Tower and Town, October 2017 (view the full edition)St Mary’s Infant SchoolMemories of an earlier St Mary's School
I started school at St. Mary's "up Herd Street" in 1940. The Infant School consisted of one huge room with an enormous sliding partition which was opened as required with much shoving and pushing. It was girls only - the boys went to St. Peter's down the High Street (today's town library).
War had been declared. The air raid warning and the all-clear alarms were sounded from the Town Hall, sounds which to this day evoke memories. We carried our gas masks in cardboard boxes with a string shoulder strap. We were subjected to random gas mask tests and on one occasion the authorities brought real gas into school to test everything out. I dodged it all by going across the playground to the lavatory block which held square wooden boxes, each with a hole in the middle of the large square seat - very difficult to climb onto. The flush came at intervals and passed down the row of loos until all had flushed. I remained there, quite frightened, until all the people had left, then I crept back into the huge classroom which stank of the terrible gas.
Miss Thomas was a lovely Headmistress. She taught us to read en masse with the vowels always up on the board for word formation. She would have each of us at her desk every day to read to her. Miss Bryant taught us arithmetic; she arranged the 12 times tables on doors all around the room. We really enjoyed this daily task; it brought out the competitive side in us. Every morning we lined up to receive our spoonful of government-issue cod liver oil and malt to prevent rickets; it tasted DISGUSTING. The spoon was wiped on some sort of paper between pupils.
We were put into teams: red, blue, green, yellow. I was blue. Every Friday afternoon our weekly points were counted. The winning team then had the appropriate coloured team star stuck to its poster on the partition wall. Looking back, it was a good introduction to learning to live with failure - not always being on the winning team! Pamela Horril |