I only have to close my eyes to picture the school where I spent seven years. The school coach from Dickleburgh left from Chenery’s yard and took all the Diss secondary students, dropping off at the Secondary Modern first in the morning and continuing to the Grammar – in the afternoon they were picked up first. We were dropped in the bus lay-by at the back of the school and made our way up the path between the science block and the tennis courts to the main part of the school, which was divided into the old block and the new block, separated by the gym along the side of which ran a covered verandah.

Going into the old block, you found a long corridor with rooms 1-5 lining each side. If I remember correctly, Room 2 on the right was my first form room, and Miss Smith was the form tutor as well as our English and history teacher. She was firm but kind, a real old school mistress type. Unlike today when students take all their belongings around the school with them unless they are lucky enough to have a locker with a key, we had an old fashioned wooden school desk with lift-up lids in our form room to store books – coats went in the cloakroom, of which more later. The desks still had inkwells although biro had just about overtaken fountain pen as writing implement of choice.

Text books – very few worksheets or printed materials of any sort – were the main resource in lessons and we were issued with our own copy of the text book for each subject to be kept – in pristine condition – for the whole year. We were advised (ie ordered) to cover text books to keep them clean – usually with wallpaper. Each subject also had its own exercise book, and with ten subjects, that was a lot of books. Each morning we would transfer into our desks the books we’d taken home to do homework the night before, and load up our satchels with the books needed for that morning’s lessons.

Yes, satchels – brown leather, of the type that now masquerade as up-market handbags. To be carried around the school and to home, transporting books and school ‘equipment’. Nowadays (and as I write this I am back teaching again despite having retired four years ago: as one student put it, I am ‘unretired’ again) it appears to be too much to ask a student to bring a pen to the lesson. Every teacher is familiar with starting the term with a box full of pens and reaching half term with an inexplicably empty box despite counting borrowed pens in and out each lesson. Not so in our day.

Before starting at the school we were sent a letter with all requirements listed, from navy gabardine mac, through brown gym knickers to set squares and compasses. In common with most of my classmates I always had in my satchel an Oxford Maths Set in a tin and a bulging pencil case with pens, pencils, rubber, ruler, coloured pencils and more pens.

What we didn’t cart around school were those navy gabardine macs – once in school in the morning we proceeded to the cloakroom at the end of the old block corridor and hung coats on the peg allotted to us. PE kit went in the wire basket suspended from the bench under the coat pegs or was hung up under our coat.

I remember the two steps down to the left of the corridor into the cloakroom, and if you continued to that end of the large square area you came to the school library, at one end of which was the Lower Sixth Common Room which in turn gave onto the back of the stage in the school hall and was therefore used for schools plays etc. Next to the library were the stairs leading up to the tower in which lived Mrs Ives, the Senior Mistress. Well, her office anyway, which also served as our classroom when we did A level French, which she taught. A fearsome figure when I was in the first form, she proved to be a wise and supportive mentor – and it was Mrs Ives who told me I was mad to think about going into teaching – I think to put me off unless I was sure it was the path for me. Which it was. Sorry Miss.

To the right of the tower room stairs were the toilets – the girls at least (for obvious reasons, I never memorised the location of the boys’ but I think they were around there as well) and at the further end of the cloakroom you turned left into the school canteen and through to the school hall, the route we took every morning for assembly. Whole school assembly, that is, complete with hymn books and prayers and led by the headmaster, ‘Alfie’ (actually Anthony, but we wouldn’t have known that then) Norfolk – or Mr Norfolk, sir to his face. All teachers wore their academic gowns to assembly, sitting in a semicircle on the stage while Mr Norfolk processed from the back of the hall up on to the stage, gown flying in his wake.

It was the end of assembly we girls dreaded as we went up the school – at least, the ones when Mr Norfolk would dismiss the boys and tell the girls to remain in the hall. We knew this meant a uniform check. Male teachers left; female teachers stood in pairs by each door and as each girl walked out of the hall she was made to drop her hymn book, bend down (from the waist – no squatting down) and pick it up while the teachers checked to see if anything untoward could be seen – ie her knickers. Of course, most of us had simply shortened our skirts by rolling them up at the waist, so the hall was a mass of wriggling, squirming girls pulling their skirts down, followed by a mass exodus into the girls’ toilet to roll them back up again before first lesson.

Following our footsteps out of the hall back through the canteen (there were also exterior doors on the other side of the hall) facing you was the tuck shop, operated at break by Mrs Ray, also the Headmaster’s secretary. Her office lay just behind, adjacent to Mr Norfolk’s own office which opened off the far end of the cloakroom. Next along that far wall was the women teachers’ staff room. You then went out of glass doors into the front foyer of the school, which had doors to the male staff room and then the woodwork room which jutted out beyond the front entrance to the school. When I was in the sixth form the rather antiquated idea of separate staff rooms was challenged by Roger Deakin who on his arrival informed our English class that he had taken up residence in the female staff room ‘because I find the company more congenial’. A year after leaving school I went back to do a day’s observation as part of my teacher training course, and found the rooms had been re-allocated as non-smoking and smoking staff rooms. Nowadays there is a total ban on smoking on a school site – I guess that’s some sort of progress.