Are you still friends with any of your friends from high school how have they changed since then?

The quick answer to that is "No". But, to understand the reason for that, you have to understand the education system as it was in the 1950s in Britain. Acceptance into the secondary school system was by merit and all children had to sit an examination at the age of eleven. Your placement in the "!1 plus ", as it was known, determined which school you went to.

In my home town of Wolverhampton there were probably several thousand eleven year-olds sitting the exam in 1952. It was a nail biting time waiting for the results and when the envelope arrived in the mail at home the tension was high as it was opened. To my parents' relief I found myself accepted into the Grammar School that was the top rung of the hierarchy of schools for boys - at the very top level there was no co-education, the top 90 boys in the town went to the Grammar School and the top 90 girls went to Wolverhampton High School for Girls.

This meant that the students came from the whole town, a big catchment area of 160,000 people covering a large geographic area. Any friends that you made at school were often living miles and miles away so that you did not spend time with them at weekends or in the school holidays. The other thought that I have is that as the school followed an academic structure and included such things as Latin and Ancient Greek in its curriculum there was a very heavy workload of homework, usually one to two hours a night and more at weekends.

That left very little time for free time with friends so the friendships tended to be very short term term and after graduation then most boys went on to universities scattered around the country and so school friendships evaporated over time.