Backward Glances II

Bear with me as I surrender to a bit more nostalgia about my first alma mater.

Back in the ’50s, Church Street Boys’ School was one of a half dozen junior schools in the place where I was born, a mid-sized (15,000) Cotswold town perched on the floor and flanks of what Queen Victoria – so local lore insists – once nicknamed the Golden Valley. It was a town best known then for its woollen cloth industry, its odiferous brewery and a pretty decent rugger team.

Our headmaster, who also taught standard (year) four, was a Welshman named Rhys Jones, by turns stern and kindly, with a bristly moustache, bushy eyebrows and a tall forehead. We first met him in standard three when he was a weekly “guest lecturer” in penmanship: firm directives about proper posture and grip, followed by endless lines of coiled OOOOOs and spiky llllllllls.

He was an authoritative figure and certainly brooked no misbehaviour, but on the rare occasion that he was moved to apply judicial cane to miscreant backside, you can be sure it was done more with regret than relish.

His good wife sometimes came to the school to give us elocution lessons: lots of deep breathing, tone matching and facial aerobics designed to help us e-nun-ci-ate correctly.

I well remember her efforts to teach us “Cargoes,” by the then poet laureate John Masefield, in preparation for a choral speaking recital. There we were nattering about quinquiremes and gold moidores and salt-caked smoke stacks, all the while wondering if our Wrigley’s would still be chewable after an hour in a linty trouser pocket.

We were a small school of four classes and quite hierarchical: we met together at lunchtime in the cafeteria (sitting at long trestle tables for toad-in-the-hole and tapioca pudding) and at Friday morning assembly (standing at ease for God Save the Queen and Onward Christian Soldiers), but there wasn’t much fraternization between age groups otherwise – the oh-so-sophisticated eleven-year-olds certainly ruled on the playground.

At recess we played marbles and tag, acted out Lash LaRue westerns and Dan Dare space epics, roller skated (I wonder if the skate key is now a museum curio?), read Enid Blyton’s latest Famous Five or Secret Seven adventure, and raced dinky toy grand prix cars (Ferraris and Maseratis, BRMs and Alfas) down the slope to the main gate – instant success to the “mechanic” who first thought to bring a can of Singer sewing machine oil to grease his wheels!

A favourite playground pastime in the fall was conkers. For the uninitiate, this is a game for two people, each equipped with a conker (the glossy brown horse chestnut seed) threaded on a piece of string. The “combatants” take turns striking each other’s conker until one breaks and the survivor claims victory. The idea is to rack up as many victims as possible before your conker finally succumbs. Sneaky tips to improve your conker’s chances include baking it briefly, soaking it in vinegar and coating it in clear nail varnish.

Another popular fall pursuit in the postwar years was the collection of rose hips (the orangey-red bead-like fruit of the rose bush), rich in vitamin C, to make a nutritious syrup for young children. On Monday morning, after a weekend of picking, we’d take our bags and baskets full of hips to the bicycle shed to be weighed. If you’d been particularly diligent, a bloke from some Ministry or other rewarded you with a lapel pin … doesn’t sound like much now, I guess, but to us kids in those days it was a big deal.

We played a lot of football (soccer) on the playground: no nets, just coats put down as goalposts; the totally paved surface certainly cut down on sliding tackles, and the ball was forever going over the fence into the factory next door. Rounders was a variation on baseball; the ball was pitched underhand and swung at one-handed with a bat that looked like a police truncheon. For cricket, the three stumps had to be stuck in a block of wood like a flat-bottomed candelabra. I remember one lunchtime fielding at silly mid-off (I kid you not – I think the “silly” was because you had to stand ten feet from the batsman, like cannon fodder!) and taking a line drive full in the mouth … ah, such wonderful memories.

And more to come.