I WAS in the cemetery desecrating a grave when I was caught by The Ghoul who tried to drown me in a barrel of cold water.

Actually, Paul “Louie” Lightfoot and I were not exactly desecrating the grave but merely trying to toss ping pong balls into a large blue vase. It was The Ghoul who said we were desecrating it. And he wasn’t really a ghoul, but Keith Hargreaves the sexton who looked after all the graves and the twin chapels-ofrest.

In fairness he wasn’t trying to drown me either, but keen to reward my mischief with a ducking. And me and Louie were only eight.

Hargreaves was renowned, celebrated and feared among all the kids in downtown Leeds around 1951. We liked him, really.

It was like having our own pantomime villain: “He’s behind you.”

The Ghoul was a character, and there were others. At West Leeds High School there was five feet small, fat Michael “Fanny” Crosland the chemistry master. I don’t know where he got the “Fanny” from but he was a great favourite with the lads.

In fact, he was a schoolboy’s dream and the very incarnation of what a chemistry teacher should be like.

He loved to perform spectacular experiments.

I think he was a thwarted magician really. We’d all be told to gather round on our high stools and Fanny would set out his test tubes, retorts and Bunsen burners like a conjurer preparing his act. One day he promised us “a pretty green puff”. We all sat agog as he fiddled with his elements like Dr Faustus.

I can’t remember the purpose of the experiment and I think it would best be put down to “entertainment”. What a treat.

We didn’t get a pretty green puff though.

Fanny must have overdone the ingredients and we got instead a loud explosion and a big black cloud. Once we’d got over our shock, we chortled to see Fanny emerging from out of the darkness, strewn with what looked like enormous cobwebs.

The physics teacher was good entertainment, too. He was Mr Wilson, very affectionately known as Long John. He’d joined the school straight from Cambridge when it opened in 1913 and he was still there spouting about the electro-magnetometer and the angle of incidence being equal to the angle of reflection at the Golden Jubilee in 1953.

Long John would stand facing the blackboard chalking out his long equations and boys would flick paper pellets into the hole in his gown – no doubt the same gown he’d bought from Eade and Ravenscroft one fine day before the First World War.

He told us how to make an atomic bomb: “First get your uranium 235…” I can hear him now, like a baritone version of Delia Smith.

Don’t think we boys weren’t capable of seriousness.

My theological education was catered for from an early age. This was supplied by “Holy Joe,” the undertaker’s assistant, Mr Coates, who used to look to the peacock feathers and sweep up the horse muck after posh funerals.

We didn’t do multicultural diversity in those days. Instead, we went to Sunday School where the undertaker’s assistant enlightened us in this way: “You will start to rot and be eaten up by worms. But that’s only your body. Jesus will descend from out of the clouds, catch your naughty soul in his hands and drop it into the fires of hell and you’ll burn everlastingly.” Good old gentle Jesus eh?

There were giants in those days. Characters. I wonder where they all are now…