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I started school at beginning of 1940 at Hautes Capelles and lived at what is now the Ann Dawn Hotel. The school was taken over by the Germans and we were taught in scattered private houses, at Pleinheaume, L’Islet, Grandes Maisons of Roussel, in a spare upstairs room up outside steps.

We wore ‘sabots’ in winter, car tyre soles, cloth tops, metal horseshoes to protect the soles, which meant you could skate down the Rue Sauvage on a frosty winter’s day.

The lessons we had were mainly Maths and English. We obviously wrote stories and did our sums and general knowledge, but it seems to me a lot of our lessons depended on the particular teacher we had and their particular interests. I remember doing things like Nature Study, and I think at the back of the Grande Maison there was a quarry where we used to go and see some kingfishers and that became part of the lesson. We used to write in books, I can’t remember whether it was ink or pencil, but I remember we used to fill up a book and when we’d filled it up we had to turn the book on its side and write across the page so that, to save the paper, because of the shortage of books. Playtimes we’d play in the front garden.

We used to play marbles in the road on the way home. We used glass marbles, I think some of them came from old ‘pop’ bottles, but if you owned a ‘steely’, which was a ball bearing, that was worth about ten glass marbles, a prized possession.
BRIAN LE CONTE

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