St Gabriels High School, Bury: Sixteen Forever
Memory is a currency that can't be banked but demands to be spent. This is how I squandered mine last weekend, returning to an institution that shaped me four decades earlier.
Part I: The Trespass
MAY 2025: I'm standing outside a ten-foot fence on an ordinary Saturday in Spring, with no real intention of doing anything but photographing the exterior. I was satisfied with being on the outside looking in, memories washing over me as I circled the perimeter. Then I notice a tree with branches extending beyond the fence line. It seems to have roots on both sides, as if it belongs to both worlds simultaneously. Looking at it, I realise someone else has used this same route before.
I check it out, thinking maybe I can do this too. It's a stretch, I'm 55 years old after all, but the branches offer a path over those menacing spikes at the top. Getting back out might be a problem, but I decide I'll figure that out later. Something deeper than curiosity pulls me toward this forbidden territory - an impulse that overrides the rational knowledge that I shouldn't be here.
The moment my feet hit the ground inside, an enormous sense of space engulfs me. The breeze, the wide-open playing field, a sudden calm. Taking those first strides feels like walking into a blanket of memories – all those games, those voices, kicking the ball, the goals, the corners, the free kicks, the whistle. Summer sports days and lying on the grass making daisy chains, the girls chatting nearby.
Time stops completely. The distant Saturday afternoon traffic, the sound of a quad bike on the old cross-country routes, distant sirens all fade to nothing. I'm suspended between then and now, caught in a strange limbo where decades collapse into themselves. Like Household's hunter in Rogue Male, I've retreated into a space between worlds – neither fully present in 2025 nor truly back in 1986, but occupying that strange threshold where past and present overlap.
As I walk toward the main building, there's a magnetism drawing me, but it's weak, not the strong pull of belonging but a faint echo of connection. I'm trespassing in the most literal sense, yet something feels wrong about that word. How can you trespass in a place that shaped you? My mind flickers with worry about getting caught or triggering an alarm, but this pull is far greater than that concern.
The silence is absolute, unnatural. Schools aren't meant to be quiet. They're designed for cacophony, for the collision of voices and movement, for sudden eruptions of laughter and persistent undertones of conversation. I find myself listening for the echoes of authority - Mr Robinson's measured tone and talent to teach, Sister Kathleen's firm instructions and disbelief at the standard of general behaviour, Mr Wroe's enthusiastic explanations and dry humour, Mrs Healy's musical direction and withering looks hearing our juvenile compositions, Mr Sutton's flustered authority, Mr Farrell’s geographic geography (yeah, I know), Mrs Lancashire's perfect pronunciation and sartorial flair, Mrs Watson's linguistic talent and youthful intensity, Terry Woolhouse sparing the whistle on the field, Gerry Byrne choosing the teams in the gym, Mr Hopkins appearing suddenly around corners.
I reach the building and touch it. It gives off an energy I recognise immediately. What catches me off guard are the phantom smells that suddenly surface, sensory memories that have lain dormant for decades. The distinctive chemical tang of the science labs where Bunsen burners hissed. The musty combination of floor polish and chalk dust that permeated every classroom. The woodwork room's comforting blend of sawdust and varnish. The unmistakable institutional scent of school dinners that would announce itself hours before lunchtime, seeping through corridors and under doors. Even the particular smell of rain-dampened uniforms drying on radiators during winter months. These olfactory ghosts are perhaps the most visceral triggers of all, bypassing conscious thought and dropping me instantly back into 1986 more effectively than any visual cue could manage. I find myself involuntarily inhaling deeper, trying to capture these spectral scents that exist now only in memory.
Walking around, I try to identify the original features that remain from my childhood. Buildings have been changed, renovated. The cladding, fascias and soffits are different. The windows are new, plastic instead of metal, double-glazed instead of the leaky ones we had. But the brick is the same, maybe slightly faded or worn. Some of the paths remain unchanged too.
So much else seems to have been filled in. Where there was once space, they've built gardens or temporary structures. A glass-roofed outdoor canteen sits between the existing canteen and sports hall. They've knocked through walls for new doors, filled open areas in. The passageway around the boys' yard is now an indoor walkway rather than an external one. I'm reminded of Duror's forest in The Cone Gatherers – a place once familiar now reshaped by human intervention, yet still holding within it something uncorrupted and essential.
Part II: The Return
In the boys' yard, I find myself trapped between two realities – the physical present where I'm an intruder, and the emotional past where I'm exactly where I should be. It's like being back after summer holidays, when we'd return not quite recognising each other, looking slightly different, reacquainting ourselves. Only they aren't here, but I am, still that 13, 14-year-old boy, back after time away. In a rush of air I can almost hear the muted tones of children, my school colleagues in that space. Though it's been 40 years, it feels so fresh in memory.
Names surface unbidden, a roll call that plays in my head with clarity: Tom Claypool, Ian Gilmore, Neil Gowing, Andrew Knight, Andrew Lilley, Simon Murphy, Mark Radovic, Eric Tamanis, Paul Teece, Andrew Walsh, Simon Williams, Paul Zdybal. I can see them all, frozen in 1986, their uniforms never aging, their faces forever sixteen. Then the girls who shared our days: Siobhan Bierne, Paula Cockshutt, Karen Cooke, Siobhan Costello, Nicola Dawson, Helen Delargy, Charlotte Duxbury, Hilary Farrington, Martine Gee, Lisa Hogan, Lisa Kenny, Lisa Magee, Cora Mahoney, Laura McTague, Frances Marshall, Rosalind Naylor, Ann Taylor, Melanie Waterworth.
We breathed this air. We stood on this tarmac. This space contained us all: our arguments and alliances, our conversations and declarations, our collective certainties and private doubts.
Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)" plays in my head as I walk the perimeter. Not because it was particularly significant then, but because it's become the universal soundtrack to 80s school nostalgia. Our actual soundtrack was more eclectic – The Smiths for some of us, Madonna for others, with Queen, Paul Young, Duran Duran, Human League, Funboy Three and Thompson Twins creating unexpected bridges between social circles.
I touch the handrail leading from what was once the science block, half-expecting an alarm to sound. But no one comes. The geese on the playing field watch with indifference. The security cameras stare blindly. The metal feels cold and impersonal, offering no connection to the past beyond what exists in my memory. Like Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I, I'm caught between identities – the carefree schoolboy and the responsible adult, inhabiting both roles simultaneously while fully belonging to neither.
I find myself humming "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" The Smiths track that seemed to capture something essential about teenage melancholy. The melody echoes strangely in the empty yard. Music was everything then, it provided the framework for understanding emotions too complex to name, for establishing identities still forming.
The camera feels both essential and inadequate. I take photos knowing they won't capture what I'm really experiencing – not the buildings or empty yards, but something more elusive. The feeling of us still existing here together. The particular quality of light on a Friday afternoon when the weekend stretched ahead like a promise. The sound of thirty voices simultaneously answering a question in class. The photos will show walls and windows, concrete and sky, but they can't capture the architecture of memory that overlays everything I see and feel today.
The renovations and additions feel almost personal, an attempt to erase the school I knew. But they've failed. My St Gabriel's exists alongside this new version, the two realities overlapping like a double exposure. I've become like Davies in his Autobiography of a Supertramp – both participant and observer in my own narrative, seeing with eyes that belong simultaneously to the past and present.
As I walk back toward the tree and perimeter fence, I struggle to get over, thinking I might hurt myself. The moment I land outside, it's like the volume and energy have gone. It's quiet, I'm away and separated from all of that. Time begins to flow normally again. A car passes. Someone calls a dog. The spell breaks, but not completely.
The photos I've taken aren't really of buildings or empty playgrounds. They're attempts to capture this impossible feeling – of standing in a place where time has both passed and stopped, of being an intruder in a space that still, somehow, feels like mine. They're a record not of St Gabriel's as it exists in 2025, but of the strange intersection between the school that lives in my memory and the one that stands in brick and mortar.
As I walk away, Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" fades in, an anthem of departure that feels appropriate to this moment of leaving, again. Forty years separate these two departures - the official one in 1986 and this unauthorised one in 2025 - but they're connected by an invisible thread, a continuity of experience that defies the progression of time. I was here. We were all here. And in some strange way, we still are, all of us still sixteen, preserved in the amber of memory, frozen in time yet somehow still vibrant, still waiting for the bell to ring one last time.
