Chapter 3: Primary School.
St. Bernadettes RC Primary School
Pete was first of us to start of course, the next year was myself, and then Steve. Anita, as usual, followed four years later. In the beginning we were accompanied by my mum to and from the school gates, mum didn't drive, so all the commuting was by bus. After Steve joined us, we were left to our own devices to catch the 183 bus the three miles down the Kenton Road to the nearest stop to Clifton Road, at the other end of which was the school. Getting there was fine, but the bus on the way home was so unreliable that we would sometimes wait for 30 minutes or more for it to turn up. A game we played was to start walking home from one bus stop to the next, taking the chance that we would not be overtaken between the stops. On the odd occasion, I managed to walk all the way home without seeing the bus.
The school was built in 1953, just 10 years before I started. It had classic post war functional school architecture. Beige bricks, two stories with a flat roof and metal framed windows. The school was split into two, infants and juniors, much like they are today. The infants had their own playground out the front, and the juniors were out the back. I recall running around the infant's playground, but I do not remember any ball games, maybe they were not allowed. I do however remember the super-ball craze in around 64 or 65. Kids started bouncing them to incredible heights in the playground but soon found that they readily disappeared onto the roof, or through the chain link fencing into the park next door.
The one time I remember being on the junior playground was when we were all marched out to listen for a sonic boom. I did not hear one though.
I had a friend, whose name I don't recall, we had this game where we tried to lift up some flag stones in the playground and imagined a tunnel beneath leading to an underground world of staircases and corridors, but no matter how hard we tried, we failed to dislodge any, so the playtime fantasy was never broken. In the early classes, the reading books were called 'Janet and John'. These were books written in the 1950s and worked by repeating the same words in different contexts. It did the job for us. I also remember playing with wooden blocks, where I was particularly good at getting the right shaped block into the right shaped hole, which was probably the first indication of the direction of my future career.
There was one traumatic event I remember which happened when I decided to walk all the way home one day. About hallway home I realised that I needed a poo. Unfortunately, I was overcome by the urge before I made it home, and I found myself in tears ringing the doorbell with full pants. Mum just took me in and without any fuss sorted it all out. She never got angry or raised her voice to us, she just got on with loving and cherishing. Every day we got a milk ration mid-morning in a triangular paper package that was really hard to get into with the flimsy provided straw, and sometimes required a pencil to pierce the foil. I believe I was a milk monitor for a while, where my job was to hand out the milk to the whole class.
Mum with Steve on his confirmation day
Me and Pete in our school uniforms
I still don't remember anything about the big event that happened to me in my infant school days. The first I recall of it was when I woke up in the school medical room with the school nurse in attendance. "Ah" she said, "You've woken up at last". Woken up? What's happened, I thought. From that point, it gets blurry again. I don't think I passed out, but I do not remember how I got to hospital, where I was diagnosed with concussion. The story was that I was running around and had collided with another kid and knocked myself out. I had a big blue bump on my forehead, but the other kid was fine. I was in the hospital for a few days where I was traumatised by the food and the toileting arrangements. The food was not like home. The jelly tasted like plastic, and they put butter under the jam when I asked for a jam sandwich. When I wanted to go to the toilet, they brought me a bottle or a metal tray. Well, I wasn't going to use those, there were no curtains or screens anywhere. I do not think I had a number two at all during my stay, and I crept off to the only toilet in the ward when I needed a number one.
My mum and dad visited me of course, but being so young, I just took that for granted and did not notice anything too unusual about them except that perhaps there was a concerned expression on their faces now and then. They did bring me a whole box of chocolates for myself which I thought was the best thing ever. The doctor came to see me a couple of times and asked the same question "Do you remember what happened?"" I answered in the negative since I honestly had no clue about most of the day. I eventually realised that the question was an important one, so the next time they came around I made up a story where I remembered everything. I said, "I ran around this corner and then I felt a big bump". I was discharged the same day.
Pete, Anita, Steve and Me
Northwick Park station in the background
Steve, Pete and Me
At the long gone Kingsbury outdoor pool.
The transition to junior school was uneventful as far as I can remember. I can recall very little about any of the lessons, but I am certain that we had some. During the classes we had to use liquid ink pens with a proper nib and an ink bottle with 'Quink' written on it that we filled them up from. The smell of this ink still sticks in my memory. My writing with these pens was appalling and I was given personal remedial handwriting lessons at one point. It did no good though because my lazy uneven handwriting has followed me through my life. There were two medical issues that I had treatment for at that time. I had a stammer when I was young and did several sessions at a speech therapist. I don't remember the stammer being an issue, so it must have been mild and fixed pretty quick. The second thing was verrucae, which are easy to get from swimming pools and the like. I used to wander off from school on my own to a clinic in a street nearby once a week. There they scraped the tops off the verrucae with a scalpel and put some cream on it. It was effective at the time, but verrucae have returned to haunt me throughout my life.
The Junior Playground was a tarmac rectangle with narrow grass verges on three sides. In one corner was a metal climbing frame, beneath which was the hard tarmac surface. The frame had two tower like ends, which were linked together by two bars above, which were too high to reach from the ground. Falling was inevitable. This would not be allowed in modern schools even if there were soft cushions underneath. I spent many hours on that frame. There was even one summer where the iron bars got so hot in the sun that nobody could use the frame at all. Other pastimes that we indulged in are definitely not allowed today. We played conkers a lot. There were boys who appeared with last year's rock-hard dried-up conkers who smashed my nice fresh ones to bits in no time and gave me sore knuckles for weeks. We flicked marbles across the width of the playground, which struck the ankles of many a child, and on one occasion accidentally smashing one of the school windows (I think)
War was a common game amongst the boys. We imagined battlefields on the triangular strip of grass on one side of the tarmac. It seemed to us to be an enormous space, but I went back in later years and was shocked at how small it was. It's amazing what an imagination can achieve in a young mind.
We had a games afternoon every week where we went to the park next door and, amongst other things, threw the cricket ball and did the high jump where you landed in the soft cushioning of one inch of wet sand. This was about the time that the Fosbury Flop technique was gaining popularity, but this required a foam-landing pad to avoid a broken neck, so it was banned.
I must have been a swot, because I was promoted from milk monitor to being a corridor monitor and ensuring everyone walks on the left on the way to the school hall.
The hall was where we had our daily assembly and sang hymns, the words of which were on large paper hymnbooks suspended from the ceiling. The pages could be flicked over the top between the ropes to select another song. Every Christmas we had a party in the hall and Father Christmas turned up to give everyone a present. Before the event the parents were asked to contribute the presents, which were then all mixed up so that you were given a different one at the event. I remember always being disappointed with my present. It was usually a small, cheap and nasty toy car. I was fully aware of what was going on, so I never trusted Father Christmas again. I joined the cubs while at primary school; however, I must have missed the information about where we were to meet. My poor mum marched us up and down Kenton Road looking for a scout hut, when all the time we should have gone to the school. I had woggles, a scarf, garters, and a cap. We met one evening a week in the school hall and paraded in teams. Each team had a sixer, who was the leader and had two yellow stripes on his arm, and a seconder with one stripe who was the Sargent of the platoon. I became a seconder myself. We did the usual stuff in the hall, like playing games and marching around.
The main purpose of cubs seemed to be the collection of badges, and I had an arm full of them. We even had badge earning weekend sessions where we would be given tasks to do in order to earn the next award. For example, we had to navigate alone through the streets of Kenton to find a particular address and give a message to the house occupant, who was expecting us of course. We also had to find and identify particular things in the woods nearby, like a plant or tree.
The cubs camping weekend sticks in my mind as well. This was in a local wood, which was probably allocated for scout camping. We arrived by coach and stayed in tents on a field. It was strange being out in the open so much and not sleeping in my own bed for the first time. One detail I particularly remember from this trip was that I learned the very useful skill of finding north by looking at moss on trees.
It is not done any more these days, but at that time, we did bob-a-job trips for Cubs around Kenton close to our house. To do this you just walked up and down local streets knocking on doors and asking if they had any jobs that needed doing for the price of one shilling. I absolutely hated it. Going into a stranger's house and sweeping leaves or weeding gardens was not my idea of fun. Imagine doing that today. For whatever reason, I decided that I was not interested in progressing to scouts, so my military career stalled for a while.
At some point in my primary school days, I started to take the occasional day off. I would leave home as usual, but instead of taking the bus to school I would wonder off to Harrow town centre and hang around in shops and libraries. I have no idea why I thought this was necessary, but it happened. Nobody at the school seemed concerned that I was not present for the odd day, so it went on for a while. Eventually I got found out and was given a severe telling off by my mum. I don't remember dad being involved at all, so maybe she was protecting me. Sometimes the school put on events or fairs in the playground for the parents. It was at one of these that we watched a competition between two teams where two pianos were destroyed for entertainment, and then the bits were posted through a small hole in a board. The winner was the first team to post their entire piano through the hole.
Primary school report 1969
Primary school report 1970
The last big event in Primary school was the school trip in the final year. There was a choice of two, either 3 days in France, or a whole week at St. Mary's Bay holiday camp in Kent. Most people opted for the week in Kent. The camp was set up in the 1920's specifically to provide holidays by the sea to children from deprived areas. By the time we got there, it was available for any school to book. I do not remember the journey, but I do recall a remarkable amount about the camp itself. The layout was very much like a military base with single storey dormitory blocks filled with bunk beds for the children, and a dining hall, laundry and other halls for meetings and events. On the open spaces were various football and rugby pitches. The camp was accessed through the front gate, where there was a small shop to buy sweets and beach stuff, this is where we spent our shilling-a-day pocket money. Across the road from the gate was access to the beach.
One afternoon we were assigned a task to go out onto the fields to look for 4-leaf clovers, which were apparently there in abundance but none of us found any, obviously a trick to keep us occupied for an hour or so. There was a small museum in one of the huts where pickled animals and fish were displayed in glass jars on shelves. Several of the girls were creeped out by it and had to leave. At bedtime, we were read a story in the dormitory. I remember a particular ghost story about headless highwaymen in Romney marsh, which kept me awake for quite some time and still bothered me in subsequent years.
One evening we all went to a disco in one of the huts. This followed the usual format where all the girls danced, and all the boys watched. I remember all the boys thought Michelle Leen stood out as the best dancer. We were taken out on trips a couple of times, for example we did a ride on the Romney Marsh railway, and had a walk at Dungeness, but most of the time we wondered around in small groups to the beach or played football in the fields. The weather was warm and sunny, and I remember everyone singing and whistling 'In the summertime.' by Mungo Jerry, which was in the charts at the time.
On the beachfront were some amusement arcades where we could gamble our pennies away. One of our number discovered that a couple of the machines were open backed, and if you leant against the wall next to them, you could reach behind and grab one of the stuffed toy prizes. We did this a number of times before one of the arcade employees spotted what we were doing and chased us out. We had to run all the way back to the camp. The camp was demolished six years later and is now a housing estate.
At the end of primary school all students did a test called the Eleven Plus, which was to decide who was clever enough to go to a grammar school. If you failed this test then you went to one of the local secondary moderns, like St. Gregory's, which did not have a stellar reputation. I must have passed my test because I ended up in a grammar school along with my brother Pete, who had started there the previous year. Incidentally, Steve seems not to have passed his eleven plus because for his first year he was in another school, I think it was called St Anselm's. Somehow though, he managed to transfer over in his second year, but I never got to the bottom of how this happened, and now I shall never know.
One last observation. At some point during my time in primary school the small matter of England winning the football World Cup happened. I have no recollection of this in school or on television, or of any celebrations or discussions concerning it. I find this to be a little strange.
St Marys Bay Camp
St Marys Bay Camp plan