During my time at Nottingham High School I so enjoyed playing this game. I rarely saw it played anywhere else in organised form. It was far more than simply kicking a ball about.

I was at the school from 1943 to 1951, from Prep through to U5A when I left after taking 'O' levels. During those eight years, grouped in our forms we found our strengths and weaknesses in learning and joys in our play. In my group we tried many things during 'breaks' outside, including (I hesitate to say) in our younger years experimental gang warfare, as a consequence of which I became for a while 'Handscrew' rather than Andrew.

However, by the time we had reached 14 or 15 we had outgrown such doings and by then were more or less united in enthusiasm for this rather special form of football. As its name indicates, the game is, or was, played with a tennis ball; it can only be played on a smooth expanse of hard surface - grass is not at all suitable. The School's playground was perfect. Day after day, lunchtime after lunchtime, I and many of my form got together to take over (selfishly I now see) an appreciable section of the playground on the side away from Forest Road, goal posts being set by points on the wall at one end and objects laid down on the tarmac at the other. Tennis ball football differs from the other form of the game in that the ball is generally and intentionally kept low - there is little if any heading of the ball (participants wearing glasses are therefore not disadvantaged) and player skill is concentrated on control by foot of this quite small and potentially fast moving object and directing or anticipating its travel; in other words, dribbling, tackling, passing and shooting as spoken of conventionally but exercised in very different manner because of the nature of the ball and the surface on which the game is played. It is also, or can be, less of a contact sport than conventional soccer and players generally remain upright! I don't remember injuries.

Each day unless it was pouring with rain we would assemble and two leaders would pick teams. Then we would play according to the rules and simply have a wonderful time until lessons or other duties called.

In the summer term cricket in the playground was understandably preferred to football and was equally enjoyed.

Sadly, at the very end of my days at the school, tennis ball football among members of my form came to an end when someone introduced a full-size ball and thereby a very different game. I suppose that as we were coming up to age 16 we were putting childhood games behind us. But growing up playing tennis ball football in early teens with my school friends is part of a memory that remains ever strong.