The Rev Dr Peter Mullen attended WLHS in the 1950s. He is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. Mullen is Chaplain to the Honourable Company of Air Pilots, one of the Livery Companies of the City of London and the Anglican Chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, a largely honorific and historical post.

He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal.

Further biographical details on Peter Mullen

I was talking with some children at a christening party: "I expect you're looking forward to the school holidays?" Long faces. "No, not really." What, children dreading the hols? I said. "Why not?" And they answered in chorus: "There's nowt to do."

Despite being better off than previous generations, with more advanced toys and games and technical gizmos, today's kids are in some important ways the most deprived.
They have very little independence and even less freedom.
Hysterical fear of child-molesters means many children are driven to school by their parents and driven home again at teatime.

And when they are off school, they don't play out as we used to do. Instead, they spend hours in their bedrooms staring into the computer or watching reams of ghastly stuff on television.
Those children at the christening party asked me what it was like when I was their age. "Oh," I said, "you mean in the olden days". I told them about growing up in the back streets of Leeds in the Fifties and of how we didn't have television and there were no computers or mobile phones.

They stared at me as if I had been some pitiable, impoverished wretch. With no computer, telly or mobile, how ever did I fill the time? Wasn't it boring? I told them that boredom was the very last thing to occur to us.
My mother used to give me four pence each day for my bus fair, but I used to walk or trot to school and spend the money at Mrs Pearson's tuck shop. [ me too in the 60's -JS]

There, you could buy a pennyworth of hot fresh bread and a halfpennyworth of butter.
Or for tuppence you could have a jam and cream long bun. As we got a bit older, things got even better. Mrs Pearson's shop had an upper room where, at lunchtime, she would let us go and listen to the Test Match on the wireless - and, I'm afraid, smoke.

There was never any question of staying in your bedroom, except for sleeping. The whole point of childhood, as I recall it, was to escape your parents and play out. Doing a few jobs and running errands were an occupational hazard, an irritating interruption, a necessary evil, and you got them over and done with as quickly as possible.
But the worst any of us was asked to do was queue at the Co-op for a cabbage or half a pound of lard. Playing out meant nothing in particular, nothing elaborate anyhow.

Chucking a ball against the wall - until the neighbours came out and told you off for making a noise. Hopscotch. Hide-and-seek in the side streets and alleys. Cowboys and Indians over the roofs of the outside loos.
But the summer holidays! Nowt to do? We would have scoffed at the very idea. Every morning I went off with Michael Hanson, Roger Hodgson and Rod Boom to a bit of spare land which was misleadingly referred to as "the gardens". Here we played makeshift cricket all day. Or we would go into Armley park and roller-skate around the bandstand.

We were warned strictly never to go near the canal. So, of course, we did. There was a pipe that stretched across the canal and we used to run across it - only very occasionally falling in among the discarded bikes and old prams.
Dread the holidays? You must be mad!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven!