Whoever coined the phrase that our school years were the “best days of our lives” should be given a detention and lines.

Some may have been lucky enough to sail through their schooldays in a happy haze of self-discovery, sporting achievements, brilliant exam successes, prizegiving awards and scholarships to further academic brilliance at university.

But for others – me included – it was more of a lesson in survival and struggle, largely bumping along the rocky seabed of the bottom of the class.

A recent trawl of school reports, during an appeal by the City of Norwich School Old Boys Union for archive material to send to the Norfolk Record Office, has brought it all back.  

Eastern Daily Press: Richard Batson recalling school days dressing up, with CNS scarf, at a Round Table event

Terse, damning, though probably quite accurate, assessments by the gowned grammar school masters of the 1970s CNS summed up the academic acumen, or lack of it, of this Heartsease council house boy as:

  • Appears to have difficult remembering and understanding facts – fourth year chemistry
  • Weak – no signs of work – fourth year biology
  • Results not good enough – first year Maths
  • His exam work was incredibly poor – Religious Education
  • Still quiet but his written work is good – first year English.
  • It is a pity he cannot be more forthcoming in class discussion.
  • Sound without being brilliant – 6th form geography
  • And – in summary – “he continues to produce satisfactory results which result largely from hard work rather than great flair.”

The teachers did acknowledge my lowly class positions were partly due to being in the mix with a top stream of uni-bound clever, and confident, young chaps – many of whom lived in the well-heeled leafy avenues near the playing fields of Eaton, in contrast to my humble Heartsease roots.    

Eastern Daily Press: Richard Batson

However, despite the teachers’ reservations, at the end of the CNS Sausage Machine I managed to emerge with two A Levels and 11 O Levels.

The only total failures were history and Latin, which I put down to the first point in the list above (which I cannot remember).

Indeed my faith in the school exams system was totally shattered from the moment I opened the results envelope in front of my expectant parents and found my only top grade was in ...Maths! That simply did not add up, as it was consistently my worst subject.

Yes there were some happy school memories. Lunchtime football on a gut-full of gristly mince and stodgy chocolate pudding; geography trips to Swanage, Salisbury and Scolt Head which, despite being less exotic than some of today’s educational outings, were an adventure for a boy from a family with no car; and singing in the massed school choir in St Andrew’s Hall.

And I had my first ever bit of writing published in the school magazine; a poem about a bat when I was in the first form, in 1967.

The editor’s remark about “son of a famous father” references a teacher whose nickname was Batman. Cannot remember if he did dinner, dinner, dinner duties.

So maybe those school days weren’t all that bad after all. And they probably shaped my future by showing me life roads not to go down (science, maths or religion) and steered me towards being a “man of words” – written rather than spoken.

Eastern Daily Press: First published work – a poem in the school mag

Whether my rather embarrassing reports prove useful in the county’s social history archive remains  open to debate - except that I would obviously be too timid to fight my case in such a class discussion.

Richard Batson went on to be a journalist and editor for 40 years, and is now a trustee at Sheringham Little Theatre and chairman of How Hill Trust