I have just been looking at my school reports. I left school in 1957, so I have been looking back some forty years. The reports make sombre reading. Not just in the unfulfilled expectations that they engender but also in the faults they emphasise which still prevail to this day. I wish I had read them at the time they were written, with the advantages brought about by age.

I was checking in particular for a quote from my housemaster, with whom I had a serious falling out in my last years, concerning a Suede Jacket.

In the 1950s life in England was grey. In the aftermath of the war, with rationing still in force, goods in the shops were in short supply and very limited in range. My staple reading was The Saturday Evening Post, the weekly American magazine that was filled with short stories, cartoons and articles. It was blessed with front covers painted by the inimitable Norman Rockwell who managed to capture cameos of Americana with verve and style. Most important to me were the advertisements. These showed goods that were only dreams to us; cars that were coloured, huge refrigerators, television sets with vast screens and best of all clothing. Clothing in the UK was monochrome grey. Here were check shirts, blue jeans and leather jackets. It was like staring at a land of plenty through a glass wall barrier.

I really thirsted for the wherewithal to find and buy these objects of desire.

In the Summer holidays of 1956 I worked for four weeks at the Hudson's Bay Company in London. This was then the central market place for furs. In August they held an annual auction of South West African Persian Lamb. Some 600,000 skins arrived in London; each was ticketed with a punch card and then sorted into lots. The sorting was done by a team of highly skilled workers. Our job was to deliver the unsorted skins to the sorter and then redeliver the sorted skins to the correct lots. We worked twelve hours day seven days a week, no European Court rulings then. The skins were stiff like parchment and had jagged edges. The sorters spent about ten seconds on each. Sorting them by size, type and tightness of curl and colour. Those with an almost silky texture were the most prized. Just prior to the auction were the show days when the buyers came to look at examples of the lots. We had to fetch and carry the skins for the buyers. This was great as they tipped. Some the Yanks tipped really well, others like the Russians in particular, tipped badly. It was all the luck of the draw. At the end of the four weeks we had earned about ú50 (equivalent to over ú500 in todays Mickey Mouse money) a fair sum for a lad of sixteen. Having achieved the money to slake some of my desires it was a question of finding and choosing.

What to spend it on? Well, 1956 was the dawn of Rock and Roll with its precursor Skiffle being already in vogue. Hands up all those who can remember the Rock Island Line an amusing song about a train driver bamboozling a customs man with a load of pig iron on its way to New Orleans. Lonnie Donegan made this song and himself famous and then went on to record such favourites as My Old Man's a Dustman. Tommy Steele was plucking his first string and Cliff Richard was curling his lip.

So the obvious start was a guitar. I hurried along to my local music store and bought an acoustic guitar shaped like a cello. The days of Fender Stratocruisers were not yet with us. Having got the guitar and learned four chords I needed the right kit. In the 2is coffee bar in Soho, yes coffee was all that was needed to fire the imagination in those simplistic times, suede jackets were de rigeur. So in true adolescent style I tracked one down and bought it. Anything to conform. It was mid brown, hip length, with four buttons and two slanted pockets.

I wore it constantly and with pride.

My relations with with my housemaster began to slide into hostility as the tight handcuffs of school life vied with the opportunities for fun outside.

This prompted him to remark to my father that I was becoming a worry to him and was on the slippery slope to hell and damnation. "The next thing he'll do is buy a suede jacket", he climaxed in one of my reports. As if this was the mark of Caan and I would be lost forever. What he didn't know was that hanging in my cupboard was the very coat of destruction.

I left school and meandered through life. The suede jacket remained with me and features proudly in the photographs of me hugging Mrs Fox, taken in 1969 to mark our engagement.

Some 20 years later when the Doctor, our first born, was reaching his seventeenth birthday, the suede jacket reappeard from a cupboard and after the odd stitch, was on his back. Since when it has hardly been off it.

The moral of this tale is that the suede jacket has served a life of constant use and given much more value than the advice of the housemaster.

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