Open Writing

I started school in the autumn when I was nearly five. I wore brown leather sandals with silver buckles, and had black Wellingtons for wet weather. Mum and I walked along Canterbury Terrace, over the railway bridge in Kingsbury Road, round the corner by the oilshop, past ‘The Mildmay Arms on the corner of King Henry’s Walk, then over the railway bridge and down the six steps beside it to St Jude's Infant School. It occupied the lower half of a square brick building, with the Big Boys schoolrooms over it and a roof-top playground.

Playtime on the first day was bewildering. I had led a quiet life at home and the sight and sound of hoards of children rushing round playing ‘He’ and shouting to each other - I couldn’t take it in. So, rescued by the hand-bell signalling the end of playtime I thankfully lined up to file back indoors.

Class-rooms were divided from each other by high wooden partitions reaching to the ceiling, having glass windows in the upper half. Dark brown hot water pipes ran along the outer wall, disappearing into the next classroom. Walls were painted dark brown to halfway up, then cream. Nothing could be seen of the outside, the windows were high up and opened by long cords manipulated by the teacher. The lower panes were of thick ridged glass covered on the outside by wire netting.

The dark wooden desks held two children sitting side by side, and the desks at the back were long enough for four children together. Pencil-boxes were kept on ledges under the desk. My box was of light wood with a transfer near the indentation where you put your fingernail in to slide the top open. Some children made do with oval date boxes with paper lace edging inside which I quite admired.

Our school day started with the Lord’s Prayer and at the end of the afternoon we had a ‘Thank you’ prayer and blessing. Every Friday afternoon until we were in the top class we were allowed to take in one of our own books or toys. Sometimes we had a story read to us. Brer Rabbit bored me. I got fed up with him always landing in the briar patch.

We made ‘models’ with plasticine; mostly cottage loaves and sausages. Some made a bird’s nest by pressing a finger down hard on a semi-solid ball of the once multi-coloured, now grey plasticine. Being given the choice to draw pictures on our slates, the best coloured chalks were always the tiniest scraps, difficult to hold. Our fingers went home crusty with powdered colour: there was nowhere to wash it off.

I remember one afternoon when I put up my hand to ask to ‘leave the room’ and was refused. I did a ‘wee’ on the floor. Oh the misery of those wet knickers !

All round the classroom walls were large oblong cards. A letter of the alphabet at one endof the card, a picture at the other, and in the middle a word divided into syllables which described the picture. A for apple to Z for zebra, I particularly liked the U for um-brel-la. I think I wanted a real one of those for myself, a small one like my cousin had, with a parrot’s head handle.

We recited nursery rhymes and sang songs like ‘Strawberry Fair and ‘Bobby Shafto’. Bits of coloured cotton scraps were given out which we had to unravel, and put the resultant fuzz into a cardboard box. I can only imagine it was to stuff cushions they sold at the Church Bazaar.

Every afternoon we slept on mats on the floor, but I could never go to sleep.

In the top class of the Infants School there was a picture of ‘Jesus, the Light of the world’ on the wall. The headmistress Miss Chick read us stories from the Bible..

We had an ink monitor who used an enamel jug to fill the ink pots in the holes in the back of the wooden desks. . By home-time our fingers had plenty of evidence of the struggle to write in real writing with a steel nib which somehow seemed to let ink run down the penholder. It was all the rage to have a home-made pen-wiper made from circular scraps of flannel held together by a small linen shirt button sewn into the centre to hold the layers together.

The twelve times table was the crowning achievement before going up into the Big Girls across the road.

There was a lesson when we had oblongs of yellow cardboard which had been cut with notches at either end. Round these cards we wound a warp thread, then with a large blunt needle full of raffia we darned across the vertical strands, and so learnt to do darning without realising it.

Mum met me after school on the pavement outside. On the early dark winter evenings we would go home, light the gas, and toast bread on a twisty - handled long wire fork in front of the kitchen fire.

She would tell me stories of when she was a child and belonged to Mr.Chorley’s Band of Hope Sunday school. In summer the children were taken by train on holiday to Lancing in Sussex. On the journey when they opened their packets of sandwiches from home, Kit often shared one of her smoked haddock sandwiches for a more usual one of raspberry jam.

They slept in dormitories and one girl who wet her bed was punished at dinner time by having to go without her rhubarb pie that day.

They loved playing on the beach, paddling and making sand castles. She remembered once there had been a ship wrecked off shore and broken crates of oranges came floating in. The girls excitedly collected armfuls of oranges and took them back to the Seaside Home. This made a welcome addition to the rice pudding for ‘afters’.

Mum was good at telling stories and teaching me her favourite songs. After a game of Snakes and Ladders or Ludo, and a bit of my ‘Fireside Tales’ I was taken up to bed and left in the quiet with my little nightlight shining on the mantelpiece for company.