Reflections from past pupil, Dan Gordon

We moved house in 1967 to a small development at the bottom of a long established street off the Holywood Road in Belfast when I was seven. Within days of arrival the lady next door interrogated me on all things and demanded to know where I was going to go to secondary school - without hesitation I told her Sullivan Upper. I remember she could barely hold her amusement - not at the name - more at the audacity of the whelp like me presuming I would be invited to darken their door. Four years later I showed her the letter saying I was in.

Sullivan was everything I wanted and needed it to be. Three levels of Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, lots of Scripture union trips, half a dozen school plays, hundreds of rugby games, geography field trips to count sand dunes at Murlough, shoppers in Bangor and potato fields at Scrabo. Cutting up a rat in Science, lighting Bunsen burners, marveling at a Vander graph generator and radioactive sources, having debates in English and playing the recorder and singing On Ilkey Moor Bar 'tat in Music. Exams like your 'Junior', single exam desks, prefects with shiny silver badges and green blazers, weird wooden climbing frames that clung to the Assembly Hall walls. The two big red velvet thrones that sat in the entrance hall and defied you to sit. The honours boards adorned with names that had two middle initials, the corridors lined with black and white Shakespearean casts and the staff corridor, where angels fear to tread. The 'old gym' 6th form centre and the freezing swimming pool with waterproof medical toilet paper, the grant wing and the tennis courts and the temporary art room, the P7 prep out in the old cricket pavilion and the headmasters house at the bottom of the drive and the School Song.
Of course there was daily report and could do betters, there were invitations to wait outside the door during class, there were inquiries and accusations, writing out school rules and at least one canning for 'horseplay'.

But what can I say it permeated my DNA it made me what I am - I would do it all again in a heartbeat - and would do very little different. Except maybe that thing with the coffin...