SCHOOL AND SOME CONSEQUENCES

I started school in January 1951, just before I was five.  It was the middle of winter.  When I woke up on a winter's morning, there was frost on the inside of the windows.  There were these wonderful leaf patterns of ice, and if you breathed (not blew), your warm breath would melt the ice, and water would trickle down the window pane.  Often, my mum would put my clothes on my bed so that they would warm me IN bed, and then I would have warm clothes to wear when I got out of bed.  In the sitting room we had a Valor Heater.  Ours was a grey paraffin stove.  It was warmer than the surroundings, but that's not saying a lot!

Anyway, in 1951, I started at Trinity Infants' School in Tewkesbury.  It was actually two buildings, one on either side of Trinity Walk.  The school was brick with great big windows and it was divided into two classrooms and a large space where we did PT, slept in the afternoons, had assemblies.  We didn't seem to have lessons.  Our teacher was Mrs Cook and she was nice but she was old.  We played with toys that had been played with too much, had to try and sleep in the afternoon (which I hated, but I don't remember why) and then we played games and sang songs until it was time to go home.

GOING HOME

Memo to Mums and Dads.  Make sure you arrive at your child's school BEFORE the end of the school day.

At our school, we had to sit up straight and wait for our mothers to arrive in the classroom.  Then you could stand up and go.  Mrs Wiggins and Carol; Mrs Nash and Peter; Mrs Stone and Wendy.  My mother usually turned up about fifth or sixth out of almost 40 mums.  It was almost certainly no more than two or three minutes, if that, but it seemed to be E-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y.  There was no play school, no kindy (kindergarten wouldn't have been a very good name only six years after the end of the Second World War).  There was also no real conception of Health and Safety as we know it today.  Our school playground was an asphalt square, and on the furthest side from our classrooms, there had been a building which had been demolished.  Most of the destroyed building had been carted away, but there were still some bricks stuck in the ground at crazy angles, so that there were points of the bricks sticking up out of the ground.  Whenever we played on the rough ground someone inevitably tripped up, but one playtime, I went an absolute cropper.  When I stood up, my clothes were bloody and I notice these dark drops of blood dripping down in front of my eyes.  I was given some first aid and then I'm not sure what the sequence of events was.  I remember my Mum arriving.  I don't know how they contacted her as we didn't have a phone.  Maybe a teacher ran down the street to my Gran's and found my mother there and brought her to the school.  Mum walked me down to the local hospital where the wound was washed and yellow flavine dabbed on, followed by a plaster.  My grazed knee was cleaned and gentian violet applied. No stitches.  I remember being disappointed that I wouldn't have any stitches to show off when I went back to school in full colour.  There weren't many purple=legged, yellow-headed boys in the class.  It can't have been a totally trivial wound, though, as I bear a small scar on my forehead to this day.

 

MISS STEPHENS, ONE OF MY FAVOURITE TEACHERS, DESPITE EVERYTHING

The following school year I was in Miss Stephens' class.  She volunteered for the Red Cross, I think, and she always smelled of disinfectant.  About four decades later I happened upon her while she was doing her shopping.

"Hello, Miss Stephens," I said, "How lovely to see you"

"Please, call me Edna" she replied.

"By all means, Edna it is, Miss Stephens" I said rather lamely.

By this time I was in short trousers and it was 1951 again.

"I haven't seen your mother for a while" she said.

"She's very well, Miss . . . Edna".

She grinned.

 

Edna Stephens (and incidentally I could never call her Edna!) was responsible for one of the early embarrassments of my life.  One day in class she enquired who wanted to do knitting.  My hand went up, together with all the girls.  Then she asked who wanted to do clay modelling.  Up went all the boys hands, including mine!

"John, you've already chosen to do knitting"

The class laughed.  Boys didn't knit in 1951, but I did.

And off I started.  Miss Stephens cast on twenty stitches of plain stitch in green wool.  Painfully slowly I went along a row.  The girls were going much quicker, and the boys were making clay cows – in fact clay more or less anything you wanted provided it was in clay.  My knitting was full of holes, and although I didn't know how to cast on, each row got longer and longer.  I was taught fisherman's stitch, and purl, and after about nine rows I had about ninety stitches in a row.  I know that to be true, because my Mum kept the "object" until the day she died.

In about November or December 1951, probably at a weekend, we gathered near the Cross with Union Jacks to wave, as King George VI and his mother, Queen Mary, swept through Tewkesbury in their big black car. . . and then I suppose we went home.