大象传媒

This story has been written onto the 大象传媒 People's War site by Callington U3A - Lucy Thomas - on behalf of Mary Atkinson. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

I spent 5 years in Junior school but have no recollection of actually learning anything. However the teachers managed to instil enough information without my even noticing, to enable me to pass the 11 plus. Oh yes, we chanted the times tables every morning!

I have odd snippets of memory; in the first class some of us had to sit on cushions in the central aisle of the room because there were 60 of us but only 45 desks. We seemed to spend interminable hours in darkened corridors during air raids. I remember Mrs Simms who had a jutting rear and bosom and was kind, and Mrs Tunnicliffe who had a moustache and was very harsh. I was left-handed, which she wouldn't tolerate and she put me in the front row under her eye where she could lean over her desk and rap my knuckles with her wooden ruler if she caught me using my left hand, or to chastise my meagre ink-spotted efforts with my right hand. Miss Ballard took us for sewing and I still have my green and pink needlecase, cross-stitched on canvas.

In the top class we had to spend Friday afternoons knitting socks for soldiers. Like Penelope, undoing each day's weaving, I imagine the teacher having to spend all weekend undoing our knitting mistakes and turning heels! We never got the same knitting back the next week. And at the end of term we packed Red Cross boxes for prisoners of war. I think the socks went into them.

But, out of class, I could give a detailed account of our playground games: the intricate rules of skipping, hopscotch and "ballsie" against the playground wall: the excitement when there was a fight in the boys' playground. A crowd would gather round a heap of struggling bodies until everyone was dispersed by Mr Cook the deputy head.

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