The bell at secondary school rang for me in 1958, writes James Boyle. Our Catholic school, Holyrood, was in the Southside of bleak, post-war Glasgow. There were at least 10 classes of first-year pupils in 1958 and each would have had around 40 youngsters. Holyrood had a fair claim to be the biggest school in Scotland with, perhaps, 2,000 unruly kids. I had sleepwalked there from a cosy and benevolent primary school into a raucous world obsessed, it seemed, with soccer and genitalia. Maybe The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s couldn’t happen in Glasgow but our school uniforms, with smart blue and silver diagonal striped ties, seemed to suggest those schools in the comics I loved – Adventure, The Wizard, The Hotspur: laughs, villains and heroes.  

The next few years were wasted. I hated the place, played truant discreetly, learned little and existed day to day, lost in the melee. All the future shapes of ambition and life to be, nourished at primary school, leaked away. I even repeated a year towards the end, in my purposelessness.