Transport

Masters as well as boys came to school by bus and tram and on foot. The car parking space round the main entrance had only one vehicle on it, the headmaster's modest Ford saloon. During my first three years 'Tubby' Taylor often came in a little sports car. It was usually parked at the side of the building, as was the only other motor - Mount joy's Morris Cowley. This car was an endless joke in the school, although it must have been invaluable to Mountjoy. He came every day from Otford in Kent, where he was said to have a small farm. He was a tall, lean man approaching sixty, with a weather-beaten face, and always wore a tweed jacket with leather buttons.

The car was a two-seater with a dickey-seat. It was almost khaki-coloured, and fearfully shabby - I remember that the windows had brown blobs all over them that came from the mica in old-fashioned safety glass. Mountjoy gave a lift every morning to another master, small owlish Bud Watson who lived in Orford Road. Their arrival was an amusing sight: the dilapidated car turning into the school drive, with Watson perched in the dickey - trilby, overcoat and big scarf, pipe sticking out of his mouth, and often a sack of potatoes beside him.

Three or four masters came on bikes, and the rest of the twenty-three or -four of them walked or used public transport. A good many boys used bikes too; there was a long cycle-shed with racks behind the school. For a time in my second year roller-skates had a mild vogue, and a few boys of about my own age came on them. They rode them in the roadway, which indicates the sparseness of the traffic compared with today.