Bollocks, I cannot remember the name of this one and it's driving me mad. I remember reading it at school when we were about 11.
It was a collection of short storieshumorous, mostlyabout a boy growing up in a Catholic school (with monks), a few decades ago I believe.
Couple of things that I remember:
There was one chapter about all the boys in the class deliberately misbehaving hideously during every class with a particular teacher (his name was Father Brassier, so they called him Pa Bra...).
One chapter about school punishments (they used to get whacked on the hand with a weird rubber thing like a spatula!)
Running: The character was getting bullied at school, and starting truanting to avoid the bullies. He took up running in order to get away from them and eventually won some kind of race/marathon (much to the disgust of the bullies, who saw him win).
The meat pie story: At the end of the boy when main character was about 16, he started working part time at a meat pie factory, where he was completely horrified by the unbelievably poor hygiene conditions, including one worker who would deliberately see how many flies he could catch on the inside of the meat pies before putting the pastry lid on top. At the end of the story, the character went to his new girlfriend's parents' house for dinner--guess what her mum served for tea…?
Book was a little bit similar to George Layton's books, except that I think the characters were a bit older.
Hmm, if anyone has any brilliant ideas, let me know!