Throughout the ordeal of life in the 50’s, as a pupil at Barton Road School, there was one exciting moment each week that helped, in some small way, to make the whole experience tolerable. And although this precious interlude lasted a mere thirty minutes, I regarded it in much the same way that a tired and thirsty man would view an oasis in the desert.

My personal oasis, minus the palm trees and the odd camel or two, thankfully appeared on the horizon whenever I saw our teacher take a book from the narrow drawer of her desk, knowing that she was about to read aloud to the class. Excited at what was to come, I was able to escape my surroundings for a while and travel to a fictional land – free to go wherever the story took me.

Our tweed-skirted teacher, who invariably wore a buttoned-up cardigan and a “bun” in her greying hair, would perch on the edge of her desk facing the class; and I recall how, whenever the sunlight shone through the classroom windows, it highlighted the shine on her “sensible” shoes as her feet swung to and fro.

Opening the book she would remove the faded bookmark, made for her by an artistic pupil “before most of you were even born”, as she so often reminded us, smooth flat the dog-eared pages and recap the story so far. By now I was finding it extremely difficult to contain my excitement. “Yes, yes, I know all that!”, I would think impatiently. “Please…get on with it!”

I just loved to hear stories told aloud. Whether I was engrossed in the current episode of our classroom “serial”, sitting on my dad’s lap listening to the latest instalment of Journey into Space on the wireless, or hearing my grandmother describe her life during World War 2 as she survived the relentless shelling of Dover – I soaked them all up like a sponge!

Unfortunately the majority of the other boys in the class did not share my enthusiasm, quickly becoming bored with having nothing to do but sit still and listen. Often, to my intense frustration, the reading was interrupted by someone talking at the back of the class, tugging the plaits of the girl in front or propelling bits of paper across the room by means of a rubber band. At times it was like being at school with the “Bash Street Kids” from the Beano!