Bilborough Grammar School

Gulls wheel over the fields

And boys, with their trainers and low-slung bags

Slouch down to the gate

We carried haversacks – remnants from the War

Green from the army, blue the RAF

It's good to see that slouching has endured

Baggy clothes and, written in Gothic script,

The names of the latest bands

Where my school was, a college now stands

Themed for learning, it is all angles and curves

Like a high-tech shopping mall

Students mill around

The playground is gone – playtime how quaint

Games of football with an old tennis ball

Weirdly, at the edge of the site, is an estate of ‘executive’ homes

New and strange, like a clump of mushrooms

I recall Balloon Woods, Strelley village

Cross-country runs we were forced on

I bet they don't do that now

Iron filings heaving in my chest

Sketching graves in an old churchyard

The green, moss-covered walls

I can just make it out – the touchline where we watched girls

Strange, distant creatures, to me they still are

Wollaton Hall stands out

A turreted chateau, improbably close

The scrubby fields where the old pit was

More memories – experiments with gunpowder

Those strange, disreputable magazines

I feel, in one way, like the slouching boys

In another, like an old soldier

On a battlefield that barely survives

As I re-trace my cycling route from school

I recall, precisely, the pebble-dashed houses

And the faux-rustic street names

Inside, I am a boy on his bike

These streets were my patch, my Serengeti

I arrive, finally, at the house

Where I left childhood

Number one, Burnbreck Gardens

It is a brick villa, modest yet somehow smug

Pleased with its social status, its neat walls and its privet hedge

That was my bedroom window

The walls ice blue, the ceiling chocolate brown

Strange colours for a child

Roasting meat, joints of home-grown weed

King Crimson, the Moody Blues from my sister's room

Those are my memories of that house