School and sports day- and early memories of school.

School and sports day- and early memories of school.

Now that the children - or at least some of them- have been given permission to go back to school, this may be an opportune moment to go back to the beginning and our formative years at the one establishment where it all started, that foundation stone of our youthful development, the initiation ceremony where we were introduced to other children of the same age.

It was that vital, life defining moment where education took priority to every other consideration and where you finally discovered that you had to wear a formal shirt, tie and blazer every day for the next 11 years or so of your life or even longer for those who paid attention in class. It was that pivotal turning point in your primary school stage of your life where everything seemed very intimidating, overwhelming and undoubtedly scary.

You still have vague recollections of your mum dropping you off at the school gates in those first, frightening years when a vast Victorian building represented something far more distressing and sinister than anything you'd encountered before. It meant that you were about to step into the fiery furnace of education, learning the basics, tackling the rudiments of the alphabet, letters, words, the construction of sentences, grammar and vocabulary. Simple really. Nothing that was too difficult to understand certainly at that age.

This was followed swiftly by the dreaded subject of mathematics comprising as it did  the adding up of sums, the memorising of multiplication tables and that petrifyingly complicated network of division and long division. You can still hear the unbearable scratching of those many coloured chalks grating on your nerves, the tap- tapping of the chalk as words and numbers on the blackboard miraculously appeared, lengthy periods of the morning devoted to the incessant soundtrack of hollering teachers, screaming children determined to create a disturbance and then more voices.

You can clearly hear the full- blooded stomping of kids racing headlong through the school gates, stampeding through the corridors and then flooding out into the school playground. To this day you can now see hundreds of kids coats piled up haphazardly on the floor of the cloakroom, the mustiest of smells along the corridor and then being told to quickly change into plimsolls because if you didn't you'd have to miss PE, exercise time, physical fitness time and the moment to get that body into shape by moving.

There was of course a crazy uniformity about our young years, a stern insistence on punctuality, order and obedience at all times. Some of us can still see certain teachers marching down corridors with what seemed like an almost military clip- clop of stilettoes, a commanding presence in an utterly mystifying world. Of course it was all very new and very exciting to some extent but not if you hadn't a clue why you had to go to school in which case the whole experience was painfully harrowing.

The start of the school day would be rudely punctuated by the ringing bell in the playground where large groups of kids would suddenly pull on the brakes, stop what they were doing immediately, look around at their new friends, now aware that the disciplines you would have to go undergo would be so demanding and rigorous that you'd just have to get used to this regime whether you liked it or not.

In ordered formations we would line up in the playground and then troop slowly towards our classrooms and just compose yourself. The sound of a thousand slamming desks, chairs that seem to scrape and creak gratingly at the same table and tables that banged and crashed, were additional audio accompaniments to the whole day in primary school. There seemed a disorganised bedlam about this whole process at first but then we recognised our surroundings and didn't complain that much.

Looking back it was PE that seemed to stick out like a sore thumb in our minds as the one subject that really looked as though it had been made up on the spot. In the large assembly hall, complete with polished brown floor and the oldest record player since the Middle Ages, we would all stand to attention, puffy red cheeks panting, hair now slightly matted and ready to attack those daunting climbing frames, the burning ropes and the very gymnastic brown pommel horse that had to be leapt over with perfect timing and accuracy.

But at this time of the year most schools of course would have been preparing for that inevitable fixture on the school calendar. Now it looks as if most of today's children may have to wait until next June for the school sports day, a glorious fusion of the funny, the mildly competitive and a good excuse for your parents to cheer their siblings home with an egg and spoon wobbling precariously in their hands.

Now school sports day was that one big opportunity to show your mum, dad or grandparents that you could be faster, fitter and stronger than the rest of your peer group. It was that one day when you could flaunt your brand new stringed vest and that flapping shirt that seemed to have a mind of its own. School sports day was the one day in the academic year when writing in books with a studious manner could be temporarily forgotten about just for an afternoon.

We rushed out to our local playing fields, comforting hospital towering over us, grey fence bordering the field and a canopy of trees now in full green bloom. Away in the distance another blackboard would be the frantic scene of much frenzied activity. Our estimable and respected teachers could be found scribbling down the scores both meticulously and conscientiously. Smudges of red, blue, green and yellow would appear and disappear to be replaced with a constant stream of up to date scores.

In the place where everything counted, splendidly painted white lines perfectly illustrated those Olympic style athletics lanes. Then we would crouch down, fingers pointing firmly into the ground, heads poised, bony young shoulders moving and twitching with barely controlled excitement. Then a gentle whistle would blow and the sight of six or seven kids bursting forward into the far reaches of the finishing line would signify that they meant business. It felt like a rite of passage but adolescence was still some way off.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the athletics field, kids would be seen strolling around, boys comparing Pannini football stickers and girls skipping for the best part of two and half hours. Most of the running, egg and spoon and sack races would be staggered and played out in very specific blocks of time. Kids would simply hang around casually as if never sure what exactly they were supposed to be doing next. Then the year group would be called out in a kind of rota system and what followed was a general wandering towards the start lane in a vaguely excited fashion.

And so the mums and dads, grans and grandpas would hurry towards the start of races as their children and grandchildren would climb into some hessian sack that looked as though it had just unloaded potatoes from the local greengrocer. The whistle went and their precious toddlers would set out on those jumping, hopping expeditions that would result in a hilarious heap of exhausted children.

When you think back to those lazy, hazy, crazy days of early summer you'd recall school playtime when nothing seemed to matter and you could be anybody you wanted to be. If you were a boy you may have harboured ambitions of becoming the next Alan Pascoe in the middle distance running events or Mary Peters in her 1972 Olympic pomp if you were a young girl. You'd run up to the bar, arch your back and then hurl yourself over the bar and onto the mat. We were entitled to our dreams

Alas though school sports day may have to be consigned to history- certainly for this year. Now Reception, Years One, Two and Six will be the only years who can be allowed to go back to school even if is until the end of July. The world is still on hold and parents will have to make snap decisions about their children's immediate future. Coronavirus has left a devastating gash in kids lives, a bloody wound that may take ages to heal but slowly there does seem to be a suggestion of good health, that recovery, although not quite complete, may be much closer than we think.

Some of us look back on our school days with a whole mixture of conflicting emotions because in retrospect they should have been the happiest days of our lives. There is a feeling that wherever we are now in our lives the lessons we learned then were more than adequate preparation for the greater challenges that stretched ahead of us in later life. How good is it to wallow in a warm pool of nostalgia since where else are we to look for redemption, that small pocket of hope?

But here we are in the last month or so of the school curriculum and there can be no school sports day because the world is suffering some loathsome disease that some of us would wish had never happened in the first place and can't wait to see the back of . Besides we miss the tumbling tomfoolery of the sack race, the giggling frivolity of the egg and spoon race and those 100 metres of the chest out running just for our parents. Oh how we miss it all.