Open Writing

The tiny community school, which closed several years ago, is perched high on a Colne Valley hillside midway between Marsden and Slaithwaite.

My outstanding recollection of the six years I was there, from the age of five to 11, is of happy times in a happy school.

I first set foot in the school, hand in hand with my mother, and was taken to see the reception class teacher. She was a lovely old lady called Miss Settle.

That first introductory visit could have put me off school completely. It didn’t. On the contrary, it encouraged me as an impressionable five-year-old to want to go there.

The success of my crucial introduction was all down to Miss Settle. She was a motherly figure despite her unmarried status. And her tender, sympathetic welcome completely won me over.

Come to think of it, I was probably less than five when I started school because one of my most vivid memories in Miss Settle’s class is of going to bed in an afternoon.

Only the youngest children were tucked up between the sheets, so I suppose I was probably only four years old. I do remember that I rarely, if at all, was persuaded to sleep. Most of the time in bed was spent thinking about what I would be doing for the rest of the afternoon or what there would be for tea when I got home.

It was wartime then, of course, which meant that everyone went to school with their gasmask in a case over their shoulder. An indirect result of this had painful consequences for me. One girl dropped her gasmask in the road as we were running home and I tripped over it. The cut on my knee which I suffered was reluctant to heal. We found out why about a fortnight later when a small lump of stone emerged from the depths of the hole in my knee and gave itself up as the barrier to recovery.

The journey to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon was looked on as an adventure rather than a toil. It was nearly a mile along field paths, country lanes and narrow roads. In winter a small group of us used to take a longer route when there was deep snow because it was all on proper roads, which usually had been cleared by the snowplough.

Snowball fights were frequent, if not everyday, occurrences. Another winter pastime, in retrospect clearly fraught with danger, was walking across an ice-bound canal on the way home. I never remember going on the ice when walking to school. Perhaps the thought of falling in and having to spend the rest of the day in wet clothes was a genuine deterrent.

In summer, activities on the walk home were much more varied. Bluebell picking and fishing for tiddlers were among the most popular. A more daring, and again more dangerous, adventure was placing pennies on the railway line, waiting for them to be crushed by a train and then dashing -- with a rapidly beating heart in case someone spotted us -- to pick up the highly-prized mutilated coins.

After my spell in Miss Settle’s class, I was moved up into a class taught by Miss Woffinden. Here I must confess to some highly-charged emotions because as a mature adult I became increasingly to realise how much I really owed to Miss Woffinden.

She, too, was a lovely lady. Much younger than Miss Settle and different in her approach. She treated us as more mature children, which of course we were by then. I don’t think I can remember a single occasion when she lost her temper. Strict but kindly probably sums up her manner. Coupled to a remarkable ability to get the best out of her pupils.

It was this latter quality for which I had cause to be grateful. For I’m now totally convinced it was this, more than anything else, which helped me to pass the dreaded 11-plus and make it to grammar school.

School dinners, I recall, were pretty good. They were made on the premises in a small kitchen by a rosy-cheeked cook who I once deeply offended by jokingly describing apple flakes in the pie as fingernails. She was not amused.

Some children brought their own sandwiches, most of which contained mundane fillings such as meat spread or hard-boiled egg. But one boy stands out in my memory because every day his sandwiches were made of bread with a thin bar of Nestle’s milk chocolate in between. I still wonder where he managed to get all the chocolate from when it was rationed.

Digging for victory, like rationing, was another wartime feature of school life. My outstanding and rather unpleasant memory of the school allotment is seeing a boy plunging his hand into a clump of weeds only to have the hand speared by a garden fork wielded by another young gardener. The fork went right through his hand and the sight froze the rest of us into silence. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it looked and he was back at school next day after hospital treatment.

The headmaster in my time was Mr. Addy, a man with wavy white hair and glasses, who was held in awe by the younger children. My most vivid memory of him constitutes the one truly unpleasant episode of my whole school life at West Slaithwaite.

One summer’s afternoon a handful of lads, me included, strayed back into the playground some time after school had finished. I can’t remember why on earth we wanted to pinch some of the rhubarb from the caretaker’s garden behind the school. But a couple of my mates went in and grabbed a handful apiece while the rest of us kept watch. Unbeknown to us, the caretaker had seen it all and made a mental note of our names. We paid the penalty next day when Mr. Addy called us into his study one by one for half a dozen strokes of the cane on the backside.

Our class was taken by Mr. Add only rarely. But I shall never forget his current affairs session one day -- when he was lecturing us on British life and traditions. Suddenly he spotted one boy whose attention clearly was straying. Quick as a flash Mr. Addy boomed, “You boy, what is the sign of mourning in England?” Back came the answer, equally swift: “Daylight, sir.” Mr. Addy, like the school cook whose apple pie I questioned, was certainly not amused as the class erupted with laughter.

Another incident which caused us much amusement concerned a music teacher called Miss Murrant. I remember nothing about Miss Murrant except that she was fairly young and a vigorous conductor of our singing, which one afternoon became so vigorous that her skirt slowly but surely began to slip from her waist. As the tempo of the song increased, so did the rate of the skirt’s slide until the unsuspecting Miss Murrant - red-faced and deeply embarrassed -- felt it fall round her ankles.

West Slaithwaite was a school which at that time had about 70 pupils. It was a school where every boy and girl knew everyone else, and probably their parents as well. I was so happy there that when I was told I had passed the 11-plus my initial reaction was to announce to my astonished parents that I had no intention of going to grammar school. I simply didn’t want to leave. Surely no school can have a better reference from a pupil than that.