Open Writing

I started in Miss Ridge’s class in the Big Girls’ school across the road from the Infants.

Pictures on the wall were of Alfred and the cakes, and another of a Viking ship.We learnt the litany necessary in any C.of E. School, - the Lord’s prayer, the creed, the ten commandments, favourite passages from the New Testament – psalm 23, and the 13th chapter of Corinthians with its sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, and verses beginning ‘Ho every-one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.’

My straight hair was cut in a bob with a fringe. Later Mum and I tried a shingle in the fashion of the Twenties, just a few years after Mum upset Dad by having her long hair cut short.

I was about eight when my older cousin Rosie came to see us in Stanley Road, and Mum introduced her to the use of Ponds Vanishing cream. Dad put a lively popular tune on the gramophone and Rosie showed me how to do the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

Mum had stopped giving me spoonfuls of Roboleine cod liver oil and malt every morning. I remember having Ex-Lax, and Venos Cough Syrup and wrapping my still-warm black stocking round my neck at bedtime to ease a sore throat. There was some talk of having to have my tonsils out, but Dad gave me a glass of warm water and alum to gargle with, and this dried up my mouth and throat. My recent research revealed a story of Annie, the daughter of Charles Darwin who was given a gargle made up of two drachmas of sulphate of aluminium and potassium in a pint of warm water, with a sweetish but astringent taste.

We regularly recited the times table, learnt how to knit, and did tacking and hemming. In the next class under the guidance of Miss Dean we did blanket and chain stitch, and run and fell seams. She taught us geography, showing where to find Sierra Leone on a map of Africa. When she left she went to work there as a missionary.

We practised cursive writing and did raffia work. Friday afternoon story-telling was no more. How I missed Epaminondas and his Auntie, and Brer Rabbit in the briar patch.

We had free school milk which came in crates delivered by the milkman. Class milk monitors gave it out at playtime, one third of a pint in a glass bottle, with a straw to push through the hole in the cardboard top. In the playground we played hopscotch, or skipping, and read books indoors if wet. This was also the time for making cats’ cradles from a piece of string wound round both hands.

We went home for midday dinner.

Each May 24th on Empire Day the whole school went out in the playground to witness a set piece with children dressed to represent countries of the world, gathered around the proud girl chosen from the top class to be Britannia. We sang patriotic songs, like Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory and marched round the playground saluting the Union Jack, ending with God save the King.

On Boat Race Day Mum would buy me a small celluloid kewpie doll, from a man in the market who held up a flat board with Oxford or Cambridge dolls pinned to it. It was always Cambridge and mine had a band of Cambridge blue ribbon round its middle.

One day in October 1930, when I was nearly eight, I saw the R101 airship floating sideways over our roofs on its maiden voyage. It crashed on a French hillside, killing 48.

We would cross the school playground into the side door of the adjoining church of St.Jude’s at Easter, Whitsun, and Harvest, and for carol-singing at Christmas. For the Christmas Bazaar my Great Aunt Emma who lived next door to us, would make lots of coconut ice bars, to sell.

Once we saw ‘Alf’s Button’, a magic lantern show in the Church Hall. A soldier in the World War of 1914-1918 was cleaning the brass buttons on his tunic, when a genie appeared, offering to give him anything he wished for. The button had been part of the metal of Aladdin’s lamp.

So we progressed through the school, and in Miss Docherty’s class learnt long division, and how to add and subtract pounds, shillings and pence, and feet and inches, pounds and ounces, pints and quarts. All very tricky, especially when it came to measurement with chains and furlongs, not to mention rod, pole or perch.

When I was nine I caught scarlet fever and was taken to the Fever Hospital, and then convalesced at another hospital in Hampstead. I remember being bathed by the nurses in a great big white enamel bath, so different to the small zinc one at home. Mum and Dad sent me in comics to read, and small glass jars of Silmos Lollies. I did not care for the morning porridge, but particularly liked the ginger sponge pudding we had. That summer we had a seaside holiday and I have a photo of myself striding along Margate prom holding my spade and pail.

In the top class Mrs. Lewis encouraged us to write essays, and once I won a certificate for a story about the lifeboat service. By this time in needlework lesson we were making buttonholes and doing feather-stitching.

Then I was chosen to be Mercury in a production of Pandora’s Box to take place in the Church Hall. At home Mum made me a cap, blouse and matching doublet out of blue silk of an old frock, and I had white chicken feathers sewn to my cap and canvas sandals, which had been dyed blue. Dad made me a wand like Mercury’s, with a cardboard cut-out snake around the top. We did not have a photo of me, but a year or so later, when I was Portia in an excerpt from The Merchant of Venice, they took my picture, which I still possess. I borrowed a black cassock and four-cornered cap from one of the Church choristers and held a large book to represent a book of the Law. In reality it was Dad’s ‘First World War in Pictures’. I recited Shakespeare’s immortal -
‘The quality of mercy is not strained,
It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven upon the earth beneath.’

One morning I woke up and found myself bleeding and called to Mum, not knowing what it was or what was happening to me. That was the start of my menstrual cycle, and I soon learnt that it was something normal that you had to accept. I was ten and a half.

When I was eleven in the summer of 1934 came the time to sit the Scholarship exam. My friend and I both passed and could move on to a High School. In my mind’s eye I can still see St. Jude’s School Honours board with the names Louise Gibbons and Eileen Coan in gilt on the black background