Show me a man or woman who says that schooldays really were the happiest days of their lives and I'll show you a loser looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses.

Lumbered with a name like Vanora, my schooldays, as you can imagine, were far from happy. Yet nostalgia, being the trickster it is, drew me back to my old school when I was in Bradford recently.

The school building itself had, unfortunately, long since been demolished to make room for an extension to the city's university but strolling around the campus I came across a large hard-surfaced car park. It looked familiar.

And so it should, I realised, for I was standing on what was once the school playground. Here I spent three of my most formative years playing hopscotch, tag and marbles.

Yes, children (and all of you under 40), when I was at primary school in the mid Fifties, we played the same sort of games that our grandparents had enjoyed at the turn of the 19th Century.

We were all pretty much well behaved with the exception of some of the older, bigger boys who achieved heroic status by smoking Woodbines (filched from their dads' pockets) in the outside lavatories.

When they were caught, the teachers beat them across their backsides with an old plimsoll, or across the knuckles with a ruler - a fate which also befell me when I was caught chewing sweets in class.

In the Fifties you didn't need a degree to be a teacher, just an aptitude for sadism.

Happy days, eh?

I tried to remember some of my friends' names and faces but they were all jumbled up in my memory.

Who was the fat girl with pigtails and a loud voice? Sylvia? Sandra? Susan?

No, not Susan. She was the class beauty - everyone said she looked like a juvenile Ava Gardener (a famous Fifties actress, children).

Boys? Well, there was Barry. I was in love with Barry and he with me - for about a week. We passed each other notes under the desks. Sweet, eh? He's probably a grandfather now.

But there were two names and faces I've never forgotten - Phillip and Julian. They were the school bullies.

I fell foul of Phillip and Julian when I came top of my class and was picked for the school relay team, all in the same term.

Julian, whose own name would have made him easy prey for others of the bullying persuasion had he not been so obviously one of nature's thugs, was a thick-set boy with a bullet-shaped head and florid, angry face.

Phillip was the very antithesis, a thin, pasty-faced creep who hung around Julian like a bad smell.

For almost 18 months they made my life a misery. They tripped me up and punched me in the playground, threw my lunchtime sandwiches down the school lavatories and lay in wait for me as I walked home, whispering threats of what they'd do to me if I told anyone about their activities.

Never have I been so scared as I was in those days. Standing in the playground, almost 45 years later, I found myself still distressed by the memory of their bullying.

I don't know whatever happened to Julian or Phillip . . . something very bad, I hope.