大象传媒

As a young child brought up in Gloucestershire during world War II, I can remember two tasks we were given. The first we were "encouraged", during late summer to pick wild rose hips. We were motivated not only by our interest to help the war effort, but by being paid a penny per pound for the rose hips. I can only assume the hips were collected for their vitamin C content, but do any other readers have any memories of picking wild rose hips?. In fact I have always wondered what happened to our collection efforts. I would hate to think the school was just trying to keep us busy.

On a more light hearted issue we were also taught in primary school to knit, and we boys thought it was a sissy thing to do. In fact each of us was required to knit a scarf for a soldier. I do hope they had a quality control programme in place, or some poor soldier was going to get very cold if issued with my scarf. I found it took such a long time to knit a scarf even with large needles. Even as a young boy, I developed my own productivity programme to speed up the process. The scarf was required to be a certain length before Miss Wilkinson would cast off for us boys. My method was simple I constantly pulled at each end of the scarf, to stretch it to reduce the time it took to complete the task. Unfortunately my completed scarfs (I think I knitted two prior to be given another task), more resembled woollen chain mail than a scarf. So here's a big belated "apology", over 60 years late, to the poor soldier issued with my scarf.

Maybe my two allocated tasks did not win the war for us, but I do recall Miss Wilkinson as our only teacher in a small rural school giving us so much praise and encouragement.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.