School.

When I was very young and before we were bombed out, the road we lived in had a school about a quarter of a mile up the road from our house and my first recollection of school are when I was taken into the infant’s class. I have distinct memories of playing with sand in a big tray, and also getting milk at milk time. We were given straws and the bottles were placed in the lids or bases of those round boxes, which hold cheese triangles.

When I moved up into the Junior School it was wartime and I can remember old newspaper was being collected, which we took to school. The amount that each person took was recorded against his or her name and after a certain time, depending on the amount you had collected, you were rewarded with make-believe badges of Army Ranks. I managed to collect enough to earn me my Sergeants stripes. We used to play games such as hopscotch and bad eggs in the playground in teams, where we had to wear coloured sashes.

One vivid memory for an eight-year old boy, was the day when we were walking from one class to another with the lady teacher in front. All of a sudden her knickers fell down because the elastic had broken. However without hardly a pause, she stepped out of them, bent down, picked them up and carried on walking. What decorum. The only other thing which springs to mind, is sitting in class and reciting the times tables, and having dinners in the school canteen which had been turned in to a National Canteen where anybody could go there and get a good cheap meal.

After we were bombed out and had moved to a requisitioned house about four miles away, I was taken to the local school down the road in order to restart my education. I was taken into the Headmaster, Mr. Kidwell, and my father explained that I had not been to school for six months or so. I was put into a class where the teacher, Miss Bishop, had a fiancée who was an airman and one day she was very upset and had been crying and we found out that he had been killed.

This school was a very modern one, built with the classrooms on three sides round a centre area with grass and a fishpond with goldfish in it, and the playground being on the fourth side. The school was a single storey structure, and all around the outside of the classrooms was a verandah so that you could go from one to another without getting wet. Also each classroom had large sliding doors on the verandah side, which meant that on hot days the whole wall could be slid back. Also the toilets were inside which was a novelty for me because at the other two schools I had attended, they were always outside without roofs.

Three things stand out from the days at that school, one was putting bent pins on cotton tied to a cork into the fishpond to try and catch the goldfish. Second was seeing an eclipse of the sun for the first time, and a third day stands out particularly for the teacher pointed out that the date was an unusual one. The date in question being 12 March 1945

After the war ended, life started to change in many ways, one of which was that we used to go from school to have swimming lessons in the public baths. These baths were at Beckenham four miles away and to get there the Education Authority hired coaches to take us there, and back.

The class I was in at school sat the eleven plus exam and much to my fathers delight, I was offered a place at the Grammar School, which looking back must have seemed to him a bit of social ladder climbing. Sometime duringthe summer term before I moved on to the Grammar School, two others, and I were jumping over the goldfish pond and were seen by a teacher who happened to be the Headmasters wife. She promptly reported us to the Headmaster.Having lined up outside the Headmasters study, it was obvious that we were going to get the cane.
One of the others who was obviously not a novice to this practice said that if we banged the flat of our hands on the wall hard before we went in, it would deaden the pain and the caning would not be so bad. So there we three were banging our hands on the wall when all of a sudden the Headmaster appeared and called us in.

For this misdemeanour,I got three whacks of the cane and that was the one and only time that I have ever got the cane at school. I must admit that banging the wall MUST have had some effect for I cannot remember the actual caning.
Having said goodbye to the Junior school I settled in to the Grammar school, but due to the rules which required a school uniform, football boots, shorts etc., this meant a strain on my parents purse. Since my father’sincome was very small however, his small salary did mean that I got Free School Dinners and Bus fares which must have saved them quite a lot.
My journey to the Grammar School each day meant a walk of about half a mile down the road followed by a mile bus journey, then I changed to another for a journey of about three miles, a trip lasting about three quarters of an hour.

At that time the London Buses were still using very old buses from the early and mid thirties and it was common for them to break down. For a while London Transport began to use private hire coaches which were extremely luxurious compared with the buses, and my friend and I found that the morning bus after the one we should have caught was a coach. Many mornings we were purposely late for school so that we could ride in the coach. Our excuse for being late was always that the old bus had broken down.

At the end of the first term at Grammar School, we had to take a test in all subjects to assess our abilities, and as I later found to my cost throughout my education, although I do reasonably well generally I am no good when it comes to exam time. In the first year at Grammar School, in my maths test, I scored 2%. However I lived to fight another day and went on to scrape three G.C.E’s one of which was Maths.