Things were very different at Pocklington School in Tom Stoppard's day.

"There were no girls, and there was no art - what a school!" he told his audience of staff and pupils with a smile when he returned to East Yorkshire on a sunny May afternoon.

Sir Tom, the playwright who penned the script for the hit film Shakespeare In Love, was a pupil at Pocklington in the 1950s, and was back to open a new performing arts centre in his name.

And he said that despite the lack of girls - and of drama on the curriculum he had some happy memories of school life.

"I didn't come back here for years until the previous headmaster David Gray invited me to come back. It was similar and completely different at the same time," he said.

"I had a good time in many ways, but it was a very different place."

The young Tom arrived in England from Czechoslovakia with his mother and brother when he was eight, and they settled in the north of England because his stepfather was from Chesterfield.

He arrived at Pocklington in 1951 as a boarder aged 13, after attending a prep school in Nottingham, and stayed until he was 17. The family home was at Dore, just outside Sheffield.

His first job after leaving school was as a local newspaper reporter, working for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, where his duties included reviewing amateur theatre shows. He stayed there for five or six years and it was there that he started writing plays.

Within a few years his new career took off when the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead became a success in the mid-60s.

Back at school nearly 40 years later, he said he was working on writing yet another play, but said it was going very slowly at the moment.

He described the new £1.5 million Tom Stoppard Centre as a "brilliant theatre" and after opening it, he watched pupils perform part of a new musical play called The Delta Ball by the school's head of art, Peter Edwards, and composer, John Bryant.

But first, he had a serious point to make to the audience too.

"The arts are often thought of as being some kind of special box that only special people are interested in," he said.

"This is to miss the point of the arts. To understand the point of the arts, you really have to imagine a society where everything to do with the arts is taken away.

"This theatre is not for certain people, but for the complete person. This is a theatre and a space which is everything to do with self-expression and self-fulfilment."

Updated: 08:45 Wednesday, May 02, 2001