Lucky you! Home for me was a half hour bus ride away, so it was school dinners four days a week from eight to eighteen and one day a week when we were asked to bring in a lunch box from home.
I remember mince was ok. Vegs were cooked to oblivion. Sometimes a suet pudding and custard was bearable. The worst was sago and tapioca - frog’s spawn in milk. 
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This was not a Catholic school… presumably someone noticed that some kids would refuse the mince… and make do with mash and cabbage… and they decided to offer an alternative.
Spam fritters and a bowl of pink gunk called strawberry yoghurt was a good menu day at my junior school. I avoided tapioca like a second BCG jab for the reason given by SuePJ.
As I lived 5 minutes walk from my secondary, school I have no idea what their canteen offered, but it must have been reasonably good as I can’t remember anyone complaining about it.
One memory of school milk was a mate of mine who decided to see how many bottles of milk he could drink. He got thirteen down him and a few minutes later there were thirteen on the floor! Yuk! 
My first cigarette was at the age of ten, showing off to my younger brother and cousin - and boy, did it turn my face green. I felt so nauseous that it put me off for life, thankfully…!
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My father (a smoker from the age of 10, introduced by his sister) demonstrated the amount of goo a cigarette produced using a fag from a pack I fount, a clean cloth and a bicycle pump to draw smoke through. I have never wanted to even try.
I was about nine or ten years old, and with a school mate, we collected all the empty one-third-of-a-pint bottles of milk from all the classrooms, and then we’d empty that last little bit of milk remaining in each bottle into an empty bottle and give it to the school caretaker for his cat. Took ages!
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I was aged about eight, I think, when I had a nightmare. The venue of this embarrassing dream was at junior school, or more precisely, behind some bushes against the school fence and fronting onto the public pavement, where people were walking.
I was hiding behind these bushes because I was naked except for a short white vest that I was desperately pulling down as low as possible. I was so aware of not wanting anyone to see me in my nakedness.
The age of innocence had gone!
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Growing up in Sarf Norwoud, greater Lundun, the aftermath of fireworks night was a wonderful. The air would always be misty after all th bonfires and pyrotechnics, and you couldn’t walk 10 feet without finding a used rocket on the pavement. As kids, we go out early, collecting as many spent fireworks as possible - not to actually DO anything with them, but the moment was special, like finding pennies covering the pavement.
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I love the smell of fireworks night….I must add this to my (very short) list of things I miss about the UK!
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Seems I was born in grandma’s home in Upper Norwood… no idea if that’s South, North, East or West… 
Lots of aunts/uncles and cousins lived around there at the time… and some of the more recent generation still do… but I’ve never been back. Although I did look for it on Google Earth…
Just up the road really. There are still a few friends there, though no near rellies. I’ve not been back that way since moving my mother up to Bicester 14/15 years ago, but suspect the place isn’t tremendously pleasant, although it probably never really was.
In Grandma’s day it wasn’t bad and there was a lovely woodland right by her house…
Of course, I’m talking about a lifetime ago… when things were very different.
There was quite a bit of woodland around in various places, as well as lots of ‘wasteland’ that provided a happy playing place for many of us and a game reserve for more predatory types. Shirley Hills was the nearest proper woodland for us, although there were some great places behind West Wickham too - I have a memory of nudging the front wheel of a bicycle to the edge of the lip over a bomb hole in some woods, only to go a little far and suddenly finding myself in the air, then landing hard on the bike - that hurt. And another of going jumping on bikes in some woods in Upper Norwood, only to hit a tree in mid-air & terminally bend the frame.