The best day of my school year was always the same: 29 May. It was known as Founder’s Day which, in most schools with such pretensions, meant being forced to dress in your best clothes, sing a hymn in Latin and then listen to some old bloke telling you how to live a good and righteous life. Doesn’t sound promising, does it? Except that at our school, it was different. We may have had the Latin hymn but, after that, we were told we must leave the school and go wherever we wanted (within legal limits, I suppose, though I don’t ever remember that being spelled out). This may not sound that spectacular, until you realise that this was a school for blind and almost-blind children.
You were also presented with five shillings, which I suppose was intended as a survival kit, but which we realised could buy 60 penny chews, or a dirty book from the top shelf of the newsagents, which the one boy with a bit of sight could read to you with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass.
If you think that, 60 years on, we live in a more liberal age [...]