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The desk had two squares carved on the top, one for each of us. The squares were filled with other squares, ten across and ten down each side. The middle four squares made one big square with two lines from corner to corner, which made eight triangles. I didn’t know what they meant, but counting them stopped me crying; and then Miss James was telling us a story about Three Little Pigs, and I listened, though I knew it already from my grandma.
Then it was playtime.
The Infants. I am in the back row, two along from Miss Fletcher, and Sheila is at the end on the right of the second row from the front (© the author)
First we had to drink a third of a pint of milk through a straw out of a bottle. The milk was delivered by Johnny Baguley from up the Hough. He was thin and tall and wore his cap sideways, and he could jump over a five-barred gate in his milking coat and wellingtons without touching it. The milk was coloured light blue because he put water in, which was against the law, but he did it.
Miss James showed me how to push a hole in the middle of the cardboard lid and stick the straw through, and I knew how to suck the straw because that was how I drank when I was ill. Then we went out to play.
The playground was big and had a slope between the flat top and bottom parts. I’d never seen so many children or heard that much noise, and I was scared.
I saw Iris and cousin Betty from the Belmont Gang, but they were playing House with the Big Girls and didn’t speak to me.
Other Big Girls were walking slowly in a circle clockwise, holding hands and singing:
‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high.
The rain comes pattering down the sky.
She is handsome. She is pretty.
She is the girl of the golden city.
She has lovers, one, two, three.
Pray can you tell me who is he?’
It made me feel sad. I didn’t know why.
I couldn’t see anyone else from the Gang. There were some boys playing Cigarette Cards. They were sitting on round gas mask holders made of tin, but I had to carry my gas mask in a square cardboard box, and I couldn’t sit on that because I’d have squashed it. I’d asked my mother to let me have a tin one, but she said they were the wrong shape and would break the gas mask and I’d be killed if there was an attack.
Cigarette Cards was played by the first boy flirting a card forwards out of the side of his hand, and then the other boys took turns to flirt theirs to land on it. If a card landed on another then that boy won it and had another go and went on until he missed. But if the card missed first time they both stayed on the ground and the next boy tried. It was hard to flirt cards because the shape made them curve in the air and soon there’d be lots of cards lying on the ground. Then the knacky bit was to land a card on more than one and take as many as it touched until there was a winner. Girls didn’t play Cigarette Cards.
The tin gas mask holders meant you could sit down in snow and not get wet. It had snowed the night before, and a slide had been got going down the steepest part of the playground, and I wasn’t allowed on because my clog irons would have brogged it. So I went to roll my curtain ring.
I tried, but the snow made the ring fall over. Then I found a part next to the school wall where the snow had melted, and the ring went down all the way to the bottom, but one of the boys took it and ran off and wouldn’t give it back, and the bell went for the end of playtime.
I sat next to Sheila and worried about my curtain ring. Then I got up and went to Miss James’s high desk and pulled at her dress. I was crying again and she asked me what the matter was. I said I wanted a holiday. Miss James said she did too but she couldn’t have one and nor could I, and she told me to go and sit down.
At dinnertime I went home and ate my bread and jam and said I wasn’t going back to school. My mother said I had to, and she took me.
The first part of the afternoon was Sleep Time. There was an iron frame at the end of the classroom, with folding beds hanging on it. We had to lift them off the frame and set them out on the floor in rows. It took two of us to lift a bed. Michael showed me how to do it and helped me, and then I helped him. My bed was number 28, and I knew that was how old I’d be when I died.
We had to take our shoes and socks off and lie down and sleep while Miss James sat at her high desk and wrote in a book. Michael was next to me and his toe nails were long with thick white ends that let the light through.
If I lay on my back I could see two things. One was a round window near the ceiling made of different-coloured glass which had patterns I could turn into dragons. The other was an old-fashioned framed picture of a mother talking to her children. My mother had taught me big letters before I started school, so I could read what was underneath the picture. It said:
WE MUSTN’T SING ON SUNDAYS
BECAUSE IT IS A SIN.
BUT WE MAY SING ON WICKED DAYS
TILL SUNDAY COMES AGAIN.
When we got up, Michael had to lace my clogs and tie the bow because I didn’t know how.
My first proper writing, January 1940 (© the author)
Miss James taught us for a year; then we went to Miss Bratt. We called her Polly because her voice sounded like a parrot. My mother said when children were in Miss Bratt’s class they got too noisy to live with because Miss Bratt was deaf and everyone had to shout, and they shouted at home; and so did I.
Miss Bratt’s room was not in the Infants part of the school. It was next to the hall, where we had Prayers, and it was horrible.
There were two windows, set between carved stone, high up, so we couldn’t see out; and it was dark, because the branches of the holly and yew trees in the vicarage garden pressed against the glass all the time and weren’t ever cut back.
Next to Miss Bratt’s high desk was an iron stove. It burned coke, which was kept in the playground without any covering and was always wet, and the smell made us cough.
In front of the stove there was a wire mesh fireguard with a brass rail round the top. If any of us got soaked with rain on the way to school we had to stand against the fireguard until our clothes stopped steaming before we could sit in our desks. The stove was so hot it made our legs blotchy red and white, and sometimes it made us cry, but Miss Bratt went on teaching because she didn’t hear us.
And Miss Bratt wouldn’t let any of us be excused during a lesson; so if we wet ourselves in class the boys had to stand at the fireguard to dry, and for the girls Miss Bratt took their knickers off and hung them on the brass rail. The smell of pee made us cough more.
One day, the smell was so bad I ran from the classroom, through the hall, out of the porch and up School Lane. Miss Bratt ran after me, shouting, ‘Richard! Richard!’, but I didn’t stop and ran all the way home.
My mother was cross and said she’d tell my father, and then I’d get what-for. But it was the end of the afternoon, so she didn’t take me back to school.
When my father came for his tea, my mother told him what I’d done, but he laughed when I said how Miss Bratt had chased me and called me Richard. I said I didn’t know why she’d called me that, because she knew it wasn’t my name. And my father laughed even more, and then he told me how my uncle Dick had done just the very same thing when he’d been in Miss Bratt’s class, and she’d run after him shouting at him to come back, and she hadn’t caught him, either.
My mother said my father must smack me, but he was laughing so much he gave me a hug and rubbed his whiskery chin against my cheek, and my mother went to wash the pots.
After Miss Bratt, we had Miss Fletcher. She was fierce, but her classroom was big and light, and she’d built a museum with rocks and fossils and sea shells and butterflies and beetles in a glass case. And on Friday afternoons she read real stories to us: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and she did all the voices differently. But the rest of the week it was Class Reading, and that was Milly-Molly-Mandy books, and we had to read them aloud in turn or all together. This was boring, except when we had gas mask lessons, where we wore our gas masks the whole time.
We put our gas masks on by dipping our chins into the rubber mask against the tin breathing part, which had woolly asbestos in to stop the gas, and then pulling the elastic straps over the back of our heads with our thumbs to hold the mask fast.
The eyepiece soon misted up so we couldn’t see properly, and if we breathed hard the rubber sides of the mask made rude noises, but Miss Fletcher didn’t say anything.
I liked Miss Fletcher, even though I got into trouble.
One day, when there was an air-raid warning, I lost my balaclava in the shelter and the teachers had to look for it after school.
The next morning, at the end of Prayers, Miss Fletcher called me out in front of everybody and told me what a nuisance I was. Then she lifted me up into the air with one hand by the back of my braces and spanked me. Because I was swinging in my braces it didn’t hurt much, and I didn’t cry, but it made me feel silly.
Afterwards, though, the same day, when we had Class Reading, Miss Fletcher gave me one of her very own books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all to myself. And I sat and read it with my fingers in my ears and breathed hard in my gas mask so I couldn’t hear that Milly-Molly-Mandy.
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