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PRIMARY SCHOOL DAYS
I started infants' school in 1948, at the age of five; my memories of it are limited. After about 18 months in the infants' school, I started at “big school”.
This was a fairly typical working class primary school of the time, less than two hundred yards from my house. The only slightly unusual things about it were that it was a Catholic school and for boys only. It wasn’t particularly tough although you had to be able to stand up for yourself and there were a few people you walked carefully around. However, I enjoyed school and the games we played.
We sat at double desks which were built to last, with cast iron legs and wooden lids roughened by decades of boys carving grooves or scratching their names on the hinged lids. We would dig out the blotting paper stuffed into the ink wells and flick it at whoever had most recently annoyed us. Provided the blotting paper had been long enough in the inkwell to soak up most of the ink, it would come out as a semi-congealed lump of satisfyingly disgusting gunk, ideal as ammunition.
Every boy from about eight years old had a penknife. It was as essential as a pocketful of marbles and the pieces of string which were always going to come in useful someday. How could a boy whittle a piece of wood or make a bow and arrows without a penknife?
A catapult was another useful part of a boy’s kit, preferably one he’d made himself out of a forked piece of wood from a small tree. Fitted with a piece of strong elastic which was threaded through a bit of bicycle inner tube, a boy could be David against Goliath, a commando silently attacking an enemy machine gun post at night or a hunter stalking the ginger tom from next door. In reality, the ginger tom was quite safe and sat six yards away, giving you a dirty look and openly sneering at your lack of skill.
Marbles was another favourite pastime. A very popular game was to take it in turns to roll a marble along the street gutter, trying to hit the other person’s marble as they leapfrogged past each other. The advantage of this was that you could play this game while walking home from school, even by yourself if necessary. In my case, although I lived only a short distance from the school, this game often slowed my progress homewards enough to get me told off by my mother for being late for my tea.
