PARK Hall was a Secondary Modern – it was local, and that was the selection criteria.
School was a riot. The fire alarm was forever going off, and an hour lesson would be 20 minutes of calming us down, 20 minutes of teaching, and 20 minutes of us waiting to get out.
It was a tough school. There were always big scraps on the green with the school down the road.
And the pupils went on strike, never mind the teachers. I remember the teachers coming back to work after being on strike, and the pupils just walked out!
I played for the football, rugby and basketball teams, but I was awful at cricket.
I wasn't a genius, academically. I got O-Levels in English literature, English language, geography, and commerce – and a CSE Grade 1 in maths – but I failed catastrophically in everything to do with science. Of course, later I had to learn all about combustion for my job. I was a late developer.
I had a wonderful English teacher called Derek Cohen. When I was 15, we used to sneak into pub clubs in Birmingham, and sometimes he would be in there – but he never grassed us up.
I signed up to do two A-levels but my attendance was rather sporadic, as I was working part-time at Tesco. In the end I passed geography but failed English.
The school has been demolished and rebuilt, now. You wouldn't recognise it at all. It wasn't a bad school by any means, things were just very different then.