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Floreat
Prescotia |
The
Website for former pupils of the Prescot
Grammar and Prescot Schools |
© The
Prescotian 2000 - 2010 |
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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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