Remembering Seaford College Junior School

To put this in perspective, I found the bill for the fees that my parents paid for full boarding for winter term 1962. They were just under £100.

In 1964, term finished mid-March, as Easter was early that year, and by late April most of the buildings had already gone. Only the chapel was left still standing and looking forlorn.

The redeveloped site takes its name from the school and is now known as College Gardens.

The only original bits that still remain standing from that time are some of the old perimeter flint walls.

The building was first occupied as an emergency by Seaford College in 1944, when the school had been given six weeks notice to leave as their premises at Seaford were being requisitioned for the war effort.

When I went there in 1962-64, the houses were still named after the war leaders.

There was a framed letter from c1951 from 10 Downing Street hanging in the hobbies room, from Mr Churchill, saying that he was happy for a house to be named after him.

The other houses were Roosevelt and Smuts, after Jan Smuts, the South African war leader.

Classrooms and admin-istration were on the ground floor, with sleeping accommodation for juniors and teachers on the first floor, and seniors on the second.

The picture of the dormitory is one of the senior dormitories on the second floor.

By modern standards, it was Spartan.

Note the crisp hospital corners of the beds and the counterpanes with the intertwined capital letters duly centred.

We spent ages making our beds look tidy and matron gave a prize to the best bed-maker, though there were never any prizes for me as it was a skill that I never really mastered.

The part of the buildings with the pitched roof was the gym and the main social area – we kept our tuck-boxes there.

It was here that we also saw films projected on a Wednesday evening; Laurel and Hardy were particular favourites.

The buildings were huge, cold and difficult to heat.

The brutal winter of 1962/63, when frost did not come out of the ground from Boxing Day until early March, probably hastened the decision of the owners to sell for redevelopment.

Coal was desperately short and pipes were bursting throughout the building.

I remember the spectacular pattern that the ice made from one high-up burst pipe between the kitchen and dining-room; it was rather beautiful and resembled organ pipes.

In those months all the children suffered with chilblains on fingers, toes and ears, and one boy even had one on his nose.

The boys from Africa – and there were a fair few from Ghana, Liberia and South Africa – were particularly affected.

There were no games that term until the very last weeks as the ground was frozen hard as rock.

So every day it was a cross-country run. Rather than tramping the local streets all the time, we would sometimes be driven to Durrington or Salvington for our run.

With our duly polished shoes, brown leather gloves, raincoats and caps, as a group we would have been unmistakable to Worthing residents walking in crocodile to and from Holy Trinity Church on Sundays.

Before we left, we assembled in the gym to be checked as fit to go out.

One of the senior boys would appear with a cloth bag from Midland Bank and dole out a penny to each boy for the church collection.

Some of the naughtier boys would withhold their penny and peel off from the crocodile to buy sweets if any shop was open.

Failing that, they had to wait until Wednesday before the film, when the school tuck shop opened.

You could get four Black Jacks, a liquorice chew, or four Fruit Salad chews for one old penny.