I am one of many who attended St. Catherine's in the very early 1950s and remember being met by Sister Sophia at Portsmouth, the ferry trip and the steam train ride culminating at Ventnor, where there used to be a model of Noah's Ark in the station building. I remember walking along the Ventnor West line not long after it closed.

A big storm which washed away an old wooden house on stilts built on the shoreline somewhere along the cliffs west of the Spyglass inn. Walking to St Catherine's Point to see a balloon which someone was going to fly. A storm came and blew it away or wrecked it. I remember going for walks on the Downs above Ventnor and seeing the wreckage of a plane which had been brought down attacking the Radar Station. Also, and I cringe when I think about it now, but we found a red bomb (incendiary?) which we picked up and tossed into a bush on the edge of a field where the plane crashed!

I remember going to see the Review of the Fleet at Spithead and seeing the sunken fossilised forest, somewhere along the coast. The old mines along the beachfronts at most of the beaches. When I was last there Frank Sinatra's "Young at Heart" was the number one record and I think our housemaster, Mr Busby must have had the record as I remember hearing it so often then. One other memory which sticks in my mind is of a sports day and fete along what might be the Ventnor Gardens area, where I bought a teapot for my mother. On looking inside it back at the home I discovered it was useless as it was almost full of chalk precipitated from the boiling water. Sixpence wasted. The price of a small block of chocolate and half my allowance for the fete!

In 1971 on a trip to the UK I went to Ventnor via train but was disappointed at having to get off at Shanklin and finish the journey by bus. How deserted the roads were. No chance of a lift.That was in September and I was almost alone in the guest house at Ventnor.