It in front of the kitchen fire and then fill it from pans and kettles with hot water. Good place to wash your hair, Liverpool. Nice soft water.

Everyone who lived in those houses, or indeed in most houses in the pre-fijties and sixties remembers how cold it could be. There had been very little central heating in Britain,¹ and during the war and post-war years, precious little fuel.

Cold? It was cold in those times, cold. We only had one fire. Freezing. The worst. Only one fire in one room. No heating. And in the winter there used to be ice on the windows and in fact you would have to put a hot water bottle in the bed and keep moving it around for an hour before get­ting into the bed (keep nipping upstairs to keep it moving) then whip your clothes off and leap in. And then oooooooohhhhhhh, lie still and then by next morning you'd just got warm and then you'd wake up, "come on, time for school", put your hand out of the bed. Freez­ing. Oh dear.

It was OK that house, very pleasant being little and it was always sunny in the summer. The worst thing was leaving the junior school and going to the big grammar school. That's when the darkness began and I realised it was raining and cloudy with old streets and backward teachers and all of that, and that is where my frustrations seemed to start. You would punch people just to get it out of your system. The whole idea of it was so serious. You can't smile and you are not allowed to do this or that. Be here, stand there, shut up, sit down and always you need those exams, those eleven-plus exams, or scholarships or GCE. That's when the darkness came in.

I didn't like school. I think it was awful; the worst time of your life. ¹ Certainly none in little houses in Liverpool and such cities.

The infants or juniors weren't bad, just because it was football, sports and all that, though there were times when they caned us. Once when I was eight or nine years old, Mr. Lyons (brother of the local insurance salesman) a teacher, caned me and got me on the wrist. It was swollen and when I got home, I tried to hide it but my father saw it and the next day he came down to the school and Mr. Lyons was called out of the class and my dad 'stuck one' on him.

The Big School, Liverpool Institute was a real pain in the neck. The teachers were either old war veterans or fresh out of college so they didn't know much anyway and if you see the picture of them you will see what I'm saying. I knew then they were not the type of people to teach but then 1 was unqualified to say so, however now, after all the years, I can tell they were not. The way they sent you out into the world was miserable. In my case, the testimonial to help me to get a job for the rest of my life, said: "1 cannot tell you what his work is like because he has not done any".

It was such a dump. It could have looked good, it could have had the paint scraped off the woodwork and been decorated like the Victoriana it was. J took Olivia to see it. Coming from California she couldn't believe it. There was night-school going on so we were able to wander around and look at all the rooms where I had been.

George's distaste for school—hatred even, resentment certainly—is pulling because quite soon after leaving, he became an eager, earnest seeker after information, truth and learning. It is odd also that a grammar-school boy—that most British elite—should have rejected all that this well-respected Liverpool school had to offer. Certainly there was encouragement at home to do well. Both his brothers completed full apprenticeships and his sister Louise passed all the necessary examinations (in those days, up to and including Higher School Certificate) to go to college and became, herself, a school teacher.

George, now, is a success in all the conventional meanings of that word, yet school was unable to strike a single chord in the boy who later, and as you read this now, craved and obtained available details on almost everything. Yet, he does not equivocate, in his recollection of secondary school in Liverpool in the nineteen fifties.