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Schooldays.
The best days of your life, they say.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that – so far the best days of my life have been my wedding day and the births of my children, and the happiest period of my life? So many ,and still ongoing thankfully.
However, I did enjoy my schooldays, dated as so much of what happened seems now.
I started at Dickleburgh Primary School at the age of 5 – the building is now the Community Centre for the village, but at that time the long, low white school was nestled against the church – very suitably, as it is a Cof E school.
There were three classes among which about 90 children were divided: Miss Register (the appropriateness of her name did not, ahem, register with me as a five year old!) taught the top class (aged 8 – 11); Miss Green the middle one (6-8) and I first entered Miss Orriss’s Infant Class.
Each morning my Mum would walk me to school, not along the main road but down to her friend Rita’s, and we would all – Mum, me, Rita and her son Melvin who was the same age as me, walk down ‘The Drift’, a footpath through the local allotments which led to the Town Meadow on which we were allowed to play at lunchtimes in the summer.
From the Meadow there was a green painted metal gate usually known as a kissing gate – though we never referred to it as such –giving access to the playground, which itself was surrounded by green metal railings – as Roger McGough says:
All around, the railings.
Are they to keep out wolves and monsters?
Things that carry off and eat children?
Things you don’t take sweets from?
Perhaps they’re to stop us getting out
Running away from the lessins. Lessin.
What does a lessin look like?
Sounds small and slimy.
They keep them in the glassrooms.
Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine.
As you came through the gate, at the far right side of the playground were the toilets. Yes, outdoor ones. A single storey block: boys to the left, girls to the right.
On the left was the school itself, and there was a back entrance to the Infant Class, but the main door faced into the playground, and when the bell rang we all had to line up in our class lines and file in neatly.
Geographically, the Infants were separate from the rest of the school: our classroom was on the left as you entered the door from the playground, past the row of three handbasins; a door on the right and a step up took you into the middle section of what was essentially one long room, which had been split into three: the back section was divided off with a glass – and wood partition, behind which Miss Register ruled.
A curtain – dark red if I remember correctly – shut off Miss Green’s classroom, and the middle section into which the door led contained the piano and was the area used for indoor PE and music lessons.
The front door, leading out of the top class end of the school straight on to the church path, was very rarely if ever used, even though we frequently filed into the church itself for Harvest, Carol and Easter services which punctuated the school year, and my pride knew no bounds on the occasions I was given a lesson to read on such occasions.