Yes, ok, Terry Putnam ( bottom left) thinks we were actually called ‘The Odds and Sods Society’.   But what would he know; he claims to have absolutely no memory of coming up to me one day (when we were both 16, maybe 17) and saying ‘Mike, you’re a mate. I’ve got a favour to ask of you’, as a result of which I found myself in the back row of the Grand Cinema on Desborough Road babysitting a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, desperately hoping that none of my other mates would see me, while Terry was ensconced in one of the double seats for which the Grand was famous (indeed, notorious) with her sixteen-year-old sister.

Whatever, the four of us are agreed that we were called the Odds and Sods something or other. And that degree of consensus among a group of seventy-something geezers is definitely to be celebrated. In fact that’s what we were doing when the photo above was taken earlier this month, at the annual dinner of the Old Wycombiensians, former pupils of the RGS, the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

From the late 1970s to 1999 I was living in London, less than 40 minutes by train from Wycombe, and since then I’ve been even closer to my old school. So why hadn’t I attended such a do before? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I actually applied for a job teaching languages at the place some time back and didn’t even receive an acknowledgment of my application, let alone an effusive, immediate reply to the effect that it was hardly worth inviting anyone else for interview seeing that I was available.  Or it could be because I don’t usually think of my old school from one year to the next, so why should  I pay good money to spend an evening with people for whom their time at school really did represent the best years of their lives.

Nor had I kept in touch with many of my old mates, though John Bedford-James (top right in the photo) was an exception. I’d even visited him in the late 50s while he was studying English at Leeds. And in 1969, when I moved there to do an MA, I was delighted to discover that he was living not too far from where I’d decided to buy a house. In fact I was round at his place the very day his son Simon came back from his first day at primary school and, when asked how it had gone, remarked plaintively that none of the other children had even heard of Buddy Holly.

But John has been living in Toronto for decades and was hardly likely to cross the Atlantic for a reunion. So when he emailed me to say that he was toying with the idea of coming this year I felt a mild twinge of guilt and conceded that, if he was prepared to travel over 3,000 miles to attend, I should be able to handle an 8-mile journey.

So, on the afternoon of Saturday the 8th of May, John and I catch the bus into Wycombe, getting off at the brand new bus station round the corner from Frogmore. ‘Isn’t this where the Rex and the Palace used to be?’ John wonders. Yes indeed, but they are long gone, together with the Grand and the Odeon; the Odeon, where we went to “Satdi mornin’ pitchers” and bounced up and down in the balcony till it felt as though it was going to collapse, and where my father was assistant manager from the mid 40s to the early 50s, which meant that I could go, absolutely free, not just to the Odeon but to the Rex, the Palace and the Grand, too, since everybody scratched everybody else’s backs in High Wycombe in those days.

John looks bewildered as we walk from the bus station through the Eden Shopping Centre which has swept away the ancient warren of alleys just beyond the High Street at the start of the long, straight road for West Wycombe, Stokenchurch and Oxford.  So I steer him quickly out of there towards what I know he will recognise, the unchanged view of the Guildhall facing Church Square at the Oxford end of the High Street.

And this evokes the earliest of my memories of the town, of my own first day at school when the three of us, me, my father and my very pregnant mother, were crammed into Turnpike Cottage, at Bisham, near the Abbey. And she took me by bus to Marlow that first morning, where we changed onto a second bus to High Wycombe, where we got off in Queen Victoria Road near the Library, then left into the High Street, all the way down, past the Red  Lion Hotel with its real red painted lion, by the Little Market House, through Church Square, past All Saints Parish Church, across to Priory Road, then up to my school, Priory Road Primary School, where I was to stay till I was nine and passed the scholarship exam to get into grammar school.  And she was there to pick me up at 4 o’clock that afternoon and take me on the reverse journey back home, by which time I knew my way so well that, next morning, as we were standing at the bus stop in Bisham, I said ‘You don’t have to come with me, Mummy. I know my way. I’ll be alright’. And she said ‘Alright. You be careful, Michael’ and gave me the money for my fare, and I was alright.

On that Saturday afternoon in early May, John and I retrace some of that route, as we have decided to walk to our old school, as we used to when we were day-boys, rather than take the bus to the top of Amersham Hill. So we head up Priory Road (past Benjamin Road, which I’d spent a whole day sweeping and weeding one hot July day, stripped to the waist and pretending not to notice the girls from Lady Verney High School on the other side of the railings), then left into the cemetery.

That’s where, another summer, Terry and I worked for a few weeks, maintaining the plots, using petrol driven power tools called ‘Tarpens’, which made such a noise that - out of respect for the mourners - we had to switch them off whenever a hearse drove into the cemetery, which meant that - as the summer went on - we became increasingly callous, since the more burials there were, the less work we did.

As we emerge from the cemetery into a little lane that runs up parallel to Amersham Road, John reminds me that my response to his asking how I was enjoying the cemetery job had been ‘it’s great, I dig graves’; but that only makes sense if you are familiar with 1950s hipster slang, which some of us had started to use as one of the side-effects of an over-exposure to early rock ‘n’ roll, Wimpy burgers and American teen movies. (Did I ever mention that Ian Dury was just a year or so behind us at the school?)

Where the lane ends we turn right into Hamilton Road, which takes us to the first building of the school complex, School House, in the front part of which the headmaster and his family used to live,  separated from us boarders by a cordon sanitaire.   On our side we subsisted on a diet of baked beans, lumpy porridge and gristle; on the other, our imagined Mr Tucker dined on roast chicken every night, hurling carcases around like Charles Laughton as Henry V111 in the Alexander Korda film. ‘Chicken’ Tucker was how we referred to him, at this time when any form of poultry was a rare treat, eaten two or three times a year if you were lucky.

Past School House we come to what was the library, now looking empty and miserable.  A few yards further on we turn left onto what had been the parade ground used by the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) every Wednesday afternoon, whose officers were a good number of our regular teachers, ones to whom we allocated nicknames, some derisory, some affectionate:   Blanco, Chunky, Crappy, Cruiser, Taffy ....  At the time, for the most part, they failed to impress us; but it struck me, not so very long ago, that these men - who faithfully put on their uniforms once a week - would have been on active service just four years before I turned up at the school in 1949, might have survived Dunkirk and D-Day, scrambled into a Spitfire during the summer of 1940, or served on one of the corvettes or cruisers which did their utmost to protect my father’s tanker as it ferried its deadly cargo of oil across the Atlantic.

The parade ground was in front of the impressive neo-Georgian facade now, sadly, hidden from the main road by a not especially memorable building dating from the early 60s. We pass between these two buildings and see two men standing in front of the main entrance, one in jacket and tie, the other more casually dressed, a gardener or caretaker we assume.  As we approach them we realise that the first is Terry Putnam,  while the under-gardener turns out to be Chris Melsom, the fourth member of our gang who, apparently, had put out a suit specially for the occasion, then driven off without it.

Our reunion was not unexpected. Terry and Chris had kept in touch and,  serendipitously, had contacted the Old Boys Association just a couple of weeks before the dinner, asking if they had any contact details for John and me.  I had met Terry a few times in the 80s, when he lived and I worked in south-east London, but Chris and I hadn’t met since we left school, and wouldn’t have recognised each other if we had passed in the street.  It isn’t until later, when I laugh at someone’s joke, that my expression triggers a memory in Chris of a much younger me and I become familiar to him again.

The event turns out to be in the new building, and we check in, collect our badges (two of which have mistakes on them, though Terry toys with the idea of going with ‘Richard’ Putnam) and get some red wine in.  Our glasses filled I propose a toast to ‘old friends’, but Terry says, ‘No, the Odds and Sods Society’, which is where we came in.

Much of the evening is spent reminiscing, filling in gaps in each other’s memories and getting quietly mellow.  One of them asks me what my girlfriend was called, the one from St Bernard’s Convent, and I remember walking with a group of schoolmates past the playing fields where a team from the Convent, in their maroon kit, was playing hockey against the High School and someone said ‘Who’s that amazing one, with the slim hips?‘ and I said ‘That’s Pauline, Pauline Howard, my girlfriend’.  My first girlfriend, my first love.

After the dinner is cleared away, we settle down to listen to the head’s review of the year, amazed at the activities now available to the pupils both in and out of school: two recording studios and a technology lab for the music department;  a variety of dramatic and musical activities; groups visiting an impressive range of parts of the world.    (I remember that Mr Tucker, back in 1952, though it worth announcing to the entire school that two boys were actually going - wait for it - to travel by plane during the easter holidays, one of them being me, off to southern Iraq where my father was working for the Basra Dredging Company, keeping the  Shatt Al-Arab - confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - open, so that ships could reach Abadan, on the Persian side, and the great Iraqi port of Basra.)

During his speech we are pleased to hear the head welcome our group, pointing out that this is the first time that we four have met in over half a century (making two different mistakes with our names this time, though ‘Michael Vaughan-Williams’ does have a certain air about it.)

Then to the final formal part of the evening, where the guest of honour - a recently retired teacher with 36 years of service - reminisces about his time at the school.  Now I don’t want to be unkind, and it is clear from the reaction of most people present that this is going down like Elvis in Vegas, but it seems to our little group that he is threatening to cover his RGS career in real time.  The two personable 6th formers sharing our table look slightly surprised at the occasional bleatings of distress emanating, sotto voce, from our side of the table, ‘I’ve lost the will to live’, being one of the mildest. 

Had he arranged it chronologically, this would have been fine.  We could have done a countdown: ‘Just twenty years to go ....... ten ...... five ..... four .... three ... two .. one’. But no, it was done thematically: 10 minutes on running the cross-country competitions, then football, then golf (‘please don’t let him have run the tiddley-winks club!’), followed by similar time devoted to the variety of subjects he taught.  Maybe if we had been familiar with more than 1% of the names he mentioned we could have enjoyed it. But then, we weren’t part of the typical audience, and the wine was slipping down well, and at least we were together and making plans for meeting again, maybe for spreading the net a little wider.  And, according to Terry, the Redrup sisters as were, Mary and Jill, were wondering what had happened to Vaughan-Rees and Bedford-James when he met them last year,.  And maybe we could cut out the middleman next time ...  don’t think we can leave it another fifty years .... great evening ..... great to see you again ... great ... bye.