My mother, who was quite irreverent about these things, maintained that the order’s main business was doing people’s laundry and that the school was something they did in their spare time. I’m sure my mother was doing the nuns an injustice, but I like to believe it anyway.

I started in the kindergarten with Mother Joseph. Mother Joseph was very scary nun, who - allegedly - used to tell us about black angels and the devil. (My mother later said that Mother Joseph had been sent back to the order’s main house to be reprogrammed!) I don’t actually remember that, but I do remember being scared of her. She was missing a finger on one hand, something I noticed when she marked my exercise book. She used to write on the blackboard (it one was one of the old fashioned kind on an easel) in a hand that mimicked the Century Gothic or whatever the typeface was that was used in our reading book - supposedly easy for young children to read. Even now, seeing that kind of handwriting or typeface can give me a funny feeling.

We used to have to lie down for a rest after lunch. I thought that was deeply insulting. I never had a rest at home and, anyway, I was a BIG boy (all of 4 or 5) and I didn’t need anything sissy like a rest. We used to have to lie down on what my memory recalls as being like camp beds, but with red tubular frames. The bit we lay on was canvas.

It’s amazing what comes back in my memory (although I have a very patchy recall of my own past) as I think and write about that time of my life. The horrible, smelly plastic beakers that we had to drink our playtime milk out of. The 1/3 pint bottles with cardboard disks as stoppers that the milk came in. The stinking lavatories in a small brick building in the playground - I used to hold it all in until I could get home so that I didn’t have to use that vile brick building. The shifting alliances in the playground.

One thing I never found out is why my parents (mother was Church of England, my father was, I think, an agnostic) sent me to a Catholic school. My best friend was a Catholic and it is possible that her mother recommended the school to my parents. The Protestant kids had to go to a half-hour Bible class every day. These were taught by a small woman in a grey felt hat, who called the boys ‘little boy’ - very annoying. The Catholics would go off to Mass on various high days and holy days. I was very surprised one day when all my classmates came back from Mass with ash crosses on their foreheads. I had no idea what it signified, and I don’t think anyone ever explained.

Tribal Groove African Body Percussion (very intriguing - go on, have a look!)

Tom Leith (Composer and music producer with his own studio, which can be hired.)