In fact, if the kitchen had cooked too much food, there would be queues of Oliver Twist-style waifs demanding “seconds” - especially if that most coveted of foodstuffs was on the menu - chips. I very specifically remember Chocolate Concrete being served with pink custard. When I've been asked to recreate this recipe people have mentioned that they used to love it with pink, chocolate or even mint custard. What a pudding jam roly-poly was: it was as capable of keeping you warm as a balaclava helmet and mittens on strings. Volcanically hot jam tempered by the soft suet crust and the ever-present custard. Occasionally the syrup sponge roll would make an appearance just in case we began to feel our sugar levels drop. As well as the traditional mince, dumplings, chips and veg for 25p, we see ploughman’s lunch for 35p, or cheese and egg salad for 25p. Not bad... Everyone knows you can't eat this sort of thing without custard and this part of the recipe could be up for debate.

Step Three: Tip the mixture into a baking tray and use your hands to press it into the base of the tin. You need to press quite firmly until there are no loose bits of the mixture on top, otherwise, it will crumble when you go to cut it later.So, no thankyou. I won’t be swapping an hour of my free time for lunch and supervision! And one day, maybe someone will come along and change things for the better.

If you are a member of the lower classes or live outside London and the south-east, the midday meal is called dinner and is often the main meal of the day. But for the upper classes and metropolitans, the midday meal is called lunch. In the evening, the lower classes and northerners come home from work, school or shopping and sit down to another fairly substantial meal called tea at about 6pm. As a pupil right through the 1970s, the school dinners my contemporaries and I consumed can be easily categorised in one word - “stodge”.What makes it hard? This isn't a wet mixture and it doesn't have a raising agent so it's naturally going to end up thin and not at all cake-like. Using your hands to press the mixture really well into the baking tin will give it the crunchy and hard texture - just like the one you had at school. In the summer there might be ham salad, consisting of a slice of ham, round lettuce, cucumber and half a tomato, served with boiled potatoes.