commonly believed that a teacher's career prospects have little to do with ability. In the Northeast of England, teachers will affirm that knowing the right people, drinking in the right circles, going on courses run by the right people, and having the "correct" political affiliations are the only sure ways of promotion. Most people in educational administration and politics will naturally query the truth of such statements.

Mrs Tuckwell's career caused some comment among those who knew her. A "mature student" in her forties, she obtained her first promotion within a year of leaving college. After her third year she had reached her third promoted post and was better off than someone like Harold Williams who had put in thirty years' service.

As Austin said, "She's either a brilliant bloody teacher, or it's because her husband's head of one of the local grammar schools and plays golf with the Director of Education."

No-one ever found out the truth, but Jim Ewan did begin to wear his socks tucked into his trousers in the staffroom, and shout "Fore!" before pitching a bit of biscuit at someone.

"Talking of councillors," resumed Harold, "I heard of one of our leading town councillors visiting a new comprehensive in Leicestershire. This would be about eight or nine years ago, say 1960. It was Arthur Graham and Mattie Sykes who went."

George Meadowes and one or two others smiled knowingly.

"Not THE Arthur Graham?" asked George. "The one who's now chairman of our governors?"

"God help us," Austin added wryly.

Harold gave a wry smile in his turn and continued.

"Arthur Graham was shown round one of these comprehensives and came back full of it. He addressed a meeting of teachers in town.

" 'Man!' he said. 'It was great! Aa've nivver seen nowt like it. Ivverybody was that friendly. The teachers there divvent hev ter be caalled "sor" an "miss". Naw, the kids just caall them by their forst names an' the' taalk ter the bairns friendly, like. Man! It was great!' "

"Man", by the way, as used in the Northeast of England, is not at all like the "man" of the Californian lallygaggin' freewheeler. The vowel is neutral, the word is not stressed, and to the southern English ear it sounds like "mon". Women are often addressed as "man".

To his narrative Harold added an impersonation of the councillor expanding his braces with his thumbs and rocking back and forth on his heels.

"Mind you," he went on, "he had the meeting in stitches. We couldn't keep straight faces, and if Mattie Sykes hadn't had the sense to restore some kind of order we'd have died laughing. Man, it was great!"

"And they're the sort of people who offer us jobs," commented Austin. "What do you say, Bill?"

Bill Leggatt, the ageing metalwork teacher, was dunking his biscuits in his tea. In one of the top pockets of his dirty grey overall, he kept a tobacco tin which contained two ginger biscuits nestling in tobacco scraps and cigarette papers.

Every day without fail, Bill collected his mug of tea from the urn on the staffroom table. Ponderously he would carry it to his seat, slopping tea onto the floor. As he sat down, more of the contents would slop over the chair and his trousers.

At Austin's words he looked up, his silver thatch boyishly tousled, his horn-rimmed spectacles askew.

"Don't ask a poor old man like me," he replied. "I'm just waiting to retire."

"Poor old man!" snorted Austin. "He's fitter than I am!"

Austin had already told me the story of Bill and Ronnie Mills. Mills was a great hulking lout who had left the school the term before I started there. He had been expelled from another school for theft and for threatening staff and pupils and had been sent on to Nile Street. On his first day he decided to try it on with Bill Leggatt.

Unfortunately for his own sake, Mills was far too dim to see that beneath the shambling, doddering appearance that Bill presented to the world lay enormous reserves of physical strength. Before entering the teaching profession Bill had been a sea-going engineer, and he literally did not know his own strength.

Because of his squat appearance and bow legs, Bill was nicknamed "Texas" by the boys. When Mills first met him, he decided that this old man would provide some sport indeed. Consequently, during Bill's metalwork lesson, Mills was rude and disruptive.

"Shut yer mouth, Texas!" was the reply to Bill's request for silence.

"Oh, come on now, son," quavered Bill. "Don't be like that to a poor old man. Come and shake hands."

The hand he held out was as big as a dinner plate, but it shook and trembled with age or fear, or both. Smirking at his new classmates, Mills cocked an arrogant eye at Bill and swaggered forward. Condescendingly he offered his own hand to the shambling, quavering old man who was so eager to make friends with him.

As Bill's huge hand enfolded his own, Mills realised that things were going to go badly for him. The former engineer, who had twice been torpedoed by U boats in the Atlantic, squeezed Mills's hand as powerfully as one of his own bench vices.

"Ow! Ohya! Aw, sir, man!" yelled Mills as Bill applied enough pressure to bring the hulking lad to his knees. All appearance of doddering age had left Bill now, and with a grim smile he gave Mills one final squeeze to bring the lesson home to him. Then he released him.

As the wincing Mills rose slowly to his feet, all the swagger and cockiness gone, Bill picked up a mild steel bar. With no apparent effort, he twisted it into a horseshoe shape. Laying it sown gently, Bill looked directly at Mills.

"If there's any more of you little toerags gives me any more lip this lesson, I'll wrap this bar round his bloody neck."

It was hard to reconcile this story with the man who was now happily rolling a cigarette in the staffroom. Slowly and messily he rolled until he had produced a misshapen, tobacco-leaking cigarette like something out of a George Orwell novel.

Day in, day out, the end result was the same, for, having spent much time and effort on rolling his cigarette, Bill would manage about three puffs before the bell rang for the end of break.

"That bloody bell's early today!" he would snort in disgust, and we would all smile as he crumpled his "weed" into an ashtray and stumped out to his lesson.

So I went on learning in those three weeks. At the end of the first week Dave Brown, Jim Ewan and I raced to the education offices in Dave's old Morris Minor to collect our first week's pay. As we were still officially students we paid no tax and therefore received the sum of twenty pounds in cash. Never before had we held so much cash in our hands. It was to be three years before the Inland Revenue allowed us to take home such sums again.

"What are you going to do with it?" I asked my probationer colleagues.

"I might have a couple of pints," beamed Jim.

"A couple of pints?" roared Dave. "I'll be out for a bloody piss-up tonight. I've been waiting for this for weeks!"