Please Miss, We're Boys

Please Miss, We're Boys is a memoir that outlines what it was like to be a "Miss" (a female teacher) back in the 1960s.

This is the story of Susan Elkin who, in 1968 at age 21, is thrust straight out of a somewhat sheltered teacher training college into the midst of a difficult inner London boy's secondary school.

She has pretty much zero experience, is a somewhat naive young lady with a propensity to wear short skirts and she is facing boys from Deptford, London.

The boys she deals with are typical of inner city boys, they are brash, outspoken, rude, coarse of tongue but also touched with a charming vulnerability.

She concludes that what they would benefit from is some good teaching. And she sets out to make sure that this happens.

With the backing of a group of disparate helpers, colleagues who are honest, open, forthright and a little bit off the wall, she manages to pull it off, finding ways to get the lads to take it easy, to sit down and to get down to some learning and some working.

The book is filled with stuff that has a resonance for me. The children read Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives, as did I at about the same time in my secondary school, although we never had a teacher who like Mr O'Riordan who "just blew up."

It's an amazing well-written memoir which tells the reader a good deal about the school but also a good deal about the Deptford of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It's published by The Book Guild at £9.99 on 28th July.