Thanks for the response.

As a parent, I'm relieved that the school's practices have evolved, although, to be clear, the communities of boarders and day-scholars was then so different that they may as well have been at different schools altogether.

And it's not that there aren't pleasant memories. I think I read with enjoyment every book in that library about the second world war, and was given my own set of keys to the school museum - which contained ancient uniforms for the school regiment when at war with the Boers, and I think the Italians in Ethiopia - where I could hang out and read at leisure. The sound of bagpipe practice for the regimental band early on Saturday mornings, the First's rugby games on Saturday afternoons. A young women music teacher - a rarity in the otherwise entirely male domain - who taught us Elton John songs, and an English teacher who wept uncontrollably when we read "Cry the beloved country". The productions of the Dramatic Society, whose performances I swear I've never seen bettered, and the camaraderie among those boys who were required to stay at school over holidays. Sneaking out after school and bussing it to Hillbrow to play billiards all afternoon, and, at thirteen being served beer in your school uniform at a Hillbrow cafe, no questions asked. That pancake place across the road, and those hollowed-out half-loaves of bread smeared with processed cheese and filled with crisps. The smell of cut grass during cricket season, and the pleasure in the hot Summer of the single glass of cool milk permitted at lunch. Those burning afternoons in a four on Wemmer Pan, and the sweaty, stinking ride back to Buxton House, exhausted rowers packed into the windowless back of a closed truck so tightly that movement was impossible, one of the rare times when juniors were thrown together with super-cool seniors and would hang on their every word. The other time of course was when smoking cigarettes behind Buxton, overlooking that fantastic view down the hill, juniors and seniors thrown together in an act of such criminality that the usual class distinctions simply did not apply, and democracy flourished to enable the bumming of Chesterfields, Texans, Gunstons and other brands that probably exist nowhere else but in that place and perhaps time. The wooden paneled school hall, with those hundreds of battered wooden chairs, and the sound of them scraping the floor as one, when standing for the headmaster. The photos of long dead rugby players and rowers and cricketers along the walls, and the forbidden long climb up the ladder behind the stage to the secret room at the top of the bell tower, where defiant boys had etched their names in the wooden structure for a hundred years.

It's been forty years, and when I tell my kids what it was like going to school in that place and at that time, for them it's as implausible as if I had been to Hogwarts.

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