Old Uffingtonians Association (1994)

   Willesden County Grammar School                         Ex-Pupils 1924-1967                    




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Russell Cleaver  (for a picture pro-tem - look at my brother's picture - we are still fairly similar!)

Oh memories leave me alone!  School days I thought I had forgotten - except I find this site has unlocked half remembered feelings.  Partial pictures that are at once so fresh yet incomplete.

Looking back I think I played football and daydreamed my way through school.  It wasn’t until I went to art school that I woke up – then realised art education at WCGS had been entirely recreational.  But school had imparted more than mere education as, dear reader you will know.  Girls for a start!  They seemed so self-assured, mature and terrifying to me then.  Tony and I had to separate thereafter to discover more.

And so to art college in the 60’s, a liberating time to be a student.  But as for sex, drugs and rock & roll?  Well we were all there and there seemed precious little of the former at the time.  It was an impressionable time.

Later teaching art proved the only outlet, a decidedly less enlightening experience.  Luckily a college education in Wales had left other lasting lessons on a Willesden schoolboy.  The countryside had worked its quiet magic on me.

So years later here am I, having been a countryside ranger, now a manager of a historic park in Hampshire.  Along the way, rich but not with money, geographically separated from my twin but attached to a lovely wife and 3 boys.  Disconcerted to find that school life and adolescence, which seemed a world away, is so disturbingly accessible via the internet.

In my mind I am once more saving penalties for the Old Uffs… Today I still play football, but it’s now ‘5 a-side for the over 50’s’!

Oh, Roll over Doc Roberts and Let it Be!