Sting’s memories of his school days aren’t exactly fond. The son of a hairdresser and engineer fitter’s mate, he passed his 11-plus and was promptly set on the path to greater things. But first he had priests to deal with.
“I got a scholarship to a grammar school,” recalls the rock singer, songwriter, actor and, now, dramatist. “So I was kind of sectioned from most of the people I was brought up with and put in this school uniform, and was sent on a train to Newcastle and taught Latin and physics and all that stuff.” For a young lad from the streets of Wallsend on Tyneside, the rupture was cataclysmic. The elevation of the boy born Gordon Sumner to a better school five miles away would, ultimately, send him all around the world, with the multiple domiciles to prove it.
“That split was pretty, ah, radical,” he says. “[To] people I’d spent time with in school and the streets – suddenly I was this different creature.
“And that was it – I didn’t really see those people again. I was cut off.” As Sting recently told CNN, St Cuthbert’s High School was also the .........
