A favorite at my school was putting condoms over all the shower heads, turning them on and doing a runner. Condoms would fill like a balloon and burst

Another trick(almost played daily)was to place the blackboard rubber on the top of a door slightly ajar and just sit there whilst the teacher walked in and got hit on head by the rubber and covered in chalk dust.

And many, many arranged mass fights with local catholic school.

To be honest, school wasn't too bad, it's what we got up to out of school

Crikey!
Forget about 'Jackass', 'Lord of the Flies' might be a more appropriate comparison...

ken

That's pretty much what my Mrs said when I told her about my schooldays.

I absolutely hated school, they wouldn't teach me what I wanted to learn and I was generally disliked by most of the teachers. All they needed to teach me was pythagorus, pi and metalwork. The only thing I should have paid attention to but didn't was French. Probably the worst years of my life, being made to do things I neither wanted to learn or needed to learn, and not being paid for it either. And don't get me started on homework and the hate filled idea that is!

How many people actually liked school?

I liked school... but best time of your life? Nah.

I LOVED school from 11-16, because every day brought some more mayhem! Seriously, it was great fun.

Had to change school at 16, and the new school was a total shock to the system. Totally buttoned down. Absolutely awful... plus the fact that after 5 years of hilarity I was completely oblivious to the fact that school could be anything other than mental! In fact, the shock sent me into a bit of a tailspin. By the time I'd sorted it out I'd cocked up my A-levels.

I think the funniest thing about the school I went to from 11-16 is that it was PRIVATE!! Nothing posh, but it was private. The kids there were the children of classic self-made men (of which there were literally thousands in the 70s Black Country, just before the early 80s manufacturing apocalypse, Thatcherite recession etc: scrap-metal merchants, demolition men, hauliers, shop keepers, steelmen, coal merchents, builders, etc etc. There were even a couple of kids whose dads had made quite a bit of money from bare-knuckle fighting ). Consequently, the school was full of complete miniature rough diamonds whose parents wanted their kids to "have a better start than they did". AND it was all boys, so really it was the perfect breeding ground for nuttiness. As a result of the parents paying for the privilege of attending the school, the school's owners were absolutely loath to discipline anyone too harshly, for fear that they'd annoy a paying parent and lose their custom (ie their money)!

Out of the blue, in 1979, an Iranian kid turned up at the school (god/allah knows how he ended up at our place). This was at a time when most of the Indian community of Britain had not yet gained wealth, so there were very few non-white kids at the school. Consequently this new boy was tested out quite a lot by some of the harsher elements, but he was mentally tough so he coped really well. He was called Mansour Khajavi. Turned out he was the son of a bigwig in the Shah's airforce, so I guess his parents were looking to hide him somewhere where the Ayatollah's hitmen would be too scared to venture!

Khajavi was absolutely hilarious, very lively and up for fun. However, one evening there was an incident involving a stone and the head of a girl from the nearby comprehensive. The stone was thrown by a kid from our class, but not Mansour. Next day the police came in to interview every 5th former one by one. Poor old Khajavi had nothing to do with it, but when he saw the agents of babylon he broke down, started shaking like a leaf and cried for his life. He was literally cacking himself. Turned out the poor kid had been rather traumatised by things he'd experienced in his final days in Tehran...

Starting to wonder whether I should write a book about my school!

My school is bollocks, one of my mates had a red strip in his hair, so they excluded him for 3 days, a bit harsh in any case, but even worse is the fact that a lot of other people have hair colour of every shade under the sun, it was just 'cause he had a "incident" earlier in school that they managed to say he has a poor attitude or some bull shit, the earlier event was two sided as with anything, only one side got punished, because of all the prejudice that only white people are racist, a lad a few years below us had a full head of red hair and even got complimented in assembly, dislike school but like messing round with my mates.

Little Louis, you reminded me of something I was going to say : I'm absolutely sure that if anything like what went on at my school had happened at a state school then there would have been exclusions, expulsions, cops, psychological reports and a fast-track to jail for some of the kids. However, the fact that it was a paid-for place meant that these naughty boys were kept pretty much sheltered from the forces of law and order. Which, on balance, I think was a good thing. I really-really detest the way that state schools are, to some extent, an early-warning surveillance service for the "justice" system, and are an arm of govt policy rather than a place for kids to get switched on to the world and all it can offer.

In reflection, yes, yes I did. At the time, even though it was only two years ago, I didn't like it at all. Would much rather be back there than at college, strangely enough