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was different in my day Frank Grimshaw |
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Chapter 10 Chapter 11
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CHAPTER 10, page 3 emulate. Exceptionally, if considered especially worthy, repeat recognition would be received from the Head himself during School Assembly. It was considered that later in life competition would inevitably be encountered in all fields and the sooner the rewards of success were personally experienced the better. It must have been assumed that eleven- and twelve-year-olds would inevitably get lost en route if expected to travel between different rooms in the vastness of the ‘Big School’. So we, as yet un-trusted, remained at our Form room desks whilst teachers travelled between lessons to inspire us with their expertise. Two forty-minute lessons preceded a half-hour break when Milk Monitors doled out the one-third pint glass bottles. Each had a hygienic sealed cardboard disc in the top with a perforated circle in the middle. When carefully pressed with the thumb it provided an entry hole for a straw – or if pressed too hard, squirted milk over anyone within range! Then a dash for the refectory to queue for biscuits. Remember this was Wartime and to get biscuits ‘off the ration’ was special! But every day they were available... 1d (One ‘old’ penny) for McVitie’s chocolate Digestive, ½d (a ha’penny) for a Nice or a Coconut ring. This was when I reaped the rewards for Dad’s lift to my pals! We were then released to run wild for a quarter of an hour before back to our desk for two more lessons until 12.30. Dinner break for an hour and a quarter and then back for three more lessons without a break till end of school at 4.00. Breaks were full of activity, dependant upon the weather, and the current ‘craze’. As well as inevitable ‘tennis ball’ football, we’d dash about on tarmac playground or when dry enough, ‘playing field’ playing ‘Releaso’ – a version of Tick and It but with two teams. Members of the ‘On’ team had to touch an opposing member who became prisoner under guard at the team’s base. A prisoner could be released if touched by a member of his own team who safely evaded the Guard. Roles were swapped if all the enemy side was captured. Agility and fleetness of foot were essential whilst body swerve and the ability to perform a forward roll at speed beneath the outstretched arm of an opponent was extremely useful! Hard to describe, and must sound less exciting than I remember it! It certainly got rid of surplus energy! We played Marbles. Glass marbles had superseded ‘olden-day’ clay ‘alleys’. Mine varied from the ‘common’ single colour glass, through crystals – with swirls and flecks of white or multi-coloured glass within – to the treasured ‘blood alleys’ of translucent white definitively marked with ‘traditional’ red swirls running through them, but also others with blues, yellows and greens coloured patches and streaks. You’d only play like-for-like, but I still hated losing my favourites! We’d play ‘singles’ – aiming at our opponent’s marble in turn – hit and win – or lose and his ‘go’! Or ‘circles’, each of the players aiming in turn at a chalked circle containing one marble from each of us – any knocked out of the circle were won! We played ‘Flicks’. Everyone had ‘swap’ cigarette cards (one in every pack of ten... two in a twenty pack) and most parents smoked providing a source of cards. |
As with anything ‘collected’ even today... Pokèmon comes to mind.... once you’d saved the ‘common ones’ into your ‘album’, there were always two or three in each set of Fifty that were ‘rare’!... you had to find a purpose for your surplus unwanted ‘swaps’. Stand six feet away from a wall, and, on your turn, from between first and second fingers ‘flick’ a card towards it. Soon the tarmac beside the wall would have sufficient scattered cards for your next card – and anybody else’s in their turn – to land on top of one or more already there. Touch any with it and they were yours to retrieve. Thrilling?! Well... it occupied our time! We played ‘snobs’ (Jacks? – Five stones?) with five brightly painted half-inch plaster cubes following a ruled sequence of different combinations. Onesies, twosies, threesies, doubles, lift and drop, and so on! – one cube thrown up just to the right height, whilst accurately picking up or setting down the others, before catching the airborne one again without error through the full sequence to win. Miss and you lost your turn! In cold winter, queues formed for turns on slides that stretched longer and longer across the ice-frosted smooth playground encouraging early arrival at school as continuous run-and-slide eventually extended the length to allow four or five to slide in succession at the same time across the twenty or thirty yards of speeding muscle-tiring exhilaration. But sadly, having achieved an ever-increasingly perfect surface, it was gone before mid-morning playtime. Fearful of the school’s responsibility for potential serious accidents, the unfortunate caretaker had been instructed to salt-grit them as soon as we were back in class. We didn’t hate him. We hated ‘the powers that be’! It would ever be so! Don’t kill the messenger! We knew there was no danger! We’d start again in a different place next day! Later in Winter, annually guaranteed to fall and achieve cover for several weeks, snow gave us ammunition for pitched battles. You took sides as you arrived, pals encouraging your support behind their inadequate defences. Suffering inevitable hits, the first lesson was frequently spent in moist discomfort. Worth it, of course! Proverbially, wartime school dinners earned a totally deserved reputation. Though always substantial, and included a pudding, if you’d ever eaten elsewhere they really were disgusting! The result for me, as had been the norm in the Preparatory School, was a packed lunch. Although permitted to eat our sandwiches in the Refectory, the pervading aroma of school dinner cabbage made it a concession of dubious merit. ‘Picnics’ were banned in the playground or the School Field, and Under-Fourteens were only allowed out of school under permit if going home to an adjacent address. With insufficient time for me to get home and back, once Teacher had gone for dinner, with others I ate my sandwiches at my desk. Then weather permitting out to play the current ‘in’ games, or, to mutual advantage, collectively start our homework! It had gradually been increased from one subject a night in the Second form, and would reach three subjects a night by the Fifth form. Theoretically, each subject was set to take half an hour, so the more we could get done at school, the sooner we were out to play at night! But didn't teachers make a rod for their own back after we handed them in! |
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