Backward Glances

Visits to elementary schools, and the chance to chat with today’s young students and their teachers, often have me thinking back to my own early schooldays – memories that are transatlantic (England’s west country) and ever more remote (the 1950s).

Not counting Castle Street Infant School (Oh, the injustice of being made to lie on a canvas cot for an afternoon nap when you’d rather be outside with a kite or a bucket and spade!), my first place of learning was Church Street Junior Boys’ School, just down the road from the Parish Church and over the fence from a textile mill which, we were told, produced the serge for the Mounties’ famous scarlet tunics.

The school is a handsome nineteenth century building of grey-blonde local stone, slate and oak, approached through impressive wrought iron front gates and surrounded by a couple of acres of paved property. Changes have taken place, but back then it was a small structure of four classrooms around a central hall, with a separate cafeteria building, outside toilets, a bicycle shed and a vegetable garden.

We were a student body of a bit more than a hundred children, starting in standard (not grade) one at the age of seven and leaving standard four for high school after taking the dreaded national 11+ placement exam – a test that purported to be able to decide whether a pre-teen would be best trained for a future in rocket science or roadwork.

And we were a monochromatic, C of E (Church of England), countryside society: the accompanying photograph of me and my standard four classmates includes a Peck and a Hook, a Ford and a Smith, a Butler and a Potter, but not a single Mohammed, Matsumoto or Mukherjee.

None of the boys wore long pants to school: all shorts and knee socks and sensible shoes (ties and blazers encouraged but not mandatory), macs, sou’westers and wellies for the rain, singlets and daps (sneakers) for phys ed, satchels for books and pencils. We sat two to a wooden desk: one hinged bench, polished smooth by generations of fidgety bottoms; two desk compartments with lift-up lids, liberally initialled by generations of bored hands (three strokes of the cane if caught in the act, I’m sure); and ink wells that remained untenanted until standard three, when we were first entrusted with those treacherous, scratchy straight pens and the rigours of proper penmanship.

The seating plan seemed a haphazard arrangement: some effort to put Paul Byrons at the back, Tom Thumbs at the front and Artful Dodgers within easy reach, I suppose, but otherwise quite arbitrary – you had to hope at least that your appointed desk partner had a working knowledge of personal hygiene and shared an interest in Rita Hayworth and the fortunes of the Gloucestershire county cricket team.

It helped too if he was prepared to help smuggle in stuff to make the school day more bearable: interminable history lessons about Edward the Confessor or Ethelred the Unready or Sheldrick the Shifty (I made that one up… I think) seemed to glide by with the aid of a Beano comic and a bag of boiled sweets – they had to be unwrapped, those crinkly wrappers were a dead giveaway.

The classroom was a dour and threadbare environment compared to those of today: no colourful displays or bustling work centres, nary an aquarium, potted plant or audio-visual contrivance in sight. There was a chalkboard propped on a large wooden easel, a pull-down map of the world with the British Empire in pink, a dusty collection of reference books and a picture of the Queen.

The curriculum was probably very Anglocentric, though my then limited world view wouldn’t have recognized it as such, and seemed to dwell at length on arithmetic – mechanical (written sums), mental (choral chanting of times tables) and problems (If train A is travelling north at 60 miles an hour …) – and nature study (how to tell your daisy from your deadly nightshade).

Half a world and two-thirds of a lifetime away and so much more to remember…look for more backward glances in future articles.

PICTURE: The young Mr. Harmer is the fair-haired one sitting far right  (third row from the top).