MEMORIES FROM THE LATE 1940s

I have very mixed feelings about Spyway.
It had some good things about it as it was extraordinarily advanced in its understanding of ecological issues, being green and natural, way before its time.
It had two headmasters, brothers, who ran the school, both bachelors, who seemed obsessed with success in games as a way of defining how successful the school itself was.
By the time I was thirteen I saw through this and thought it absurd. Quite a lot of my time there I was not particularly happy and I was very glad to leave.
It was a boarding school, and although I was not particularly lonely, I did not like rugger or swimming. I disliked the latter as I found being thrown into the sea so terrifying. I have been back to Dancing Ledge where we were taught to swim and, for someone who couldn't swim, it is quite an alarming place to have to enter the water. One associates fear of water with cold as well; heated swimming pools hardly existed in the late 1940s.
I do remember three teachers: Mr Gray who taught classics, was a wonderful teacher; Mr Broom taught geography and mathematics; I liked the science master, Mr Bailey, and what really impressed me was that he was building a dinghy himself in a workshop in Swanage, and we would go to see how he was getting on.
I did like cricket and was captain of the under 11s but the Warner brothers decided I didn't bowl correctly and by thirteen had put me off cricket completely.
I started to take photographs with a box Brownie when I was ten and I still have the negatives from my days at Spyway, in fact I have all my negatives.
Books and reading were probably the things I enjoyed most. Mr Geoffrey, the younger of the headmasters, with the new boys in their first winter term would always start with 'Moonfleet' by J. Meade Faulkner. It is still one of my favourite books and has a Jungian undertone that one does not realise as a child. I have read it to my own children who have absolutely no intention of reading it to their children as they can't really see the point of it.
Eric, the other Headmaster, read Conan Doyle's 'The White Company', which I also enjoyed. Being read to I always thought was magical.  We hardly did any music apart from singing.