The Infant’s School, as it was called, was a low gloomy building, it belonged to the church, as did the only other school in the village. If there was such a thing as a ‘Board of Governors’ in those days, it must have been their firm conviction that colour or anything that would make the school attractive would only lead to serious mischief and an unwillingness to learn! All the paintwork was a dull dark brown, parts of the wall not covered in this were an equally nasty shade of green distemper. Distemper was a cheap way of covering walls, it was a coloured powder mixed in a bucket of water, then sloshed on the wall with a big brush. When it was dry it came off on your clothes if you were careless enough to brush against it. We all had to sit at desks and not talk, even on the first day. We had chalk and stiff black paper on which to draw and make letters. Clay to model with, and I do mean clay, nasty grey and smelly. At home I had ‘Harbutt’s Plasticene’, six different coloured sticks for sixpence! I was terrified of the teacher, her name was Mrs.Voight and she appeared to be very old, much older than my Mum. She had a very sharp tongue and never seemed to smile. Her main concern seemed to be in keeping us quiet, she certainly achieved this with me, timid to start with, she had me completely sewn up! The lavatories were across the playground, on part of the field on which the school had been built, they were dirty and cold and I hated them. During the week before Christmas I had been kept at home with a cold, I pleaded to be allowed to go on the last day, goodness knows why when I hated it so much, perhaps I wanted to savour the delicious feeling of not having to go for two weeks. In the afternoon we were all sitting, our little arms folded, everything having been tidied away. Mrs.Voight placed a wrapped sweet, (one), in front of each child except me. I can see her sharp, bad-tempered face now as she said “I am not giving you a sweet, you have been absent this week”. I did not answer and tried not to cry, but as soon as I got outside and saw Mum waiting for me I burst into floods of tears. She tried to comfort me and bought me a twopenny block of chocolate on the way home but even that could not console me. It was the enormity of being shown up in front of the whole class that upset me.
The following summer I moved out of the ‘babies’ class, as it was called, into first class and then when I was seven, into Standard One. The headmistress, Miss.Yearsley taught this class. She had a very mournful expression, a bit like a bloodhound, she also had a brother who looked the same, and for years they had a little dog that looked like both of them! She was not nasty tempered like Mrs.Voight, and in fact kept a tin of ‘Acid Drops with which to reward brilliance. I was once. So rewarded, for of all things, getting all my sums right! Every Monday afternoon we did raffia work, and it is no exaggeration to say that this spoilt all my Sundays as well as Mondays because I started worrying about it on Sundays! I just could never get it right. We were given a square of cardboard, notched on two sides round which string was threaded. The theory then was that you could thread the raffia in and out of the string and eventually you had made a mat which you could then take home to your mother. I never made a mat! All my Monday lessons were spent unravelling the previous week’s mistakes, and, of course, the raffia became shredded with so much undoing, it quite defeated me. I was so envious of those who were given fresh supplies of bright green and red when they had completed a mat and were, perhaps, striving for the supreme goal, a small bag with a plaited handle! I certainly never got ‘Acid Drops’ for raffia work!