大象传媒

On Saturday, June 10, 1944, four days after the Allies landed in France, I left inner city Birmingham for the Warwickshire countryside. Aston Commercial School, where I was a 15-year-old student learning shorthand and typing, was off to the first Farming Camp School.
The idea was that we would study in the morning and help on the land in the afternoon, and it worked very well The lessons were all geared to rural matters and the money we earned from our (quite strenuous) farm work helped pay for our keep.
This was mainly weeding onions, digging up potatoes and picking strawberries. (You could eat a few of those but the novelty soon wore off.)
In those pre-GCE days I was due that summer to sit three Royal Society of Arts (RSA) exams - in English, bookkeeping and maths - which I took sitting at a makeshift desk in one of the long wooden camp huts.
One afternoon we left the Farming Camp at Broom, near Bidford-on-Avon to travel by coach to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Seats were at a premium so we stood at the back to watch Richard II.
Another day we put on our own (shortened) version of A Midsummer Night鈥檚 Dream when relatives - mostly mums, as dads were in the Forces - came to see our outdoor show. I was Puck and my improvised costume included brown school knickers, most embarrassing as ours was a mixed school.
We frequently got the giggles during rehearsals when our lovely English teacher gave us a hint - look at the top of the other person鈥檚 nose, it always works.
I only had one more term at school and left at Christmas shortly after my 16th birthday. I would have loved to have stayed on to do School Cert. and then go on to college, but money was short at home and I had to get a job. Not to be outdone, 40 years later, married and the mother of three grown-up children, I was presented with my OU degree.
I often wonder what happened to the other boys and girls at the Farming Camp School who, like me, did their little bit for the country?

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