大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Lincolnshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Chappell and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Chappell fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

In 1940, with the Battle of Britain being furiously fought in the skies over England, we were still without a school. Our teachers and our school officers of the Education Department had to look for alternative school premises.

Our class teacher, a Mr McLennan, was as bewildered as we children were, I suppose, by the sudden turn of events, took us off on long walks. These he was generous enough to describe as 鈥渘ature walks鈥�. To begin with, no building appeared to be available to us. Class discipline began to fall apart. On one occasion in Dean Wood, Mr McLennan, calling the class register at four p.m. after a long afternoon in woodland, was answered by only ten voices out of the possible forty-five. Many pupils had either gone home early or had deliberately lost themselves in this large wooded area amongst its hills, hollows and streams Often these so called nature walks were abandoned, for instance if it rained. The schoolteacher had on other recourse, then, but to send his pupils off to their homes, no matter what the time of day.

The Education Office at last began to discover emergency rooms and buildings, rooms, sometimes with carpets, in the local Liberal Club, whose secretary provided the first of a number of rooms in the emergency. In the Fountain Street Working Men鈥檚 Club were wooden floors. Since there were no available chairs, the floor surfaces offered were to prove important. The Cooperative Hall in Albion Street offered long tables and long seating, the seating upholstered in a round, leaking horsehair. It was very uncomfortable both for girls in dresses and the boys in short trousers. Mr McLennan was ingenious enough to find a set of Victorian school slates set in neat wooden frames. On these we scrawled our 鈥渟ums鈥� and proper nouns wiping their surfaces clean with a fragment of wet sponge, a wiper that was tossed from hand to hand as the children sat on a carpet or on a hardwood floor or on a horsehair-covered long bench. In the working men鈥檚 clubs at least, the odours of the stale beer clung to our clothing and filled our nostrils as we worked.

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