The Great Slide
Looking back now in
old age, it was probably the harsh winter of 1947
that encouraged its creation….The Great
Slide. … stretching from the entrance gates
of PGS and careering down in a seductive curve to
the old wooden building situated to one side of
the main school at the bottom….
Gleaming. Cold. Wide. Dangerous. And
irresistible. Running down towards the top of it
and launching yourself on to it was like jumping
down the side of Mount Everest…or the
vastness of the Russian steppes….or a
glacier at the South Pole.
Some boys could only summon up the courage to
slide conventionally… facing forwards,
upright….others crouched down in the
“diddy-man” posture… some lads who
would no doubt go on to win the Victoria Cross,
went down doing diddy-man, backwards…..For days, possibly
even weeks, the slide remained in place…
every morning we arrived at school expecting to
find it turned to slush by some jobs-worth
teacher or caretaker. But every day it was always
there.. frozen to new and improbable levels of
hazard in the night and once more looking
untrodden…. Waiting for us.
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For the days the Great Slide remained in place in
the playground of Prescot Grammar School
schoolboy reputations were made for ever by acts
of icy recklessness … and also lost by the
swotty boys who walked down past it, gingerly,
averting their eyes, into school.
Health and Safety? We’d never heard of it.
And neither clearly had the school authorities.
Happy days of dangerous delights, they were.
Could never happen today.
Peter Harrison. ( later transferred to the more
sober confines of Holt High School, Liverpool,
1948) |
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