I joined my elder sister Carol when I was five, at the Spring Bank Primary School in New Mills and my first memory is leaning against the wall, just inside the gate and being joined by another first day kid, whose name was Glynn. We spent a few years together, Glynn and me; he was my best mate.
Being a red-blooded pair of kids, we sat in the back of the class and as I couldn’t read the blackboard, the teacher assumed that I was a slow learning retard. This was perfectly understandable, as half the kids were slow-learning retards, (Cruel but true!).
Eventually, Mum took me to the optician and I got my first pair of specs, they were John Lennon type glasses and the change was amazing, I could see each individual leaf on a tree, instead of a green amorphous blob. My joy was short lived however. I went into the class and Rosemary Hoggins started laughing at me and then most of the kids were taking the piss out of me and calling me “speccy four eyes”. After that I only ever wore them when I was looking at
the blackboard, it took me years to get over that.
At the age of six or seven, Carol, Joyce (my younger sister) and me all went to Hague Bar Primary school, which was much better. The head master was called Mister Hallam and if we misbehaved he used to smack us on the leg with a ruler or if we really misbehaved he smacked us on the backside with a plimsole (sandshoe, no Nikes back then).
After a year or so, I became a ‘milk monitor’; this involved collecting the crates of milk from outside, where the milkman left them. For those of you who didn’t live in England in the fifties. As part of the welfare state, all primary schools were obliged to provide a third of a pint of milk to each pupil. The reasoning behind this was so that all the kids would grow up with strong bones and teeth, I think! (as an aside, Margaret Thatcher became known as ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’ in later years, when she discontinued the practice).
This was good in theory, but not such a great idea in practice. In summer the milk, which had a nice inch or so of cream at the top of the bottle would be warm (yep! even in an English Summer) and bordering on rancid. Drinking it took a very strong stomach and kids would be dribbling milk and trying hard not to vomit. Being the person partially responsible for this form of child abuse, I was not Mr. Popular.
In spring and autumn it was OK apart from the Tits (feathery type Blue-Tits and Great-Tits, not what you were thinking, although the mental connection between tits and milk can be forgiven). The crafty little critters used to peck through the aluminium tops and drink the cream from half the bottles.
A big responsibility for one so young, was deciding who got the untouched bottles. In winter the milk would freeze and as milk expands when frozen, this pushed the tops off the bottles and seemed to keep the Tits away. Could this be the origin of the expression ‘Freeze your Tits Off’?
I remember one winter’s day when the snow was very heavy. Carol, Joyce and me couldn’t catch the bus (which couldn’t get safely through the snowdrifts) and walked to the school, about two miles away, very slowly, throwing snowballs at each other. I got a slippering with a sandshoe from Mr. Hallam for being late and the girls didn’t get punished at all, which wasn’t real fair.
But even in those days it may have been considered improper, for a male teacher to be smacking young girls on the backside with a shoe. All sorts of perversions spring to mind.
Cheers for now,
SkyBlueSkull
http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com
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