Were I to write a misery memoir, it would be a slim volume, and – without knocking Kurt Vonnegut’s “man in a hole” shape of storytelling – not one amounting to much more than the word count of this column. Which is handy isn’t it?

There would be chapters on my two periods of living in a caravan, first as a toddler near Heathrow and then as an early teen in an Oxfordshire village, and one on enduring a winter in the coldest student flat in Aberdeen (in which the Shaman’s original drummer once pissed out of my first floor window during a party). But the main section would tell of my time at a boarding school for the partially sighted when I was eleven years old.

However, far from an unhappy memory, other than a few bouts of homesickness and the bothersome regime of early-to-bed early-to-rise, the 18 months I spent at that Hogwarts for blind wizards was a magical time. There were playing fields, an allegedly heated swimming pool, and the full-time friends I had there – thrown together as we were 24/7. They were the kind of comrades the narrator of Stand By Me had in mind when he said at the end of that film: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”. Or maybe those marble-playing miscreants of Lowell in the 1930s, the souls of which Jack Kerouac sought to sanctify through the “spontaneous bop prosody” of his Dr Sax novella.

In a strange and crumbling world of long corridors, hissing Victorian plumbing, and a constant smell of industrial laundry and stewed tea, the former Brighton Asylum for the Blind was set at the top of a hill in an East Sussex seaside town. And these were forever friends – if forever could be condensed into just short of two years towards the end of happy childhoods and before being ambushed by hormones.

There was D from Bedford, a mini Marlon Brando in his leather jacket and supreme like-I-give-a-shit swagger. J was from somewhere in London, but it could have been the burbs, a Just William figure with scabbed knees but looking to put aside childish things and discover the secrets of punk rock. Wiry and sensitive, wearing orange-tinted glasses, E was the albino child of an Anglo-Caribbean family, from Oxford like me but the less than leafy Blackbird Leys.

There were others. The girls who we saw now and then, their living quarters elsewhere. One white-haired lass decided we were going out though I don’t recall any kisses, holding hands or even a conversation that lasted more than a minute. When she judged the romance to be over, her older sister handed me a 50p piece by way of my P45. It seemed an important artefact and I kept it in my broken handled Moscow Olympics mug for two years before blowing it on a quarter of wine gums and a can of Coke.

The staff were wonderful, with a sadistic exception or two. I experienced the sting of a ruler on the palm of my hand and the thwack of a slipper on the backside but the pyjamas stayed on. And there was never a hint of impropriety of which I was aware.

My favourite teacher, Mr M, read us The Hobbit, improved my grammar immeasurably, and spoke to us like we were adults even when the evidence suggested otherwise. One teaching assistant was the daughter of Mac, the Daily Mail cartoonist, and we were all secretly in love with her.

She wrapped her arms around me and my co-conspirator M, his face one of fear and freckles, as we toured the London Dungeons on a day trip. And she consoled us after our football team was regularly thrashed by our rivals, and no I’m not making this up, a nearby school of asthmatics: 4-0, 7-1, 12-0. The wheezy bastards.

Our Admiral kit was based on the 1976 Southampton strip, which was weird as we were so much closer to Brighton. Punished for not wearing my baggy tracksuit trousers over my shorts one wintry lunchtime, I was sent to the library to write out “I MUST NOT MAKE RUDE GESTURE AT MRS M” two hundred times. It was there that I would learn about the history of Scotland (1314 and all that), exchange James Herbert novels as if they were contraband, and get up early to read the tabloid back pages.

I left the school for the last time at the end of 1979, my parents unhappy I’d be sitting only a handful of ‘O’ levels. The place closed down six years later when the policy of mainstreaming kids with a handicap (as was the terminology of the time) came into play.

Still, I’ve only to hear Wuthering Heights or Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and I’m back there, treading those squeaky corridors, smelling those Victorian smells, in that strange, crumbling and enchanted place at the top of the hill in an English seaside town, where specky four-eyes and his pals will always be playing. ■

Rodger Evans