In September 1940 I was five years old and it was time to start my education. I went to the village school. This was a Victorian building and was heated with an open fire in each classroom. There was no heating in the cloakrooms. Those children who sat in the front of the class near the fire were warm but those at the back were cold.
Mother said that when I arrived home after my first day I said that I had learned ‘S’ for Sun but was still not able to read.
The cloakrooms were dark and had a row of sinks at one end and there was no hot water, only cold. We all had to take a cup or mug to school and gargle each morning with ‘permanganate of potash’. This was a purple-coloured concoction supposed to keep away infections of the throat. A great idea as polio and diphtheria were prevalent at that time due to the lack of mains drainage.
One thing that I remember is that everywhere we went we had to take our gas masks with us. Some were kept in a small square cardboard box with a string to carry over the shoulder. Mine was carried in a red “plastic” case. Gas masks were unpleasant to wear being hot and stuffy. We would practise air-raid safety by hiding under the school desks and wearing the gas mask.
Myfirstteacher was Mrs. Hazel. She was very nice and quite young. The Headmaster, Mr. Hacon had decorated each classroom with a frieze of coloured patterns. At that time all the classrooms in Suffolk were painted dark green and cream so any kind of added decoration was welcome. One of our classrooms was decorated with squirrels and one with sailing ships, the others I can’t remember. We sat in the old-style iron and wood desks. Each seated two children and there were two holes for tiny china inkwells. The holes were empty in the infants’ class but in the older children’s classes the tiny wells were filled daily by the ‘ink monitor’ who went round with an enamel jug a bit like a small watering can topping up the ink. These inkwells were used for all sorts of things such as making pellets from blotting paper soaked in ink and flicked across the room from the end of a ruler. Blotting paper was an absorbent paper used for drying fresh writing so that the page would not smudge. Several girls would have their long hair plaited with the ends tied with ribbons or elastic bands. Girls who sat in front of boys were in constant danger of having their hair dipped in the ink. The consequences can be imagined. In the infants we used slates and coloured chalks. Stella Warne put green chalk in my hair and my mother was not pleased!
As well as the slates we had printed exercise books. Writing books had specially printed red and blue lines to help us to form our letters and get them the right size. Sum books (there were only ‘sums’ in those days) were printed with squares. The squares got smaller as the children got older. As an aid to counting we used cowrie shells and beads. We learned to read from cards. Each card had a picture at the top and a sentence underneath. The sentences were about a cat called Kitty and a dog called Rover. Once we had mastered these we passed on to the Beacon Series of reading books. These were a series of books carefully graded in difficulty and featuring a wide variety of topics as well as legends, fairy stories and historical characters, Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell and famous Kings and Queens. At the back of each book was a list of words to learn to read and spell. We learned using the ‘phonic’ method. The reading was no trouble to me but spelling and writing were another matter. I have since realised that I have a photographic memory so need to see things written down to be able to remember them.
Arithmetic I found quite easy and Father helped me to learn the times tables. Remember it was pre-decimal days and calculations had to be worked in pounds, shillings and pence. There were 20 shillings in the pound and 12 pennies in one shilling. Weight and length were even more complicated. Only people in Europe used kilograms and kilometres. In England we had more tables to learn. Twelve inches made one foot, three feet made one yard, twenty-two yards made a chain (the length of a cricket pitch) but 1760 yards and 5280 feet made a mile. A look at an old recipe book will give you an idea of the weights. There were 16 ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, eight stones in a hundredweight (this was often used for potatoes), and 20 hundredweights (often written as cwts) made one ton. Favourite questions in arithmetic involved changing pounds into pence, ounces into stones and inches into miles and vice versa. There were no calculators! Calculators were only an improbable dream.
My second teacher was Miss Stella Keeble. She was young, pretty and a clever artist. She drew beautiful pictures on the blackboard. In this class I can remember practising hiding under the desks in case there was an air-raid. Each week we had ten words to learn to spell. This is an exercise which I believe has haunted children for many, many years and I did not help because when I became a teacher, I too set the children ten words to learn every week. I think that we all dreaded the Monday spelling-test but the only time I slipped up was on that wretched word ‘friend’. My punishment was to write ‘friend’ out ten times.
We did various kinds of craft and needlework as well as art work. I still have a kettle holder that I made at school but that is all that remains of my early attempts at ‘arts and craft’.
I spent only one year in Miss Keeble’s class and was moved up to Miss Stephenson’s class. Miss Stephenson’s name was Phyllis but everyone called her ‘Polly’. She was an older lady with white hair done up in a ‘bun’. I can remember that we sat in rows, two to a desk and there was certainly not a lot of running about in the classroom. Some things stick in my mind about life with Miss Stephenson.
The toilets were situated in a block in the middle of the playground. One side was for the boys facing their playground and the other side for the girls facing their side of the playground. When a child needed to go to the toilet he or she had to raise a hand and ask for permission to leave. This procedure was embarrassing enough but worse was to follow. There was a shortage of toilet paper so a roll was kept in a cupboard in each classroom, so not only did you have to ask to go to the toilet in public if needed, you had to ask the teacher for paper as well. I had a better idea. I would cry as I had a bad tummy ache and would be sent home ‘sick’ and go to the toilet in peace.
We were always being told that there were children worse off than we were. Miss Stephenson decided that we would knit vests for babies in Greece. These little vests were knitted in 2-ply (fine) wool and were done in ‘knit two, purl two’ pattern. I was not a fast knitter and bearing in mind I was a year younger that the rest of the class my vest was very slow to grow. In the end a girl called Jill Batley finished it for me.
Miss Stephenson became ill with a mental complaint which made her think that we should be taught more Scripture (religious) lessons than anything else and each week-end as well as the spellings we had to learn passages from the Bible and the Psalms. My father was not happy about this and he, and no doubt other parents complained and ‘Polly’ was given medical retirement.
As I have mentioned before the playground was divided into two parts, one for the boys and the other for the girls. I cannot remember but surmise that the smaller boys played in the girls’ playground. There was no playground equipment such as there is nowadays. In fact I had not been down a slide until I was over twelve years old and we used the recreation ground at Beccles when waiting for a train.
With very little equipment available we played traditional games. Some I enjoyed but others were too rough and boisterous. It must be remembered that at that time I was small for my age and not used to playing with more than two children at a time. We would play ‘tag’. This involved one person starting as ‘IT’ who would chase and try to catch a second person, on contact the pair would join hands and chase another victim, who also tagged onto the first two. This carried on until all those playing had been caught. The final catch started off the next game. This could become a frantic game with the weaker members of the string being pulled over. Another game was ‘hopscotch’. The grid was drawn with a piece of chalk found in a field. A small tin, toothpaste or shoe polish filled with earth was used to throw in the squares. Hopscotch was fun but hard on the shoes.
We also played with balls and skipping ropes. Skipping was one thing I enjoyed. We would have a long quite heavy rope (one of the few belonging to the school) and, with two people, one at each end, turning the rope one or several children would run through the turning rope sometimes stopping to skip for longer times. I was good at this as I was light on my feet. The success of the game depended on the skill of the people doing the turning. Once again traditional rhymes were sung, such as
‘Up in the North, a long way off,
The donkey’s got the whooping cough.
What shall we give him to make him better?
Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper.’
with the rope being turned faster and faster. I used to skip a lot at home. I was lucky as I owned a proper skipping rope. Other children often used a length of washing line. Skipping and ‘hopscotch’ were hard on children’s poorly-made shoes and Mr. Philpot was kept busy.
‘Grandmothers’ footsteps’ and’ What’s the Time. Mr. Wolf?’ were games involving one ‘Grandma’ or one ‘Wolf’ and several followers who would shout at them. When ‘Grandma’ or ‘the Wolf’ turned round all the followers would have to stand still. Those still moving were ‘out’. The last person left would be ‘Grandma’ or ‘Wolf’ next time.
Children, mostly girls would spend hours playing ‘ball’ against a wall. ‘Sevens’ was a popular game. This involved throwing the ball against the wall using different types of motion. You started with on simple throw and catch, to be followed by two throws bouncing the ball on the ground first. As the game progressed the positions became more difficult until you threw seven times in some complicated movement that I cannot remember. Of course, if you dropped the ball your friend/opponent had her turn. Children who were really talented could progress to using two or three balls at the same time. I could manage two balls but three proved to be beyond me.
At that time children stayed at the same village school until they were 14 years old. When I was ten years old, or it might have been nine, I was promoted to the top class. The teacher here was the Head Master and I sat in the front of the class next to his daughter Brenda. Brenda was a year older than me and therefore left to go to the Sir John Leman School at Beccles a year before me. I did find another friend called Jean to sit next to but a nervous nine year old in a class with boys and girls aged fourteen was not a good idea. I spent a great part of my time at that school being frightened, especially when a cane was used to punish some misbehaving boy.
In 1944 an Education Act was passed which made a Secondary education free for all pupils (children could still receive private education if they could afford it). In Suffolk new Secondary Modern schools were set up and the existing Grammar schools were made free of charge. There was to be an exam called the 11-plus for all pupils, the results of which would determine the type of school to be attended by each pupil. The pupils would stay at the same type of school until 15 or 16 depending on the leaving age at that time.
Most people still called the new exam ‘the Scholarship’. Passing this had meant that a child could attend a Grammar school free-of-charge, leaving the majority of the places to be fee-paying. Brenda had done well in her 11-plus and had transferred to The Sir John Leman School in Beccles in 1945 and I was determined to follow her. 1946 was the year when it was my turn to take the dreaded exam which was held on March 25th. I found it comparatively easy. There were some Arithmetic questions, a certain amount of English and a separate paper of General knowledge questions. I was surprised that there were children who did not even know their date-of-birth.
On June 13th my parents received a letter asking me to attend an interview at Yoxford School on Friday 21st June. This was quite a daunting experience for a ten-year old and I found out later that I should not have taken the exam until the next year as I would not be 11 until September 4th. (The cut-off date was August 31st. and this would catch up with me later). Sometimes the Headmaster of Leiston Grammar School presided and sometimes the Headmaster of the Beccles School. Many years before, my mother had been to Leiston Grammar and had hated it so I was all the more determined not to be sent there.
Before the exam it had been decided that I would show that I followed some sort of hobby so Mother and I would go out and search the fields and hedges for as many kinds of wild flower as we could find. Picking wild flowers was not illegal in those days. There was to be one difficulty – the sap from certain types of flower brought my hands up in itchy blisters. We took little notice, allergies did not exist then and we gathered the flowers, pressed them between sheets of blotting paper (a kind of soft absorbent paper used for drying writing in ink before the days of the ball point pen) and carefully mounted them into a book. In the days before Sellotape we used tiny strips of pink Elastoplast. Each flower was accompanied with a brief description of habitat etc. I took this book with me to the interview and Mother came too. I‘m not sure who was the most frightened but we were pleased to see that Dr. Wood from Beccles was one of the interviewers.
I must have made a good impression and received a good report from Mr. Hacon as on 25th July my parents received a letter saying that I would be attending The Sir John Leman School and that they would be required to sign an undertaking that they would keep me there until the end of the school year (31st July) following my sixteenth birthday. I was extremely pleased that I had managed to pass that exam as the alternative plan was for me to attend a private school in Ipswich and stay with Aunt Nellie during the week!
Children from Yoxford, Sibton, Peasenhall and Darsham would travel to Beccles by train each day. They received a season ticket for each term free-of-charge. Many years later I discovered that Mr. Hacon had had a five pound bet with my father that I would be going to Beccles.
After the summer holiday of 1946 I would start a completely new life.
Gillian Bryant (nee Starling) 2020