A Primary Teacher's Experiences 2

I was told our school were going to a town in the Midlands with a very attractive-sounding name so I imagined it to be a pretty village nestling among the hills in the Peak District. Not so! It was a strange grimy mining village, with rows of terraced houses without any front gardens, snaking uphill and downhill, interspersed with alternate chapels and pubs, all equally daunting to a southerner of gentle upbringing!
As the train slowed down at the station, the road bridge above the line was crammed with sightseers all goggling at us, and as we were shepherded along to the school reception centre, there were murmurs of ‘The poor bairns!’ ‘Look, they’re tired out’ and so on, expressing the warm-hearted sympathy which I found to be characteristic of the neighbourhood. I and another young teacher from the same school were lucky to be allotted to one of the best billets, with the parents of a billeting officer who was looking out for something compatible. We were taken to one of the most comfortable detached houses in the place, but were rather aghast at finding we had to share a rather large double bed until her mother followed us to the evacuation area and took a house there, so I was eventually left with a bed to myself.

My landlady was a marvellous person, and I was more mothered and looked after than I had ever been before. If I was home a bit later than expected, she would be at the gate looking out for me, with a hot meal on the stove, and all she took for my keep was a pound a week - not much, even then. I did what I could to repay her kindness and I remember making her a dress out of a length she had, which she said would ‘do for the house’. She was so pleased with it she kept it for best. This meant wearing it for the Sunday evening walk round the park. This amused me at first but I soon realised how much this park meant to the people. It had been reclaimed from a derelict area spoiled by mining and was very pleasant, an oasis if you like. It sported a bandstand where the local brass band took it in turns with the glee club to perform on Sunday evenings after chapel. In the middle was an enclosure with - of all things - a peacock to finish the picture. It could be heard squawking in the early morning from our house, and often woke me up. But to go back to our arrival - no arrangements had yet been made for our school accommodation, but it was felt we should look after the children and as the weather was magnificent, we spent a whole fortnight each looking after our fifteen children in this park. It was about the hardest job I have ever done and unfortunately one of my lot, who was barely five, ran along the rim of a shallow pond and fell off into the water. As he hadn’t yet got a change of clothes, he had to be put to bed until they dried.
One of the teachers’ jobs was to visit the billets once a fortnight, to see how our children were getting on. Most were in miners’ homes with homely, kind decent people, and settled in very well. I took some photos of some of mine with their foster-parents and sent them to the mothers to reassure them. But one problem I had was that my eyes were affected by the measles I had barely got over, so that I had to wear dark glasses and apologise if I looked as if I were crying which was rather embarrassing to say the least. At the end of the fortnight, we were found schoolrooms in various places. The Junior part of our school used the nave and vestries of a big church and the Infants used a set of Sunday School rooms. I had a small group in a little vestry, which I don’t think had any windows and we set about the three Rs once more, trying to ensure the kids at least learned to read and write. They all drew fearsome pictures of war-planes spitting fire at each other — especially the boys — but I don’t remember much about the work, except that we used some good early readers, starting with words connected with labelled pictures of the parts of a house then parts of the body and so on. I was good at drawing and made a lot of wall charts and pieces of apparatus to go with this. Then they read the old Beacon Readers. I don’t think there was much in the way of library books or picture books, but we did ‘handwork’ using waste materials and a good deal of singing in the afternoons.
My Headmistress gave me driving lessons so I could drive her car if needed, which I enjoyed very much, though we couldn’t go far as petrol was rationed to necessities. I soon felt nicely settled here. I joined a badminton club, started music lessons with a view to trying for an LRAM, and also went with a rambling club walking or cycling in the lovely hilly district, which was not too far away. I was nicely settled in our makeshift school when l once again got caught in the ‘last to come, first to go’ system, for one of the men in the Junior Department got called up, and as I suspect I was the only one of our staff who would not have kicked up an awful fuss at being moved, I was sent off to a small hall completely on my own to look after about twenty Junior boys of about eight to ten years of age.
My previous experience with Juniors came in handy, and I think I gained the respect of my little lot by my drawing on the blackboard. There were very few aids of any kind, but 1 found I could always hold the children’s attention by ‘illustrating whatever I was saying by sketches. There would be subdued murmurs of ‘Coo look at that!’ and I remember reading in one of the letters home that the boys frequently wrote in class-time, ‘I like my teacher because she can draw good.’ I was extremely thankful for the co-operation of this particular lad who was the leader among the boys, for what he said ‘went’ as far as the rest were concerned. I found in later teaching situations that winning round a leader was often the answer to difficult classes, though here it was pure accident. Although I felt I was getting on quite well here, one problem was that we used the same room that was used by a Sunday School class on Sundays and another that someone opened the place up quite early, and when I arrived at about quarter to nine, some of my boys had already been there some time, rampaging about. If any damage was reported no-one knew or could prove whether it was done on Sunday or early Monday morning and when I finally left this set-up, I heard that a large bill had been presented to the Education Authority for breakages that I certainly knew nothing about. One morning there was some sort of uproar when I arrived, and I made them all sit down and start writing all their tables out from memory to calm them down. There was dead silence, and just then a supervisor came to visit and was most impressed with my disciplinary powers, which she certainly wouldn’t have been ten minutes before, so I breathed a sigh of relief. I was still in the same nice ‘digs’ and had quite & lot of contacts out of school, but by now, - I was about twenty-five - I did feel the dearth of young men around. If one did by any chance light on one, he usually had some health problem or was a conscientious objector who, in my unthinking youth, I considered beyond the pale.
The only close experience of bombing I had during the entire war was when a land-mine was jettisoned in this mining village, near enough to blow our windows in (or out, I forget which). My landlady and her husband were elderly, and I got the steps and nailed mats from the floor over the broken windows, as it was wet and windy that night. We were supposed to share a shelter in our next-door neighbour’s garden if things got bad, but usually preferred to stay at home and huddle under a table. At the time of the destruction of Coventry, we heard waves of bombers going over, - it seemed all night, and next day some distraught relatives arrived to tell us how dreadful it had been, but I never saw anything myself. After this a number of parents decided their children might just as well be at home and the danger of coastal invasion had lessened, so numbers declined in the evacuation area, and the next thing I knew, I was asked to return to teach back home. I was almost persuaded to stay, as I could have had a post in one of the local schools, but I thought I would hate it if all our evacuees and staff were brought home and I was left in what was, after all, an alien land, in spite of all the kindness we had received. So I went back. I had, of course, returned for holidays to see the family, travelling on terribly crowded trains full of troops. I had equipped myself with a really strong suitcase and nearly always sat on it in a corridor near the door of the carriage as far as I can recollect. I got quite expert at grabbing a decent spot where I wouldn’t get trodden on. I would probably have done better by tarting myself up a bit and pretending to faint on one of the soldiers’ laps but I never thought of this at the time.
Soon I was living at home again, sharing a not too large suburban house with my father and step-mother, my father’s sister, and three young half-brothers. The oldest boy, about seven or eight, had been evacuated to a different part of the Midlands with his school, and probably returned at the same time.
The school I was now allocated to was right the other side of the town, and I had to go by train after quite a long walk to the station, and start about 7.30 to get there by 9, as trains didn’t fit in well. There were no school meals or handy cafes, and it was about 6.30 when I got home, so I got very tired. This school had just re-opened after being closed for two years and was near a big barracks. Some of the children had not been evacuated and had consequently not been to school at all for some time. Others were, naturally, very unsettled and there was no established routine at all. There was a large school field, and on the first day the pupils were scattered all over it by the end of the morning break. Someone blew a whistle or rang a bell (I forget which) for the end of break, but they just took no notice. We spent the rest of the morning trying to round them up. One forgets how conditioned children usually are to responding to signals, and we had to start again from scratch! It was just as bad in class. I had between thirty-five and forty boys and girls ranging from about eight to eleven years, all at different stages of knowledge - and ignorance — and it was very hard work getting them started in groups at the appropriate work level. The Head, who had also just returned from the evacuation area, seemed to me to spend the whole of her time collecting National Savings, a class at a time, when she would have been very welcome giving a hand in the classroom taking one of the groups. Being a little more confident and sophisticated by this time, I continually pestered ‘The Office’ to transfer me to a school nearer my home which they did the following term. This school was nearer home and I could cycle there. The children came, on the whole, from a ‘nice area’ and gave very little trouble. A group was always waiting at the end of the path vying with each other for the privilege of pushing my bike or carrying my case.
The Head, a very nice person who was reputed to be on the verge of a breakdown as a result of her evacuation experiences was a good organiser and a hard worker. We heard that she had had a lot of problems over senior girls being billeted in miners’ homes where the man bathed in front of the fire when he came home from work and had found this very upsetting. The school building was only partly used for education and some of it belonged to the A.R.P. and ambulance Services, so there were quite a lot of people about. (One classroom was rather ominously labelled ‘Mortuary’, but as far as I know this was never needed). Some of the men seemed to be just hanging around waiting for emergencies, which never materialised, and were always willing to shift cupboards, which was a great help. Here I had the opposite problem in relation to the Head. She was seldom out of my classroom. Although numbers of staff were sufficient for the Head not to have to take a class, she had no office or Head’s room. As we were on good terms, she said would I mind if she ‘camped out ‘in a corner of my classroom, which was quite large. I could hardly refuse, and she spent most of her time filling in forms and counting dinner money and the of course inevitable National Savings. Although she was most kind and pleasant, and never interfered or criticised me I wasn’t too happy about being watched, as I thought, and one day when she complained that she never had time to teach, I offered to see to the money part of the time, so she could have a go with my class. She actually took me up on this, much to my surprise, and it was quite a relief. However, one day, I did some measuring up and decided that an open cloakroom at the end of one corridor would make her an office if a big cupboard could be set across the gap. There was plenty of surplus furniture about and I found one that just fitted, I got one or two ARP men who said they would move the cupboard - and presented my plan to the Head. I had made Provision for every objection she thought of and at length it was done. I found an electric fire and even wrote a notice ‘Headmistress’, the doors and she was really pleased when it was done and used it for the rest my time there. I took a reasonably sized lower Junior class in this school. I used to take ‘Scripture’ every morning there and though I don’t remember now how it began, at one point I asked the children to think how they could help to make a happy home and avoid quarrelling. The next day one little girl told me “I did what you said to-day. My mum and dad were quarrelling about who was going to give me my dinner money, so I just took it out of my own money box”.

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