London Borough of Newham, September 1967. My first job was in a junior school, where I was given a class of 38 second-year children - I think that would be Year 4 in today’s terminology. My colleagues told me that it was known to be a difficult class.

Later on, I learned that the headmaster hadn’t been thrilled to have an Oxford graduate assigned to his school. It is possible that he chose that class for me in case I needed to be taken down a peg or two.

And so it was that I met Wally Johnson. In those days, you could be called Wally and not be laughed out of the playground. Johnson wasn’t his real surname - I was advised to change it just in case, against all odds, he has grown up to be a TES reader.

Wally was the naughtiest boy in the class and the bane of my life. One day I kept him behind and asked him - in classic, well-meaning new-teacher fashion - why he behaved so badly. He just stood there, looking very sad, and said nothing. After a while, arrangements were made for him to spend some of his time working at a table outside the headmaster’s office.

I shall remember Wally to the day I die - and I wish I could remember all the others, but most of the names and faces are lost. There were, of course, lots of nice girls (“Like your shoes, Miss. Like your handbag”). The girls were concerned when they found out I didn’t have a television. “Miss,” one of them said, “if you got a job, you could save up and buy a telly.” I didn’t have the heart to explain that I had a job already.

The school was formal and traditional and, in some subjects, I was given a syllabus. That’s why one day, as I was telling them a story about Moses - probably not very well - a girl put her hand up. “Miss, I don’t get it. Is the Israelites the baddies?”

“No,” I heard myself reply. “The Egyptians is the baddies. The Israelites is the goodies”. It was hard to stick to “correct” grammar when it felt more polite somehow to talk like the children.

I found their East End usage attractive, though I couldn’t always understand them at first. A boy tried to tell me about his father’s “barrer”. He had to say it several times before the penny dropped. “His barrow!”

Another linguistic memory concerns the time I said a very bad word in front of my class. This was on a morning when I was having the usual little discipline problems.

A young window cleaner appeared and began work on the outside of the classroom windows, observing everything with a huge grin on his face. It was too much. After the bad word came out, I clapped my hand to my mouth. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” The children reacted very well - I think their opinion of me had just improved.

We survived the year, class 2C and I, but it wasn’t easy. I had to buckle down and do things the headmaster’s way - old-fashioned and formal, instead of the trendy, progressive way I’d been taught in my year at training college.

By the end of it, he and I had begun to like and respect each other. The next year, I got a lovely class and was allowed a bit more freedom. My second year of teaching was the best of my whole career.

Poet Wendy Cope has written If I Don’t Know (Faber pound;8.99) and recently edited Heaven on Earth: 101 happy poems (Faber pound;6.99)