VIVAT ACADEMIA

Some time during the summer of 1959 (late July probably) a letter fell through our letterbox at 43 St Margarets Road. My mum opened it with shaking hands to discover that I had passed the 11-plus and would be going to Stand Grammar School. This was something to celebrate in our family, as elder brother Mike had failed it. I remember being given a grown-up bicycle with 3-speed Sturmey Archer gears and straight handlebars. I wanted drop handlebars (they were far more serious) but mum thought them dangerous, and common. To this day, neither of these reasons for refusing my request make any sense - especially as Mike already had a drop-handlebar bike with derailleur gears.

The general view - which was fairly accurate - held that while I was bright and Mike only steady, he had the magic Common Sense ingredient whereas I was away with the fairies and not to be trusted. It seems bizarre looking back that the difference between death and survival on Britain's roads was held to be the shape of bicycle handlebars, but there you are. Dad told me many years later how my mother had formed the opinion, based on observation, that speed-merchants with crewcuts owned drop handlebar bikes, and 'always seemed to be looking down rather than at the road ahead'.

Crewcuts sat alongside voting Labour among that eclectic collection of things labelled vulgar in our family. The only form of eccentricity I'd been allowed up to this point was a Davy Crockett hat, the Walt Disney film having created one of the major crazes of the decade - second only to the hoola-hoop. I wouldn't have been allowed one normally - they were sold at Woolworths, and God knew what people who shopped there voted. But so fascinated was I with the Kentucky Congressman, pestering round the clock and making veiled threats of leaving home eventually won my parents over. Mum begged an old fur hat from Auntie Myra, and nabbed the tail from Great Aunt Lil's flea-bitten fox-fur. She sewed in secret until on my birthday in 1958, an unpromising looking shoe-box was found to contain the only genuine coonskin Davy Crockett hat in Prestwich.

It goes without saying that I didn't remove the hat until the day before starting at Grammar School eighteen months later. I slept, bathed took the 11-plus and climbed trees in the thing because it was a mark of being the one and only. Other kids gawped at my Davy Crockett hat with undisguised envy: its worth exceeded a hundred baked conkers (riches beyond the dreams of avarice) and earned me several kisses in return for Linda Mordin being allowed to wear it for a few seconds now and again. My Davy Crockett hat was the bee's knees, the business, the brightest and best.

But the day of starting at Stand Grammar did eventually arrive. Kitted out in the jacket, shirt, cap and tie from Brookes of Bury (not the Coop, too many Labour voters there) I was (at least on that first day) the symbol of The Wards on the Corner being A Cut Above. Passing the 11-plus was the 1950s equivalent of going to a Top Six university today.

This is no exaggeration. Our primary school class had thirty kids in it, and only five of us passed. Just two boys - myself and close mucker Les Horton - got a scholarship. Other boys were politely told to attend Heys Boys Secondary Modern, an altogether unprepossessing 1940s brutalist block where those good at metalwork and fascinated by plumbing would thrive. The best of these (like my brother) passed for Technical College at fourteen, and focused on the stuff I hated like Chemistry and Mechanical Drawing. Just the enunciation of the words 'mechanical drawing' was enough to make me recoil in terror.

Grammar School kids were the cream, and no mistake: they were to become the new socially mobile technocrats envisaged by Butler's Education Act of 1944, and made a reality by the postwar Labour Government. Operating under the Joint Matriculation Board (JMB), the elitist State system was considered so advanced, even my parents thought privately educated kids came from homes with 'more money than sense'.

To be in possession of more savings than cerebral matter was the ultimate insult in Lancashire at the time. Partly a result of wartime privation, the viewpoint was nevertheless also a cultural dislike of waste and 'swank' in any shape or form. For Dad especially, having earned an education (rather than buying one) was a point of particular pride. It appealed to his working class Toryism - and I'm bound to say, from a distance of half a century, it has a very real moral justification still.

Ten years later, the by then middle class intellectual Labour Party of Crossman, Crosland, Castle, Benn, Wilson and Jenkins did their best to eradicate the Grammar School from our national life. They abolished the 11-Plus (it was hated by then - but only by those who failed it) and brought in a Comprehensive Education system that has never come within a country mile of achieving the standards so freely offered to me. I felt I was lucky at the time, but only now do I realise quite how fortunate I was to get under the net.

Reviled it may have been, but the elitism of the time changed Britain forever and for the better. It is a myth to say that 11-Plus failure 'doomed' kids to social and educational inferiority: my brother went on to get a degree every bit as good as mine, and several close friends traded up to Grammar school successfully with the introduction of a 14-Plus exam for 'late developers'. The change of system was nothing more or less than the Politics of Envy - and later still, of the guilt felt by public schoolboys on the Left. The same nonsense survives in the contemporary Tory Party: like many overly-sensitive pc forms of address today, the potty polemics of the 1960s salved consciences, but also stored up problems.

All that said, there was undoubtedly a slightly sneering and aspirant side to Grammar Schools - or at least, there was in mine. There were three good schools in our area - Stand, Bury and Manchester - and the creme de la creme went to the last of these. Put forward for a scholarship to this pinnacle of educational method, I pitched up for the exam along with what seemed like an infant British army, and was ushered into the vast and awe-inspiring Main Hall of the school. The space evoked something much more akin to panic in me, chiefly because of the portraits of former teachers adorning the walls.

The folks in these pictures didn't so much seem stern as dangerously mad. They waved canes, stared obsessively over pinces-nez spectacles and gave the appearance - every one - of barely controlled sadism - a cruelty which (I felt) might easily result in small children being boiled alive. Especially me.

The exams took most of the day. Having gaped at the horrible wall hangings throughout the morning, my discomfort increased at lunchtime break when the British Army descended in a screaming, wriggling horde on the sole lavatory made available. Always an inhibited voider, I stood doing nothing for a while and then decided to just hold on. By the end of the last exam at 4.15, my bladder was the size of a Montgolfier balloon. None of this made for concentration, and of course I didn't get a scholarship. No single piece of news has ever been so welcome.

Perhaps because it wasn't the ultimate Lancastrian School - and also because of the innately strict snobbery of the Headmaster A F Williamson - Stand was modelled upon a disciplinary code that might have emerged from a cross between Gordonstoun and The Camp on Blood Island. On the first day of Term - September 3rd 1959, the twentieth anniversary of World War Two's outbreak, and equally traumatic - I was made suddenly and brutally aware of the existence of Big School.

In Big School, nobody had a first name. Nobody smiled, except when giving one a detention or 'the swish' - six of the best with a cane. There were indescribably tall boys called Prefects who could punish you with anything from eight-sided essays to a clip around the ear. And there were teachers whose reputations seemed to make them perfect casting for Dickensian villains. (On closer acquaintance, some of them turned out to be even worse)

But for me, the size and the rules were the truly overwhelming part. There was first of all the sense of starting at the bottom of the heap all over again. Being the lowest of a seven-rung caste ladder wasn't much fun, and there were plenty of Third Formers (this being the school Year when Kevinism was at its height) eager to punch the solar plexus very hard, or jam a small head in the railings. At St Margarets Primary, not only had there been none of this, but I was top dog at most things: captain of football, ace bowler at cricket, and of course the only kid (owing to my Crockett hat) qualified to hunt bear in the backwoods.

Here, while I trialled for and won a place on the Under Twelves soccer team, the captaincy was well beyond my reach in the capable hands of Keith Jameson, the superstar Bobby Moore from Prestwich Parish School. As for intellectual brilliance, it took only a few days for me to conclude that I was the thickest person there. (This was a pattern I would repeat through life at every stage).

The self-perception of insoluble personal density was based on my ability to have a blank mind the instant anyone in authority asked me to follow any kind of order. Discipline and rules had been apparent at home, but not even Dad called me Ward. For instance, there were thirteen pieces of kit for games day. Every Monday on leaving the house I would have the thirteen items, but somehow at kit inspection I would have twelve. Text books had to be kept at the left inside desks, exercise books on the right. Ink blotches in exercise books had to be removed with an idiotic system which only ever produced (for me anyway) a blob that ended up covering most of the page.

The timetable was utterly beyond me. Form Master Brian Crosfield kicked off this learning process by asking us to draw various vertical and horizontal lines, but frankly he might as well have requested a six-thousand word treatise on molecular cloud patterns. By the time everyone else was filling in 'Art - Double Period - Wednesday 2 - 4pm', I was still working on the ninety degree angle top-left of the paper.

The obvious result was that for the first week I was in the wrong place most of the time, attending lessons only via the ingenious (if irritating) method of clinging like a limpet to other kids I recognised - but living in constant fear of suddenly being the only small person left in the corridors when the second bell went. Eventually, classmate Lawrence McGinty took pity, and let me crib his immaculate diagram. Without this intervention, I might be a First Former there still, but Lol's obvious mental dexterity meant he was destined for higher things. He is now ITN's science correspondent, and nobody who knew him then is at all surprised.

Turning up late for a lesson was an automatic detention. Three detentions meant an appointment with The Beak (Headmaster) for a session of swish. Those who think six thwacks with a cane not that much are advised to examine standard issue weapons of the era more closely. The canes were split at the striking end, and small pellets of metal lodged therein. I've had enthusiastically inept proctology examinations much less painful than Williamson's cane, and infinitely less humiliating: the pain was so intense, it literally squeezed tears from the eyes.

Needless to say, within a fortnight the tally of detentions via late arrival, games kit discrepancy and exercise book blots had earned me the first of many meetings in the Headmaster's study. While at Stand I probably broke every school rule there was (throwing snowballs, not wearing a cap, smoking, having hands in pockets, breathing incorrectly and so forth) but in no way was I a rebel. Quite the opposite: until the end of the Second Year, I was permanently frightened of everyone and everything.

In between all this business of doing the right thing at the right time were the lessons themselves, and the masters who took them. I have no idea if contemporary teachers are as eccentric as those who taught all those decades ago, but we can be certain that they are not as violent: that is to say, they may have a taste for violence, but they're no longer allowed to indulge it. In 1959, barmy reprimands added character to the school, and were thus positively encouraged.

The subject terrifying me above any other was mathematics. Later on I discovered that this was no more than a horror of numbers, which isn't really what maths is about. Today I suspect - at least in the private sector - the distinction would be spotted, but then it simply seemed to me (and everyone else) that I had no gift for the subject. The poor devil tasked with sorting me out in the first year was a Welsh bloke called Hannaby. I don't think he stayed in the profession long, and I may well have been an important catalyst in his decision to pursue an alternative career. He tried in turn with long division, decimals, fractions and then logarithms to find evidence of comprehension on my part, all without success.

But if Mr Hannaby was a mild-mannered chap, other teachers compensated for their own lack of charisma with a form of bullying which simply wouldn't be tolerated today. There is part of me thinking that, for some kids now, it might be the only way left to socialise them once their parents have finished mucking things up: but that doesn't excuse it or make it right. Some of these people were despicable.

The most feared - but not really despicable at all - was Stand's head of music T J Longstaffe. He had a small moustache reminiscent of a character in the Popeye cartoons called Wimpy, and this was thus the name by which he was known. The very word was spoken with dread, for Longstaffe had a fearsome (and dangerous) temper. A few years back I saw the German movie about Hitler's last days, Die Untergang. While the rest of the cinema audience sat watching this raving, screaming mass murderer - gripped by the fact that such a lunatic had ruled practically the whole of Europe after 1941 - I could see only Wimpy on a wet Tuesday morning, having a histerionic fit because some unfortunate had failed to hit the right note. The resemblance was uncanny.

Long before even arriving at the school, pupils were warned in the strongest possible terms not to join The Choir. I use capitals there to show the emphasis given to such a crazy idea by those warning of the danger - and also to express the degree to which choir membership was seen as a form of capital punishment.....an appalling gas chamber in which choristers would die a slow-motion death over five years or more. But some boys lapped it up: a mate in much later times, Geoff Ingham still talks fondly of Longstaffe, and was an enthusiastic choir member. Mind you, Geoff had perfect pitch and was a talented guitarist who seriously considered a rock career. For myself, I can only remember spending every Monday evening attempting to change the quantum future so that 10 am the following day would never arrive. Wimpy put back my love of playing and listening to music some ten years - and that surely wasn't the idea, whatever the guy's excuses.

The reason I am inclined to exonerate Longstaffe is because he literally had no control over his rages. Once through them and back in reality - the spittle clearly visible around his mouth - the bloke could be very interesting, and was genuinely keen for his boys to do well. Other masters I recall lacked the same excuse.

One of these was an art master I won't name, as the way life is the bastard may well still be alive - and he'd definitely be the sort to sue. His speciality was throwing rock-hard board dusters at boys with a ferocity that could easily have fractured a young skull. But in his case, the violence was controlled. He was also a crap teacher, content to give us all an exercise to do so he could wander into his studio at the back and draw stuff in which he had a personal interest. There was another swine of a maths master who called everyone 'laddie' - until he chose unwisely to use the form of address to one of the schools renowned thugs, and paid the price by being unceremoniously flattened.

The kid concerned was a fifth-former called Flab Jones. His real name was B K Jones, but as the leading teddy boy at Stand Grammar, he was only ever referred to as Flab. His face was covered in acne and his hair looked as if a panful of fat had fallen on it. He sported winkle-picker shoes (against the rules) drainpipe trousers (against the rules) and refused to wear a cap outside school - the ultimate crime for Williamson, apart from kissing girls from our sister school down the road. The truth is, he was a lovely, gentle man who thought the whole crypto-public school ethic of the place to be laughable and objectionable. I've no idea what he went on to do, but I'm sure he made something of his life. He was right about the extremes to which discipline went; but there was definitely good in what the school was trying to do.

Such admiration and fondness as I have for the place revolves around the genuine desire most teachers had to inspire. In part this came from the influence of Deputy Head Les Lumley, a tough but kindly hunchback who taught physics. It says a lot for Les that he managed to make a subject which (at the time) bored me stupid somehow interesting - although the respect wasn't always mutual.

Lumley would tell us heat gained by cool bodies equalled heat lost by hot bodies and I'd ask why. He'd answer that it was to do with molecular friction speeds, and I'd ask why. The 'why' thing would continue until he just stared at me in frustration and said "Ward, do shut up". But Les was fascinating about so many things. He had taught English in German schools under the Nazis, and kindled my early interest in how mad the regime was. Also he had a brilliant mind, and was the one - eventually - who made me realise that all sciences were exciting quests rather than boring rows of elements and numbers.

In contemporary Cool Britannia, teachers often point to their appraisals and inspections as evidence of a job well done. The people who taught us at Stand Grammar School ('SGS' to its old boys) lived in an era mercifully long before targets and correctness and scoring sytems. They were judged (and usually judged themselves) by the number of kids they turned away from the road to failure and towards the realisation of a special talent. Two masters of the time stand out when I think of my own case.

Howard Ogdon was an extraordinary man who had been horrifically shell-shocked during the First World War. Today, he wouldn't be employed in education, having as he did 'a history of mental illness'. He was a manic depressive who - his case complicated by the nightmare of trench warfare - had been sectioned during the 1930s. A genius, Ogdon read up on his own condition during lucid periods, and devised his own therapy as a cure. Successfully self-treated by 1940, Howard realised nobody believed in his sanity, and so coolly escaped for the necessary year and a day in order to prove it. Convalescing with his brother, he returned to teaching after the war, suffering several further breakdowns but still managing along the way to write and publish the account of his experiences, Civilisation of the Lost. By the time he became my English teacher in 1959, this complete one-off was the most eccentric of the eccentrics - his inexplicable nickname Joe Bogg, and his bizarre behaviour legendary.

Joe Bogg had a habit during lessons of catching flies, a trick he had perfected such that no insect ever escaped once having caught his attention. These he stored in his desk drawer, and towards the end of summer afternoons Ogdon's desk buzzed audibly. Walking randomly along corridors (or about the surrounding fields) he would act roles from Shakespeare, or accost passing boys and insist they not only observed the wonders of nature, but wrote down their feelings about it. The word bonkers was invented for Howard Ogdon, but that he was a great man cannot be doubted. Nothing escaped his eye or his mind. He once told Andy Christie to stop diluting his ink, a keen observation which so impressed the boy, he talked about it ever afterwards. When one of the many nutters in our pupil population blew up a desk in the English room during morning break, Ogdon (who was unfortunate enough to be there at the time) didn't flinch. A party of janitors arrived at the scene to find Joe Bogg unmoved among the debris, reciting a Walter De La Mare poem, Two Red Roses Across the Moon.

But Ogdon's greatest genius lay in an ability to tell students what they should and shouldn't do with such talent as they had. Although he frightened me (as we've already established, pretty well everything did at this stage) right off the bat - literally, by the end of my first term - he said "You must either write, or teach English. There is a boy some years ahead of you called Jacobson, and he is the same". This 'boy' was Howard Jacobson the author and journalist. I've no idea if he was inspired by old Joe Bogg, but I'd wager he was at least encouraged by him.

Ogdon died when I was in the Third Year, and daft as it sounds, half a century on I can still feel a sense of loss. At a time when I thought myself a freak (perhaps entirely mad) he encouraged me to indulge the talent rather than hide it for fear of ridicule.

His son was the celebrated musician John Ogdon. Himself a chronic depressive, this the greatest English pianist of his generation committed suicide in the end. We have still only scratched the surface of what makes some of us sad and some of us intolerably cheerful. As often as not, however, it is the afflicted folk who give the rest of us inspiration and pleasure.

Easily the most popular teacher in the school was A J 'Johnny' Frith, a history teacher who made the subject come alive for me, it having previously seemed yet more disturbing rows of numbers - 1066, 1493, 1588 and so on. Entirely sane and insanely funny, Frith nevertheless also enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity. Yet he had at the same time that indefinable ability to shut a class up by merely entering the classroom. Although not above whacking kids with his gym-pump, it was more an amusing ritual than a genuine form of punishment: Frith only had to frown in order to evoke the sort of silence in which pins fear to drop.

His punishments were many and varied, and only ever applied when one had been 'idle'. This was his favourite word, spoken in the farcical way that public schoolboys of his generation had: "You're ooyidal boyee" he'd yell, but with an enormous grin on his thin, animated face. Failure to answer a question correctly in class would be greeted with the phrase "Round the tree!", a reference to the gnarled old hawthorn that grew right at the far end of our playing fields. Such was his enthusiasm for making errant kids run round the tree and back, by the end of some lessons he was almost alone in the classroom. Once during woodwork (this classroom overlooking the legendary tree) Mr Jones peered out to see a procession of boys variously struggling and sprinting. "I see Mr Frith's taking history again" he remarked before returning to his task of explaining the depth of my incompetence as a carpenter.

As a wit he was without equal. Some children found themselves on Weekly Report as a result of what Frith called 'slacking', and one such unfortunate - called Rifkin as I recall - started off in the Tuesday lesson by scoring 3 out of 20 in a test. Johnny took his report and scribbled 'A Dim Start' in the appropriate place. When on the Thursday Rifkin got nought out of twenty, the teacher added 'followed by total darkness'. We had on one occasion been tasked with reproducing our names in Gothic writing. In my exercise book, beneath this effort he wrote 'Considerably more ghastly than Gothic, but you can at least spell your own name'.

Like Ogdon, John Frith early on expressed his belief that I had a talent for the subject. This he fed, knowing my fascination for anecdotes about history's alumni. Whether it was Henry II's tendency to bite carpets, Peter the Great's obsession with extracting courtiers' teeth or the extent of Elizabeth I's hideous baldness, he always enlivened lessons with hysterical stories. I still laugh today about how Charles I lost the Battle of Marston Moor because, the owner of a terrible stammer, he couldn't get out the order to charge.

Frith's other main responsibility was taking charge of the school's cross-country teams, for which SGS had a fearsome and richly deserved reputation. He trained everyone from the vantage point of a rickety stand-up-and-beg bike known as The Green Flash. Atop this ancient thing he encouraged faster speeds with the use of a cricket bat, once fully autographed but now worn clean by constant application to young buttocks. My own average speed thus increased over time, enabling faster movement on the left wing, to which I had been banished during Under Twelve soccer matches.

P B Hargeaves was the most senior of our gym teachers. When I arrived in his class, I looked rather like a walking X-ray, so thin and weedy was I. Today, Phil Hargeaves too would be quickly evicted from any school as an abusive sadist. I suppose he was in some ways, but some of his methods were entirely sound. These included thrashings with Percy the Pump and parade-ground style screaming at anyone trying to get away with doing less than he demanded. By the end of each term, most of us were not only fitter, we felt better about ourselves because some muscle had been added, and some seemingly insurmountable obstacles vanquished.

Some of his remarks were ourageous. He would yell at anyone carrying an extra pound or two with a venom that embraced everything from insults about the domesic diet to pretty unpleasant anti-semitism. On other occasions he would ask kids to do too much - as a result of which Kenny Williams wound up breaking both arms. But overall, he wanted no more than what people then called 'to make men of us'. "What this country needs is another bloody war and some good solid starvation" he'd shout as we clambered up ropes and over high walls. Quite a few of us had been fantasising about being heroic soldiers since the age of three, so this didn't seem at all a bad idea. The thing was, none of us feared 'Haggis' (as he was called, for reasons that escape me) because the tongue was firmly in the cheek in almost every one of his outbursts. I have seen Jewish kids giggle at some of his racist insults. Today they'd be enough to give the pc cadres an attack of the vapours, and Islamist websites some new material.

Cruelty was by no means restricted to the teaching staff however. If anything, it was comparatively mild compared to the kids themselves. What half-socialised kids tend to do (and Grammar School then was perilously close to Lord of the Flies) is notice things about each other, and then mention it. Jewish kid Mike Shonn got called Schonk because of his large semitic nose (and then Nosh because of his appetite), Andy Christie - born with a form of infantilism -was midget or shrimp, and I got 'emergency' quite often thanks to a famous soap of the time, Emergency Ward 10.

They also do the same blunt observation thing with teachers, only without any of the mercy demonstrated above. A Welsh chemistry master we had called Reivy suffered a form of cleft palate which meant some words were a real struggle for him. From the moment he first pronounced the unit of energy Erg ('aaaaiiiiurrhhhch') he was, simply, The Erg. A tall, angular chap, Mr Reivy wore jackets too short for his unfeasibly long arms and loped along in a strangely gay manner. Whole lines of kids would follow behind the bloke wherever he went, aping his mince and another nervous tic - that of pushing his unruly quiff back from the forehead.

A few children take on the Cap and Bells role as a natural act, and one of the more outrageous of these was David Boyes. Dave had serious bottle when it came to facing out masters, and would talk to The Erg while doing all the mannerisms at once. It was painfully funny to watch.

The subject of more impressions than any other teacher was Head of Latin Mr Schofield, another poor sod blessed with a congenital condition - in his case an alarming facial twitch accompanied by quickly changing speech cadences. He could make the words "You boy!" sound like a badly-played violin, and look as if he was staring somewhere else entirely. Thus saying the words was a bit pointless in the first place, as the personal pronoun could've been aimed at dozens of different people.

Known universally and forever as Harry Twitch, he was in reality a nice man with a genuine flair for teaching, but terrified some kids because once on a thought pattern, he never wished to be diverted - and would bellow at anyone who tried. A luckless pupil meant to be elsewhere once spent the whole period in Harry's class, having tried three times to ask for permission to leave and been told "Sit down child before I flog you to death" three times.

As you may have guessed from various passing references by now, the Jewish minority at Stand Grammar School was very big. Prestwich itself (but also Didsbury, from where some pupils were drawn) had a large Jewish population, and its third generation were alongside the Goyim on almost a one-for-one basis by 1960. On track now to becoming the surgeons, lawyers, accountants and architects their parents wanted them to be, in that respect they were no different to the Christian boys. But in many others they were entirely (and usually delightfully) different. Before this starts to sound patronising, let me explain.

Being familiar with Jewish customs and slang had been a part of my life more or less from infancy. Close chum Ellis Carlick (and another kid in his road, Mike Chadwick) were both keen soccer players and supporters - and the 'coats for goalposts' thing is always more important than religion at that age. The majority of Jews supported City (they'd come like most poor immigrants from Moss Side, where City's ground Maine Road was) and so of a morning, debates about Saturday's game (or the increasingly frequent 'night match') dominated most conversations. The gag in those days used to be that at Old Trafford on match days, the front row of the stand was one long dog-collar - United has always been a Catholic club - while at City the collars were replaced by Yamulkas.

Perhaps also there were other reasons I found it easy and natural to have close Jewish friends. My own parents after all had been the victims of religious bigotry (being 'of the orange and the green', no flowers or music were allowed at their wedding) and I suspect even then the genetic British favour for the underdog was especially strong in me. But to be honest, Mancunian Jews were not natural underdogs: I think it was more that Jewishness was familiar. As a kid, my mother had earned pennies switching on cooker gas-taps for Jewish neighbours on the Sabbath (when no work is allowed) and my father's boyhood friend Dave Makovski ('Mack') was a successful tailor. Being a cloth merchant, Dad dealt with Jews on a daily basis. His sister's long-term boyfriend was Jewish - a fact disliked by Grandad, who spent a lot of time muttering about dishonourable intentions.

In short, I got to the Jews long before media archetypes did. Indeed, when I left Manchester to go to University, I was surprised at the level of ignorance about Jewish ways - and appalled at the gratuitous, inbuilt anti-semitism. There had always been Jewish jokes in my life, but only rarely of the nasty variety - most came from Jewish standups anyway. But once I left the city, it dawned on me that some people meant it. Whichever type I came across - and anti-semitism comes in two flavours, envy and snobbery - I wouldn't say it made me angry, but it certainly made me recoil. It still does.

I have (like most people paying attention) seen examples where Jewish people have been their own worst enemy. But then, I could say the same of catholics, MPs, negroes, footballers, women and any other sector of society one might care to name. My overriding emotion is that of having liked most Jews I've known well, and regarding them as probably the most culturally productive immigrants Britain has ever had. Of course, they're clannish: they favour their own. Who doesn't? And after being the victim of endless pograms, who wouldn't?

At school, the Jewish kids didn't attend assembly, still in those days an overtly Christian occasion. As our main hall had a minstrels' gallery with classrooms off it, they disappeared mysteriously into these and studied texts of one form and another. Then they re-emerged to hear the Notices. One huge bonus of the Jewish minority at Stand was leaving early during that part of the calendar when they must be home by sundown. Sitting on the Number 73 bus going home at 3.30, we would all sing a slightly changed version of the Cliff Richard classic as 'We're all going on a Jewish holiday'.

The feature of Jewishness most obviously apparent (beyond semitic features) was a level of IQ and intellectual dexterity well beyond that of most. I honestly cannot remember any thick Jews at school. I can remember the odd Jewish bigot here and there - and predictably, they were the least bright - but not anyone where you thought 'How did he get here?'

There was a kid called Cowan who wrote (and won a Radio prize for) an essay about 'my least favourite word'. He chose 'commuter', which he felt sounded like computer, and thus dehumanised people. It was a brilliant piece. Raymond Kay I also remember as something of a maverick - he used to call himself the world's only anti-semitic Jew - and the already mentioned Howard Jacobson had a wit and bonhommie that was truly memorable. When I was in 4B, Jacobson was our form prefect. Everyone liked him.

Probably the Jewish kid who stood out most was Lol Creme, later a musician with Hotlegs and 10cc. I'm bound to say that at the time, I had no idea Lol (who sat across from me in 5A) had any musical ability at all. At the time he was known for a surreal brand of eccentricity in humour - which I shared - and an artistic talent leaning towards bizarre caricatures of the teachers. Most of them I seem to remember involving large numbers of manic native American arrows sticking out of mortarboards.

Our English teacher in the fifth year (another one who must remain nameless) dismissed both of us as 'unlikely to amount to anything'. 'He may pass - it all depends' this idiot wrote on my pre-O-level report. I got a top-grade distinction in English. Lol shone in various creative fields: our paths nearly passed when he got into directing TV commercials, but the last time I actually heard his voice was on a Radio 2 evening show in 2007. He still had that distinctive Mancunian/Jewish no-bullshit twang.

Over the seven years spent at Stand, I had no more than two or three close friends. I think this is true of most people at school: there's a wide circle of folks with whom one shares classes and certain extra-curricular stuff, but only a few real mates. In my case, things were made more tricky by the fact that, within weeks of arriving at Grammar School, I plunged into a fairly severe bout of depression.

Loking back from the safe distance of time and relative calm now, several reasons occur to me. I'd had a row with two close chums from primary school - one of whom in particular was a vindictive sort of kid. After several months of me being tormented, my elder brother duffed him up a bit, but by then some of the damage to my self-esteem had been done.

I was small and skinny as a kid. I also seem to have started out with a guilty secret about almost everything I felt to be the constituents of me. It was hard to let people in - and when I did, if they rejected or let me down in any way, it seemed only to confirm the inbuilt fears.

This had happened earlier that year of 1959 with (of all things) a girl. Her already mentioned name was Linda Mordin, and I'd been potty about her since we met on the first day of infant school aged five. Even by the standards of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, it was outstandingly precocious of me to discover the opposite sex at that age - or at least to consider it good for anything beyond worms down the neck and trying to see a bum or two while watching netball.

For five years, my adoration of Linda joined all the other guilty secrets shoving and pushing their way round my small head. But then out of a blue sky - let's be clear about this, a very bright and deliciously warm blue sky - she passed a note to me in that final year of primary school, confessing to an undying love. For me.

'Undying' when you're ten means 'for a week or two', but when the affair fizzled out (and to this day neither of us can remember how or why) I was pretty desolate. When you're ten, a week or two is forever anyway - so I should've been content with that. But instead, I wallowed in self-pity. If you've never been there, pity-wallowing is just terrific: it is the only way one can die a thousand deaths and not, as such, die at all. Not for nothing is the state of mind referred to as bitter-sweet. It's a sort of shivery 'God I feel crap and isn't that nice' place.

However, arriving at the bottom of the slush pile in an enormous building on that first day in 1959 - with what seemed like millions of big and clever people - was not what I most required after fallings out with both male and female soulmates.

Looking around, the only kid who appeared to be as miserable as me was Dave Russell. Dave had a reason: his Dad had just died, and a spell in hospital with peritonitis immediately afterwards wasn't the icing on anything very much.

For the first eighteen months or so we larked about in a glum, deadpan sort of way - wanking in alleyways on the way home while discussing what girls' bits might really be like, and whether - as Andy Christie averred - they had teeth. Mainly we went to watch United (then in a dire state of transition immediately after the Munich plane disaster) or listened to our two main heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Buddy Holly (also killed in a plane accident in February 1959) was the only other rocker we felt to be worthy - probably because he was dead, and therefore had proved himself as dangerously glamorous as the other Great One, James Dean. What we didn't do was a great deal of homework, so by the end of the Second Year - while Dave's photographic memory kept him in the top half - I found myself twenty-ninth out of the thirty-one souls in 2A.

By this time (midway through 1961) my depression was easing off - with or without medication, if you're not manic this happens anyway - and during that summer we decided on what became known as The Pact. This was a simple document scribbled on the page of an old Rough Book, the gist of which was an alliance under which any and all insights we had in any subject would be shared. By this method, Dave came 2nd in the first term of 3A while I came 4th. At the end of the year he came top and me 2nd. After that, neither of us ever came lower than third in anything. In particular, Russell D A was always top in physics and chemistry, while Ward J A took first place in English and History as a matter of course.

None of this was due to what used to be known as cribbing - copying each other's work - but rather from discussing all the homework we were given and then buzzing off home to put our own spin on the outcome of each debate. Naturally, it became internally competitive as well - also of course a good thing. If this makes us sound like a pair of swots, I should point out that the only goal was to stick a metaphorical finger up to all those teachers who'd written us off as mediocre and hopeless respectively. (I might add that neither Frith nor Lumley thought we were dumb for a second: their verdict - 'idle' - was both succinct and accurate.)

At the end of the Third Year, specialisation began and so David went into extra science and I veered naturally towards arts and languages. After that the friendship carried on, but never at quite the same level of intensity. I went to Dave's first wedding and he to mine: but there were longer and longer gaps in between. I last saw him in Portugal (where he made his home with second wife Anna-Maria) during 2003. Soon afterwards he developed spinal atrophy, and at the time of writing languishes in a Lisbon hospice, unable to move. Some people are naturally unlucky, and Dave is one of them.

The role of hip-joined best mate was taken up by Shaun Whittaker. Our friendship got off to a poor start when on the very first day at SGS I joyously mentioned that he was to be in the same class as me, to which Shaun's cool retort was "Big deal". But by the fourth year, we had an interest in protest and otherwise arcane music in common. An emporium in St Annes Square Manchester (The Rare Record Shop) was where we shopped regularly for the works of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Leadbelly and all points Hobo.

While this might mark us out as Klassic Kool Acid Kids before our time, the truth is that we were snottily pretentious. Already dismissing the works of Lovable Liverpool Moptops as puerile, we rarely resisted the opportunity during peer-group discussions to drop names like John Lee Hooker, Buffy St Marie, Joan Baez and of course Woody Guthrie (who at that time I thought was black). The mere mention of British folk-singer Donovan was enough to collapse us into fits of derisive laughter.

We parted company musically when Dylan went electric (Whit resisted this while I maneouvered carefully off in pursuit of the Mod girls listening to the likes of The Who and Small Faces) but the relationship endured. After University it was rekindled again, but Shaun was hard to stay in touch with. For one thing, his hobby was going all over the world researching and diving on wrecks - he was part of the team which raised Drake's coffin - and for another, Shaunny had a horror of staying in touch. Good bloke, though. He is something in urban planning - for Berkshire I think.

While more loose and informal, the Speech Day Smokers' Club was also important for a while. It met annually on our free Speech Day afternoons (and on some Sundays) with the sole purpose of exploring Heaton Park - which would be entirely empty and thus the perfect spot for smoking ourselves to death for three hours.

It was being grown up, being sophisticated and being dangerous - but mainly it was freedom. Walking through the Saint Margaret's Road gates shortly after one pm felt what I'd imagine crossing the Swiss border was like for escapees from Nazi POW camps.

There were five regular members - myself, Dave, Ian Plant, Kevin Read, and the uncomfortable larger than life Martin Bailey. Martin was especially mysterious to the rest of us because he had discovered foreign cigarettes.

While Ian Plant was a Woodbines man and I favoured Gold Leaf, Bailey would turn up with a jet-black flat-pack of Sobranie Cocktail. These oddities had cigarette paper in all sorts of garish colours, and an exotic smell that suggested the exchange of secret nuclear plans in Istanbul. Another time he'd pull out a pack of Lucky Strike - far more cult than the only other American crushproof pack we'd ever seen, Peter Stuyvesant.

But Bailey - who soon obtained the anagrammatic nickname Nitram Yeliab - led an odd demi-monde life which was part daredevil and part pure fantasy. During his A-Level Geography exam, I watched in stunned amazement as he calmly sat with his exercise book on full view, leafing through it for the information he needed. This wasn't cheating, it was treason on a grand scale. But with half an hour to go, Hawk-eyed Les Lumley hobbled in and, after a few minutes of scanning the room, went to Martin's desk. He picked up the giant cribsheet and asked Yeliab what was going on. Gasping as if he'd seen the book for the first time, he said "How did that get there?" Les asked him if he thought he was entirely naive, and the red-handed Bailey used it to reach for his wallet. "Isn't there some way we can forget this sir?" he asked. It was the most dramatic (and almost the funniest) moment of my life up to that date.

One culprit never found was the kid who suspended Wimpy's Assembly piano from the ceiling by the thinnest of wires. The occasion was April Fool's Day (I can't remember which year) but I don't think anyone who witnessed the sight of this unwilling Steinway pendulum will ever forget it. Alerted to the spectacle the minute he arrived, by 8.45 am Wimpy Longstaffe had gone well past screaming voice, and reached the jumping, hair-tearing, foaming-mouth stage. Order and counter-order poured from various of those in authority, and was immediately countermanded by the music master whose terror of losing the piano defied all reason and human decibel limits.

It was entirely fitting and predictable that a bloke who had tormented so many kids into an anxiety state should now find himself on the receiving end. As the headmaster arrived with his usual air of being the ultimate weapon (or at the very least having it back in his study) ladders arrived while a luckless janitor went up into the glass roof-space to help gently lower the instrument to the ground. But by this time Longstaffe had collapsed in a chair, his purple colour having changed to a whiter shade of pale. It was a victory of sorts.

Some time towards the end of the first year, Brian Crosfield entered our form room wearing a similar facial colour, and a black tie. He was, he said, very sorry to have to tell us that Andrew Christie had committed suicide the previous night.

Andy always had a tragic air about him. A single-parent kid when almost nobody was, he also had the curse (with which he'd been born) of eternal pigmyism. The condition gave him the quick, darting appearance of a rodent, and his voice - strangely deep and rough - only added to the sense of the kid somehow being out of scale, something fashioned by God in a particularly psychopathic moment.

There were no tears, but there was an intake of breath like none I've heard since. He was the first person I'd ever known die, and the news seemed all the more impossible for him being aged only thirteen. Even by 1960, childhood death had become largely a thing of the past. Its presence on that early summer's morning was perhaps the most lasting of all lessons that year: carpe diem.

Where Stand Grammar School once stood there is today an upmarket development of apartments. Looking at the site some five years ago, I was struck by the obvious metaphor of a society rapidly losing the plot. We all need somewhere to live, but in a civilised culture, loving discipline combined with an enthusiasm for knowledge is far more important than a fancy address. SGS had a lot of things wrong (corporal punishment for one, overly powerful prefects for another) but it exceeded everything asked of it as an institution in that all-too-brief twenty years of planned social mobility after 1945.

The school had been founded in 1688 (the year of Britain's only Glorious - and bloodless - Revolution) and a seat of learning for luminaries as varied as comedian Al Read and Indian Empire anti-hero Robert Clive. As the Grammars were steadily undermined by Labour's earnest vandals after 1966, the place became a Sixth Form College - and was eventually deemed redundant. How or why is something I will never understand, any more than I would comprehend Manchester Grammar - still thankfully extant - being flattened and then built upon. Whatever the polemics of any particular period, excellence will always be excellence. Stand punched above its weight as an educational centre year in, year out. But it failed in one all-important dimension: conforming to a one-size-fits-all mentality that has since infected every area of national life from prison rehabilitation to medicine.

Above all, the lesson from those secondary school years remains for me that of the seemingly opposite (but in actuality twinned) cornerstones of a stable, progressive society: love and discipline. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, too many of us thought love without discipline - 'if it feels good, do it' - would suffice. Later, far too many parents thought money could double for love. Further downmarket, those who have never known discipline now father children for whom they have no love at all.

We have abolished both the faults and advantages of elitist, disciplinarian, loving England - and we are very much the worse for it.

Politics in our house during the 1950s was a subject for brief affirmation rather than long debate. My parents occasionally elucidated the simple difference between the two main Parties: Labour wasted money and supported layabouts, whereas the Conservatives encouraged hard work and thrift. There was a funny little lot in the middle (five MPs at most) called the Liberals, but they hadn't been in power since grandad's time, and grandad was ancient - sixty-eight at least.

So that was that.

We lived from 1950 until 1965 in what was then a neat, well-trimmed suburb of Manchester called Prestwich. Prestwich is famous mainly for its mental home - one of the biggest in Britain. Actually, cancel 'mainly' - the lunatic asylum is the sum total of celebrity involved here. People would say "You'll wind up in Prestwich" and everyone knew what they meant: the remark was in the same vein as "If you pull that face any more, one day it'll stick".

But the place did have importance in Manchester, because it was where many of the Conservative-voting lower-middle class lived. These were the folks to whom Macmillan was really talking in 1959 when he said "You've never had it so good". And he was right, they hadn't. There was little or no 'political consciousness' among those getting on, but there was a very strong social consciousness, and it revolved around the concept of bettering yourself. Wherever they had come from - Salford, Bury, Middleton or other terraced Mancunian slums - people in Prestwich were determined to stay and, if possible, be secure forever.

For mum and dad the logic was straightforward: the Conservatives wanted everyone to do this, and 'the Labour' didn't. In the face of this established reality, the need for an Opposition Party at 43 St Margaret's Road may have been urgent, but on the whole it was absent. Every five years, a blue and white poster went up in our front window (behind which lay the Best Room, reflecting why we voted that way in the first place) and its message was uncompromising: 'Vote Conservative - Medwin for Prestwich & Middleton'. Our MP wasn't called Medwin, but he had that sort of name. There was no hyphenation - people like that had 'side' to them - and importantly, there wasn't anything suggesting doubtful provenance: no hint of O'Reilly or Greenberg or Higgins. Just a good, solid, normal name. Like Ward.

After we'd been living there for a few years, the next door neighbours moved away, and were replaced by a Yorkshireman. He had a small Ukrainian wife, and seemd to be what my mum called 'a bit rough'. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, they voted Labour. It wasn't exactly 'there goes the neighbourhood', but it was close to it.

The new neighbour said working-class Yorkshire things to the kids like "give o'er!" (stop that instantly) in a gruff and loud voice. And of course Mrs Rough sounded foreign, chiefly because she was. East of the Iron Curtain too. Probably a Communist.

In point of fact this dumpy, bustling woman was extremely personable and virulently anti-Soviet. Her sisters and mother having been multiply raped by the liberating forces of Socialism, it was difficult to squeeze anything nice out of our new neighbour's wife about Russians. You could get her to agree with the possibility that they might be human, but that was it. One of her favourite aphorisms was "Rooshianns? I shpitt on Roooshianns". By contrast, she thought England a Paradise on Earth.

She was also iffy about the Germans, they having preceded the Russians with the burning and raping performance by two years. One must remember that this was 1955 or thereabouts, and the war had ended a mere decade before. She would have been about thirty at the time, and the memories were raw. So too were those of the Jews in Manchester (many of whom had settled in Prestwich after early years struggling in the terraces of Higher Broughton or Moss Side) and anyone who'd lived through the Blitz of mid 1941. Finally, our former Soviet allies had turned out to be just as bad as everyone always suspected they were, especially old Joe.

Given this context, Mrs Rough settled in very well and gained most people's approval. She had all the required assets: a poverty-stricken beginning, a stoical manner, an admiration for Blighty and a focused hatred of her enemies. But the couple were kept at arm's length because they voted Labour.

This was, my dad declared, what Yorkshire people did: they were awkward and stubborn and bolshie. It was also clearly what many Lancastrians did too, but empirical data wasn't invented until much later, and so this fact could be glossed over relatively easily.

My father was a very intelligent man, and my mother 'not behind the door' as they say in the North. And yet they held views which would, today, mark them out as incurably bigoted materialist social climbers. But it's not enough (and more to the point, not fair) to simply judge and then write off their views and beliefs like that: there were many and good reasons for them.

First and foremost, smug contemporary social commentators tend on the whole to ignore the mores of the 192os (when my folks were in their infancy) or are truly ignorant of them. I'm not sure which of these possibilities is the more depressing, but either way, to airbrush from social history the adherence to an Imperial tradition of assumed national and racial superiority simply isn't on.

Casual and daily anti-Semitism was normal at the time. The French never washed their hands, the Spaniards were untrustworthy and the Italians either lecherous bottom-pinchers or effeminate waiters. The idea that a Russian might be civilised was considered laughable - had they not shot their Royal family? - and the concept of the Chinese being anything other than slitty-eyed little people who did laundry was many miles off any Briton's radar, be they high or low.

As for the Germans, they were at least clean, but flawed with an enormous shoulder-chip which inclined them to international violence. Good organisers, terrible dressers and hopelessly fat. The Swiss? Cuckoo clocks. Austrians? Yodellers. The Dutch? Good eggs, like us - but their language sounded like a bad attack of catarrh and they were eccentric....wooden shoes, that sort of thing.

Anyone who had been subjugated by our Imperial advance was naturally primitive. Indian Rajahs were alright, but the rest of that culture's products were poor, surrounded by flies and always begging for God's sake. The few with any brains had been hired by us to run the Indian civil service. But even they were, you know - hot blooded. It didn't do to let the Memsahib out alone while they were about: anything might happen.

As for Africa - are you serious? Gyppos to the north - a screaming, bloodthirsty devious rabble the whole lot of them; nig-nogs in the south, thick as a donkey's dong; and naked pigmy cannibals running round the jungles in between. Since slavery's abolition, bit of a job to know what to do with any of the buggers, to be honest.

It would be a mistake to imagine that these opinions (largely restricted as a set now to the very old and mentally infirm) were confined to the uneducated classes and Oswald Mosley. Baldwin, Lloyd George, Churchill himself and most of the Establishment would have agreed enthusiastically with almost all of them. (As late as 1968, the MP and eminent scholar Enoch Powell was referring to negroid children as 'grinning piccaninnies').

To hold such views did not make a person right-wing, racist, prejudiced or mad. What's more, like it or not - and almost nobody does any more - these British rulers and ordinary patriots were infinitely more honest than we are today. They saw people in loin-cloths and not a lot else (their women naked-breasted) and classed them as savages. They saw India in thrall to dreadfully cruel class separations that called people 'untouchable' while sacred cows were allowed to wander anywhere unmolested, and thought the ideas primitive. They told of Chinese who forced daughters to stunt the growth of their feet in order to be more sexually desirable, and reached the conclusion this was barbaric.

Fundamentally, they felt the European (and under duress, American) cultures to be more advanced. On most bases accepted even today, they were right.

Huge numbers of ordinary workers and trade union organisers held the same views, only more so: anyone not pink of skin pigment was a nigger or a wog - the terms were fairly interchangeable. Yellow folks were chinkies, and swarthy Europeans Dagoes, Eyeties, Frogs or greasy Turks.

As a sensitive, bright young lad, my father was repulsed by the crudity and suffering he saw all around him. He read voraciously from an early age, and was a particular fan of Empire-loyalist authors such as Rudyard Kipling. He felt (quite literally) nothing in common with those described in popular novels as 'natives'.

Dad was a Catholic working class boy who left school at twelve. Because grandma couldn't afford the doctor, in 1930 his sister Mollie had her left leg amputated following an infection that should have been treated earlier. My grandmother never forgave herself for this, which strikes me now as a terrible shame: if you have no money, you have no money.

Grandad fought in the First World War and was gassed three times, then taken prisoner for over two years. When he came back in 1920, his job as a master carpenter had gone. In 1926 he joined the General Strike, which - for those of you who don't do history - his side lost rather badly. It did however go to penalties, and Alf's was that (as an organiser) he got fired. Eventually, Alf (as he was always called) scraped under the net as a tram conductor. He could draw an apple so well, I wanted to take his sketches away and keep them. But he spent most of his life clipping tickets on a Salford tram.

By 1933, my father had landed a job with a small cloth merchants as the office boy. He got the job ahead of seventy-eight other applicants because he could do quadratic equations. His mother (on being told her son had got the job) told his new employer "Ah, sure it'll do until he finds somethin' better". To Mrs Ward (nee Theresa Mahon from Cork) there wasn't much more to life than something better.

Most things were preferable to being a Salford Mick. In the mid-Thirties, the fascist Blackshirts were extremely active in Manchester, and a point often forgotten now is that Oswald Mosley's recruits, while they mainly had it in for the Jews, were not keen on the Irish either. There seems to have been a bit of rough and tumble, especially as one of Pop's best friends was the tailor's son David Machovski - a Jew.

Had he been truly bigoted and thick, dad would simply have accepted the nature of things. But almost uniquely among teenagers of his background, my father carved out the chance to use his intellect in order to appreciate far more about the world, its products and its cultures: he was after all engaged in a cosmopolitan import business. For a start, he already needed to understand Indian and Chinese script - at least well enough to establish provenance.

Why then you wonder - given this background of misery, deprivation and waste under the grinding boot of the ruling class - would my father aspire to be a middle-class Tory?

It's not that complicated. He totted up what he felt the Labour Party had done to improve his Dad's lot, and arrived at a score of minus thirty-five. He also thought about what the Labour Party had done to stop Hitler - the Left was largely pacifist at the time - and felt its stock fall even further into the red. (My father read Mein Kampf two years before Chamberlain did: it was his considered opinion from then on that the German fuhrer was entirely mad - and unstoppable without war. In 1938, he volunteered to be a pilot. Happily for me, he was turned down as colour-blind).

Dad's hero was Churchill, a man his father hated but for whom he had respect bordering on idolatry - and with whom he agreed entirely about the need to eradicate Nazism. He was also fascinated by Churchill's class. Like many kids in the 1930s, he read Billy Bunter and similar upper-class set comic stories. He revelled in stories of Imperial derring-do. It didn't seem that odd to him to want a slice of it.

To ask why he wanted to better himself is hardly necessary. His street was a microcosm of widespread social ills at the time: wife-beating, drunkenness, petty criminality and theft were certainly not the norm, but they were commonplace. He saw schoolmates turning in despair to going 'on the fiddle' in one way or another, and he saw his mother looking old before her time. Eventually, he saw a boyhood friend hanged. Above all, he saw a system that wasted talent - but far from wanting to destroy it, he reached the view by his mid-teens that first, he was a lot brighter than most; and second, organised labour didn't seem to have a chance. As many have concluded before and since, the best strategy was to use what he had, not what others might (or might not) offer him.

Furthermore, he was working for Stanley Stewart, almost the epitome of what my father aspired to about quintessential Englishness. Stanley was educated at expensive schools. He had been a junior Wimbledon doubles champion. He had borrowed a small amount of money and hocked the one property he owned to start the business - now doing so well that (even in the midst of deep depression) it could afford to employ a full-time office boy. He might be rich, but he was far from idle. He was a role-model of some considerable appeal for young Bernard Ward.

Stan Stewart was a brusque but wonderfully stylish and above all kind man. In the sixty years he knew Pop, the boss never once patronised him or indeed gave the slightest sign of class snobbery. He admired his employee's determination, wanted him to do well, and eventually welcomed him as a full partner. To my Dad, this attitude seemed altogether more attractive and positive than the rabid class envy of the working class Left.

There has been a tendency since the 1960s TV docudrama form to see pre-war working class struggles as heroic, but they were anything but. The majority of workers from 1920 until 1939 were systematically humiliated, their living conditions dreadful, and their lives hard and tawdry. For young lads with any kind of ambition, the TUC v The System was akin to Georgia v Russia: not only did Dad think things would never really change (and they haven't) he also felt the equality assumption of Socialism to be misguided. Equality of opportunity was his guiding light - and would remain so.

Further down towards earth, it is hard to overestimate the need for that generation to achieve respectability. There is nothing heroic about a Dad on the dole, a crippled sister, and going to school with no socks and ragged-arsed trousers. Few of us like to be only on the fringes of the pack, and being a half-Irish Catholic with little proper education was well below the requirement for full membership. Walking up towards middle-class and high-Anglican Cheetham Hill, it wasn't hard to see how the other half lived. Rather than evoking envy, the prospect I think made many people aspirant. It made my father fiercely ambitious - and in a way, frightened by it.

Yet for my mum growing up in that very place, respectability was also something which seemed to belong to other people. Although from the merchant class, my mother's family needed an enormous armoire to house its skeletons: a mere cupboard would never have sufficed.

Her mother was a talented semi-professional concert pianist. Melissa Mountain played at minor public functions, and for the soirees of smart Edwardian society - although she was a notch below that herself. She met Bert Wall and soon became pregnant, a social disaster that required all of the family's clout to arrange a white St Luke's wedding at short notice. On the whole, with Melissa this seems to have been a case of start as you mean to go on. Despite having the child (my Auntie Edna, 96 this year and still going strong) the new mother soon parked her on a nursemaid and continued with her career.

The arty, showbizz and libertine set in which she moved was what my great-aunt Lilly (Bert's sister) used to call 'fast', and Melissa made the most of it. Her second child Phyllis looked nothing like either her siblings or father (throughout her life, Aunti Phyll was sure she was the result of a dalliance) and by the time a third child (Myra) had arrived, Bert was left wondering how his wife had managed to conceive while he was in the trenches of the Somme.

At the time (while not unknown) my maternal grandmother's behaviour was scandalous. Nor did the rumours stop when Bert returned alive and sired my mum - who was his spitting image, and inherited every facet of his stoical character. As if to confirm the wagging tongues, early in 1920 Melissa began an affair with an Irish tenor. Soon pregnant again (and no longer sleeping with her husband) she deserted the family and went to live with her lover. This was now twenty-past scandal, and on into the social region called Beyond the Pale.

Her end was sordid. The pregnancy proved to be difficult, and the birth probably a complex breach. Neither mother nor child survived: in fact, my grandmother bled to death in a garret, her drunken beau long since gone. Mum was adopted by Lilly and her new husband Frank Mellor - a lovely bloke who suddenly found himself the proud father of four girls. The instant brood settled at 50 Smedley Lane - a place which today resembles East Glasgow, but was in 1924 the height of bourgeois gentility.

However, most of the family money had by now evaporated. Melissa spent a fair amount of it during Bert's wartime absence, and the man himself died of TB in 1922. A brother and two cousins enjoyed a prodigious appetite for alcohol - they had never amounted to much beyond huge unpaid bills. Two further siblings died in the Flanders mud. Only Lilly and her sister Nin remained alive, but Nin was barking mad. Frank Mellor (a de Trafford cousin by birth) had been cut off from those riches for marrying beneath himself. He had a flourishing carpentry business, but was not a wealthy man.

Behind the lace curtains of 'Number Fifty' (as it was always called in the family) all seemed to be middle class conformity with a dash of blue blood. The truth is it was tough: Lilly borrowed money to open a general grocers, and the girls took turns after school and at weekends to serve, clean up and generally make themselves useful. From the age of seven or eight, my mother gradually soaked up the reality of being the hard-up orphan child of an outrageous libertine.

The learning taken from all this by her was straightforward: hard work, teetotallism, extreme care in sexual matters and above all social acceptance were infinitely preferable to the bohemian life.

Thus, when they met at a New Year's dance at the turn of 1940, Bernard Ward and Mildred Wall may have appeared on paper to be chalk and cheese. In fact, they were both outsiders with a strong will to get away from a horrible past and into a brighter future. Once together and married (which they were - against the will of both families - by October 1942) there was only ever one way they were going to vote.

This had to be postponed for three years while my father fought the Japanese, which sensibly he decided not to do single-handed. In the RAF at last, he rose to become a sergeant armourer and saw active service in north Africa, Burma and Malaya before chasing the enemy down to Singapore, where he attended the Japanese surrender early in 1946. He was cute, my dad: while there, he made the acquaintance of a rich cotton exporting family (the Cheungs) - charming people whose business was to help young Bernard do very well in the cotton finishing trade after the War.

Nevertheless, until 1951 he and millions of others endured life in an effectively bankrupt nation. While my view remains that Attlee's Labour Government was far and away the best Britain has ever had, it wasn't fun if you were there. Struggling manfully with hopeless debt, while trying to kick-start a shattered industry and take on aggressive competition from a freed Empire, Labour did an astonishing job in those five years of unequalled social advance. But by the dawn of the 1950s, people not only associated rationing with Socialism, they were tired of grime and want and the old wartime way of life: they'd won hadn't they? Now it was time to spread the wings and fly.

This was another powerful attraction of voting Conservative. Churchill promised the electors he would 'set the people free' from Socialist bureaucracy, and free of a dismal past was precisely where lots of Bernards and Mildreds wanted to be. But anyway - although it's hard to see why from 2008's far distant perspective - Britain in 1951 was ready for optimism.

There were a number of random trends and events behind this undercurrent of emotion. For some reason to do with wanting to show there was life in the old lion yet, the country launched an international Exhibition in 1951. Against all the odds it was a resounding success, and for some seemed to herald the dawn of a new era.

When it comes to the heralding, nobody has surpassed Winston Churchill, and it seems unlikely anyone ever will. After the sad and much put-upon King George VI passed away in 1952, Winnie wasted little time in referring to the prospect of 'a new Elizabethan Age'. Unlike his dreadful anti-Labour speeches during the 1945 election, this phrase captured a mood: the young Queen was his Good Bess, and he genuinely longed to fill the role of doting elder Statesman. Elizabeth II returned his admiration with interest, and although insiders knew that the Prime Minister was by now a geriatric veteran of several strokes still fighting his lifelong manic depression, to the young marrieds of postwar Britain, there was a new Queen, a feisty old warhorse, and everything to play for in a bright new future.

Again, in these days when we maintain a widespread suspicion of science and some of its commercial and military paymasters, it is impossible to grasp just how completely, until after the 1960s, science represented everyone's hopes for the future - and was unequivocally seen as A Good Thing. It was indeed the era of Dan Dare pilot of the Future (the Eagle comic's very English spaceman) and the heyday of science fiction classics like The Midwitch Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids and Trouble with Lichen - all written by our very own John Wyndham.

I remember lapping up Frank Hampson's section-view artwork in the Eagle's centre-spread as if it was yesterday. The illustrations predicted how tomorrow's people would farm Mars, travel in giant ships to distant stars, and travel at four times the speed of sound to Australia in ninety minutes. Less exactly drawn (and just as inaccurately predictive) comics like the Beano had characters from the year 1975 who went to work by personal helicopter from the age of twelve and spoke to each other via wristwatch walkie-talkies.

But the abiding constant in this nonsense was that all the heroes were Brits. We had an army and an air force, we flew enormous Vulcan bombers (Vulture would've been a better name for these vast and beautifully terrifying craft) and inside such angels of death nestled cutting-edge nuclear missiles capable of vapourising most of Russia - or any other Johnny Foreigner who cared to argue with us. We had invented the flying bedstead (forerunner of the Hovercraft, also British) and would thus lead the world in the inevitable move to VTO for all commercial aircraft - Vertical Take-Off. It was only a matter of time.

But best of all, we had Professor Quatermass, BBC TV's sci-fi hero extraordinaire. Bernard Quatermass (played by the lovely actor Andre Morell) was that rare thing, a Boffin of Action. Most boffins of course had silly hair and pointy heads and looked rather like Craig Brown - but not Quatermass. This prof built and launched space ships: and then when they brought back foul alien life-forms - as they nearly always did - our hero cleared up the mess too.

He had to really, because all the politicians, policeman and military personnel in Nigel Kneale's fabulous plots were complete tossers. Or to be more precise, doubters: "Men from Mars?" they'd all say, "Poppycock!"

The zenith of Kneale's series was the last one of that decade, the horrific Quatermass and the Pit. This time giant cryogenically preserved ants from Mars were discovered in a space capsule under East London. Because the Top Brass ignored Bernie the Boffin's warnings, the alien insects leapt into life and took over the world. Naturally, when they did, the Yanks and the Russkies were nowhere to be seen - so Quatermass dealt with them. The ants, that is.

I watched the dramas in growing terror from the ages of seven to ten - and although from 8.00 pm onwards (when What's My Line took over) I was catatonic with fear and under the bedclothes until daylight, I was confident to the point of unshakeable certainty that no nation anywhere on the planet had anyone who could last more than two rounds with Quatermass.

The point was, we could still cut it: the grit was still in place, and the upper-lip as rigid as ever. We might all be dressed in wide flannel trousers and appalling Clarks sandals with basin-cut hairdoes, but we were still the eternally amateur all-conquering and vulgarity-deficient British - and our Second Coming looked inevitable.

As if to set the scene for this new dawn, Britons woke up on Coronation Day to discover they had conquered Everest. Well, Edmund Hillary had (and he was a New Zealander actually) but his genes had come from these shores and that was good enough for everyone on that special day. The centuries-old pageantry was beamed forth from yet another (alleged) British invention, the television. And because we were the neighbourhood thrusters, it was beamed into our living room as well - to an audience of over twenty people.

A more accurate account goes like this. Uncle Frank (by now close to death but still very much my favourite human being at age five) decided the Coronation was an event not to be missed. Asking for Dad's advice and company on the shopping trip for a television set, at the dealership he listened while my father gave forth what knowledge he had gleaned from Practical Householder, the bottom line of which was the superiority of a Bush twelve-inch set over other rivals. Fine said Frank Mellor to the salesman, we'll take two. Which is how we got our first telly.

A very common advertising phrase in the 1950s was 'The Wonder of the Age'. It was applied to everything from 3D cinema glasses and refrigerators to five-speed bicycle gears and Long Life canned beer - but it rang completely true in relation to The Telly. Our house in St Margaret's Road stood on the corner of Freshfield Avenue, and from that enclave on the morning of 2nd June 1953 came the Holdens and the Wharmbys and the Portlocks and the Dodds and various relatives and Esther and Tommy.

They came to watch a flickering 405-line analogue picture, under a third of a metre in width, in mono colour and sound. It showed (often on the horizontal plane) rare glimpses of a blurred coach, and a minute Royal hand waving at the drenched crowds. For on June 2nd 1953, it chucked it down with rain from dawn until dusk. The weather did, I suspect, know something we didn't.

By roughly ten am I was bored beyond belief. The expectation had been lacking in my mind ever since the Church Hall celebration of the previous weekend, when the ice cream had run out just before it got to me. If this smacks of brattism to the reader, I should point out just what rarity value ice cream had in 1953. One shop only in our area sold it - soft Italian stuff made by Lorenzinis in a cornet with raspberry juice for threepence (1.25p) - and available in the one flavour, whale oil.

You think I jest, but not at all. Dairy output was by rationing law for hungry babies' milk and heart-stopping butter alone. Real 'dairy' ices weren't available until (I think) 1958 - which was excellent timing as the following year proved to be the hottest ever. The ice cream we had before then was made with powdered milk and whale blubber.

Some days before the Church Hall bunfight, we were told proudly that the ice cream on offer would be neapolitan. We all goshed, and then asked why it came from Politan,and where Politan was. On being told the ridiculous truth that such ice cream held three flavours - chocolate, vanilla and strawberry - it was obvious there would be little sleep until the ambrosia arrived. My fit of screaming hysterics when it didn't was possibly, to some extent, down to the lack of rest. But I doubt it.

By the time the last foreign monarch had disappeared into Westminster Abbey just after 11 am, it seemed to me that I must be at least nine hundred years old. The time from noon until two-fifteen alone felt like forty decades in a Gulag. I asked a couple of times if I could go and play out, a disgraceful request which evoked looks of astonished and jingoistic horror. Play out? During the crowning of your monarch lad?

Yet again, it is difficult to explain how important all this was to the New Elizabethans. Dad made a huge flagpole, painted it gold and expertly ran an enormous Union Jack liberated from the Singapore ceremony of surrender up it. This symbol of loyalty to the House of Windsor he had poking out of our lavatory window for a month before and after The Big One. It made me inordinately proud of my Dad's handy nature, if still confused about what the Bejesus was going on.

The red-white-and-blue flag was of course grossly out of proportion to our essentially understated family seat. Like something befitting Waterloo flying from a tiny suburban loo, the Jack fluttered away proudly, lifted into life by the ever-present breeze off Heaton Park reservoir across the way. From a distance it looked like our house might take to the high seas at any moment.

At last - some three geological epochs later at about six pm - our personal audience left: exhausted, overwhelmed by the spectacle, and determined to start saving for a set of their own. All, that is, except the last two named spectators, Esther and Tommy. They stayed for three days; and if dad hadn't turfed them out unceremoniously on Day Four, they'd have expired with us some time during 1990.

Tommy was what used to be called a layabout. There were lots of layabouts in those days, but for some reason they've all died out since. Today we have disadvantaged, alienated and underprivileged families instead. But in 1953 (and right up to the start of the 1970s) every area had its own quota of layabouts. The Daily Mirror's character Andy Capp was the cartoon archetype of their ilk. And Tommy was one of them.

My father had been in the RAF with him. Between February 1946 in Hong Kong and 1953 in Prestwich, Tommy had been absent from our lives save for an annual Christmas card. But on June 2nd 1953, he and his petite wife Esther pitched up just in time for lunch (the Number 4 bus dropped them handily right outside our door) and hung around for the next nine meals until their abrupt eviction after a final, fractious breakfast.

I'd imagine that they were homeless as well as feckless, but I do recall overhearing Pop say to mum "he always was a lazy bugger" shortly after they'd left for wherever the next billet was.

This peripatetic couple summed up that from which my folks were trying to escape. In a sentence, this was being people others looked down upon. How cowardly that sounds today - and yet what resolve it required back then. From 1942 onwards, the game plan for my folks had a single-minded goal: acceptance.

I'd like to say that - being precociously aware by age twelve and a future social commentator already half-made - I understood and accepted this desire completely. But I didn't get it at all. I had no desire to play Che Guevara to Pop's Batista, but I had my doubts about all this quiet suffering, strangled emotions and Normal Norman stuff. (I did not, by the way, know even a fraction of the crap they'd been through until my early twenties; and being young, I didn't care until much later).

Having the doubts gave me that bewildered, shocking guilt all children feel when at last it dawns on them that - just perhaps - their parents didn't create and thus now control the solar system. It also made me hopelessly confused about who or what I was, and why what I wanted to do with my life seemed to be something utterly unthinkable.

I expect it's a sensation endured by every child of every parent in the world at some time or another. But at the time, the certainty of being the first is absolute. And it places us - for a time at least - in a confined loneliness more solitary than any dungeon cell.

 

 

Up for it or not?

Speaking for myself, most of the years 1962-67 were devoted to the uphill task of getting laid. Actually, to be more specific every day was devoted to this aim. My batting average until the final breakthrough in June 1967 was:

P 18 W 0 D 12 L 6

Although it will seem incredible to contemporary males, those scores put me up there with Bradman on the sexual scoreboard. (A draw, by the way, was heavy petting resulting in underwear dampness for both sides) The fact is that - whatever you see on the grainy documentaries - full-on sexual intercourse c0mplete with male ejaculation wasn't at all easy to find. Girls were like logarithms until about 1968; after that sex became almost a form of introduction for a while, but the poet Philip Larkin was astonishingly lucky to get his end away without nuptual formalities as early as 1963.

I suppose in a way it was unnatural to be walking home awkwardly most evenings under the strain of Y-front-and-willy entanglement, but nevertheless it stopped me from making some appalling mistakes. When Mums told their daughters boys only wanted one thing, they were broadly right: we did indeed want it, but a lot more than once. Five times a day would've been a reasonable number for most of us I should think.

Given that level of motivation (and my extremely hazy grasp of contraception) without all this removal of hands from forbidden areas I would've been married off and doomed to a life of suburban boredom by 1965. So whatever the modern mores may be, I am eternally grateful for the knees/aspirin form of birth control that dominated during those years of desperate frustration.

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