Trundling through life: School

Showing posts with label School. Show all posts

15 October 2025

School dinners

I had a school dinner every day from when I started school until I completed my fifth form at Grammar School. Throughout primary school the cost was one shilling - five pence in today's money! The price increased in my secondary school days but I don't think it was ever more than 1/6.

Most days there was some sort of meat, potatoes, vegetables and gravy followed by a pudding with custard. That was the basic idea.

Meat could be a meat pie, or braised liver, or stew or sausages or maybe roast meat. Vegetables would be cabbage, or carrots, or butterbeans, or tinned peas, or swede and carrots.

Puddings were often milk puddings (tapioca, sago, rice) but could also be traditional English puds like Bakewell tart, Manchester tart, or steamed pudding. We might also have stewed fruit or fruit crumble.

On Friday fish appeared, fried, baked or poached in milk. There would be a salad sometime although I have still never worked out why salads included cold baked beans.

Everything was washed down with water. And everybody had to try everything.

Considering we'd also had milk half way through the morning, I think it could be said that we didn't go hungry!

23 July 2025

More school photographs

I had another search around and found a few more group photographs from school.

This was two years later. I'm sixth from the right on the second to back row (with my eyes closed. Class sizes had started to increase so Miss Rains had a class of forty.

This gem was a year later when I was Princess April in the class play. I'm the long haired girl almost in the centre behind Jack Frost. My (then) best friend Kathryn was the witch next to me.

This was the fifth form at Grammar School. After this I went to sixth form college. There are only twenty two of us here but I know there were a couple of absentees.

I still meet regularly with the girl on the extreme right of the front row. She's also on the extreme right of the school play photo. (I still say girl but we are both in our seventies!)

22 July 2025

An old photograph

Writing about end of term yesterday inspired me to look for my old school photographs and this was the first one I ever had. I was in Miss Higgins class at Priory Lane Infants School and I think this would have been 1956 I'm fifth from the left on the middle row.

School was the first time I had mixed with such a wide variety of children from such diverse backgrounds. The children I knew pre-school were my parents' friends' children. (This was in the days before playgroups and nursery schools for all.) The school drew its pupils from a wide variety of economic backgrounds and, although the picture shows bright smiling faces, I can remember several children with only vague notions of hygiene!

I was very proud of the dress I was wearing on this occasion. My father had recently been on a business trip to America and while there he had bought outfits from Macy's for my sister and I. In 1956 Britain was still in the grip of post-war austerity and that dress was truly a wonder.

06 August 2024

R is for Remember when

I love to remember when I was a girl.

Sometimes my remembering makes me want those times back, but often I feel glad that things have changed.

Do you remember waking up in a cold bedroom with ice on the inside of windows? And a weekly bath and daily all over washes with a rough flannel?

Do you remember there being milk delivered to the doorstep before you were even up?

Do you remember walking to school with your friends and skipping or playing hopscotch on the way?

Do you remember cycling to school and maybe propping your bike against the kerb on the way? I don't know when I last saw a bike leaning on a kerb.

Do you remember getting a third of a pint of slightly warm milk (with a straw) to drink at mid-morning?

Do you remember school dinners with liver or a sausage or anonymous meat with cabbage or carrots and mashed potato, followed by rice pudding?

Do you remember the excitement of school radio programmes?

Do you remember bread and jam for tea, followed by home-made cake?

Do you remember going to bed cuddling a hot water bottle (mine was stone!) with all sorts of things piled on the bed just to keep you warm?

If you do, I think you (like me) are very lucky.

11 December 2017

Christmas memories 8. Infant school Christmas party

None of us can truly remember our childish wonder at Christmas but we can look back through adult eyes with enormous gratitude for the little things which grown-ups did to give us wonderful memories.

For me the infant school party was truly magical. We each took in a cake or something similar which was whisked away from us as soon as we arrived at school in the morning. The morning of the school party was a time of barely controlled excitement. Each classroom had been decorated using the craft creations of the children. One year we made snowflakes to stick on the window, another year was cotton wool snowmen and yet another a host of angels. Crepe paper streamers would be high on the ceiling in a way which I am told would make any fire officer these days need more than an angel to soothe him. Each classroom had a tree usually hung with toilet roll lanterns and there would be a huge banner wishing everyone Merry Christmas.

Lunch was usually a little early and then we were shooed out into the playground so that teachers, school staff and a bevy of parents could set to work. The dinner ladies must have had a hard time with us that day!

Eventually we were allowed back into school for The Party. Games took place in our classrooms and always included Pass the Parcel, Musical Statues and whatever else the teacher could think of.

And finally, the party tea. This was always laid out on long tables in the dining room by the kitchen staff and those wonderful parents. It was less than two hours since lunch but I don't remember being even slightly inhibited when it came to eating my share. Sandwiches, jelly, cakes went down in rapid succession.

At last there would be a lull in the noise and then there would be a huge BANG! Santa and his sleigh had arrived on the school roof! All eyes went up to the high windows around the hall to watch Santa striding along the roof of the adjacent corridor on his way down to an ecstatic band of children.

Soon he came into the hall carrying a huge sack. Had we been good? Of course, Santa, we were always good. He asked his question of the whole school as he arrived and then of each class before he handed out presents. He checked with the teachers that we had indeed been good and we looked anxiously at Miss Higgins and Miss Gulliver as they gave their reports.

All too soon, Santa left and we had a final story before we too were sent home to tell our parents what a wonderful time we had had.

All this took place early in the final week of term. It had to be so that there would be time to eat the rest of the huge cakes our mums had sent for the party.

27 September 2017

Season of , , , ?

September (and maybe even more October) is a great time for musing and remembering. The nights are drawing in and although I no longer have a real fire I do sometimes light candles and the gentle light is more conducive for looking into the past than trying to organise the present.

September was back to school. I loved school - well until I was about seventeen then I wasn't so keen. Primary school was wonderful, lessons were exciting, learning came naturally.

Apart from lessons though there was playtime and at this time of the year conkers were the game of choice. I've been told that conkers aren't looked on with quite the same favour now as they were in my childhood but the fifties were a great time to be a kid. I was never much good at playing conkers but I loved collecting them. Those wonderful shiny "nuts" ready to be prised out of their spiny coating. They were just the right size for keeping in your pocket or clutching in your hand. Mention that something is chestnut coloured and it's conkers (horse chestnuts) rather than sweet chestnuts which come into my mind.

Everybody had their own theories about the best way to harden a conker. Some soaked them in vinegar, others burnished them with shoe polish. We had a Rayburn in the kitchen and Mother would put my offerings in the slow bottom oven.

I've really enjoyed writing this post. I shall have a smile on my face all day!

04 September 2016

Willingly to school (1)

I loved school! I started sixty years ago this week and can still remember how excited I was.

I went to Priory Lane Infants School which was about half a mile from where I lived. I can't remember what I wore that first day but I can remember that I couldn't get there fast enough. We had been to put my name down a few weeks earlier and I had had a tantalising glimpse of children doing wonderful things and now I was going to be one of those privileged children.

I was in Miss Higgins class. As we walked through the door Miss Higgins was marking registers and giving out name badges with one hand and hanging on to a screaming child with the other. I couldn't wait to get rid of Mummy's hand and start playing with all those wonderful toys and couldn't really work out why anyone didn't want to be there.

Then half way through the morning I was given a bottle of milk and a straw. I'd never drunk milk from a bottle before so this was another wonder of my new life.

As twelve o'clock drew near Miss Higgins and her helpers divided the children into two groups, putting one group into coats ready to go home for lunch while the rest were shepherded to the dining room for school dinner. I was assigned to the first group and off I went.

Mummy was very surprised to see me. She'd ordered and paid for school dinners for me. So together we walked back to school. There was a bit of a flap on when we got there as somebody had done a head count and realised that they were one head short.

Can you imagine the hullabaloo there would be today if a four year old child nipped off home unnoticed?

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