By chance I came across a copy of the Cleethorpes Chronicle for July 10th from which I learned that the infant school I attended is closing and that a teacher there - Mrs. Bembridge - was asking for memories.

I'm not sure that memories of what was for me a predominantly unhappy experience are precisely what she was wanting, but here they are:-

THRUNSCOE INFANT SCHOOL

Thrunscoe Infant School opened in the year that I was born, and I entered the reception class in the last September of the 1950s.

A few weeks earlier I had been taken by my parents to visit the school and be enrolled. Both of them knew Miss Nocton, the headmistress, as she had taught both of them at Bursar Street School when they were infants – and thereby hangs a mystery: why on earth did they choose a school run by a woman whom as children neither had liked? My mother remembered her time in Miss Nocton’s class as one of misery sitting next to Harold who pinched her black and blue completely unnoticed by the teacher. When you add to this the fact that they were friendly with both Eric Boncey (head of St. Peter’s) and Ron Rudd (head of Bursar) the choice of school becomes even more mysterious.

Of course it isn’t as mysterious as all that. This is the time of the baby boomers – classes were huge and crowded – and here was a lovely new little school built in attractive grounds (an old orchard) with spacious, airy classrooms containing activity areas and with new indoor lavatories next to them – so much nicer than the old buildings of the alternatives with their cramped schoolyards and primitive outdoor sanitation.

I remember these lavatories (I had not yet learned that ‘toilet’ was the accepted word in a school context) from that initial visit. My sister and I were allowed a little limited exploration while my parents were talking to Miss Nocton, and, observing that of the two lavatories opening off that cloakroom corridor one had a row of cubicles and the other a single one, I told Helen that the one was for the little ones who couldn’t wait while the other was for bigger children who could. Logical, but wrong. I also remember that, looking out of the classroom window, I could see big girls in the remains of the orchard which divided Little Thrunscoe from Big Thrunscoe.

I was really looking forward to starting school and saw great vistas of learning opening up before me. How disappointing was the reality.

FIRST DAY

On my first day I woke up really early, dressed myself in my new blue blouse and my grey pleated skirt with shoulder straps, my white ankle socks and brown leather sandels. And underneath I had on my ‘Cherub’ vest and my new grey gym knickers. I went downstairs and laid the table for breakfast, and was joined by Mummy and Baby. We had breakfast very slowly because what I didn’t know was that the new children were timed to filter into school throughout the morning and that the Ts’ entry wasn’t scheduled until after 10 o’clock.

It was however still very early when we set out to walk to school – before eight at a guess because I can remember how the dew shone upon the spiders’ webs on the privet hedges at the corner of Cromwell Road and the Kingsway. Hang on! That’s the opposite direction from our house at 75 Kingsway and the school! Well, it was a very circuitous route my mother chose to walk me to school on that first day – nearly two hours to go less than half-a-mile, collecting the shopping along the way.

Somewhere in Highgate we met with another mother and child on the same mission and thus Pamela became my first school friend. That is we walked into school together that first day, and promptly each made new friends as we were placed on different tables.

My first disappointment on arriving in school was my hook in the cloakroom: it didn’t have my name on it and I was invited to choose from a sheet of colourful stickers (sadly depleted so late in the alphabet) to identify my peg – I chose a giraffe (wholly inappropriate as these animals are tall and silent). I think that it was at this point we were measured against a rule on the wall next to the classroom door, and it was certainly then that we were asked various questions about whether we could read, write, count etc. Of course I could! I was four-an-a-half years old! Even Baby, two years younger, could count and read and write her name and a few other words.

We were then placed according to our achievements, and I was put on the top table with the others who were both literate and numerate next to Elizabeth. It was all a bit unnerving when the other children seemed so comfortably settled - after all, some had been school children for a full two hours longer than I. There was a second table for those whose literacy and numeracy was less advanced and a further two or three tables of other children.

Despite this hierarchical system, which we all understood within a few days, the official line in those days was that the teaching of reading and writing was properly the business of the school and that parents who taught their children to read and write were somehow doing it all wrong and shouldn’t do it at all. In my case – as I am sure it was for many others – as well tell me to stop breathing as tell me to stop reading. I can remember the day when I realised that I could read the printed notices outside Bacon’s Dairy, but not the ones chalked in Mr. Bacon’s elegant copperplate: I was two years old. By three-and-a-half I was fluent, by four I was reading proper books, and when I was five I wrote my first book of poetry and stories called 'An Ouncey Book of Fairy Tales'. It was going to be called 'Once Upon a Time' but my father spotted the obvious spelling mistake as I was designing the cover, so (ever resourceful) I wrote a poem to start the book. This opus is now lost, but I recall that it began
"An ounce of sugar
An ounce of tea.
We went to the shops
Baby and me."
Not deathless verse (nor very accurate on the quantities to be bought), but not bad for five.

EARLY IMPRESSIONS

The reception class teacher, Miss Cowton, was very young and enthusiastic and looked just like Miss Honey in the film of "Matilda". I later learned that she had earned a place at university, but (in the days when graduates were considered too academic to teach infants!) had opted for the then two year teacher training course, and that this was her probationary year. Probationer or not, she was head and shoulders the best teacher of my infant years, and managed forty four and five year olds without ever needing to raise her voice and – as far as I recall – never so much as having to threaten punishment beyond moving a troublesome child to another seat.

One of my early impressions was of a girl called Dianne who was not quite as clean as the rest of us and had blackened front teeth. I think I recognised neglect even at that early stage and I remember thinking that her parents must really hate her to call her ‘Die Anne’.

Another even more unpleasing discovery to my fastidious young sensibilities was the day one of the children wet herself on the classroom floor. Not only did I find it quite unbelievable that a ‘big’ girl of four years old should be unable to contain herself, but the worse discovery was that the teachers actually expected such babyish behaviour and had a drawer full of spare knickers against such an eventuality!

FRIENDS

I was briefly best friends with Elizabeth who sat next to me, but she was soon whisked away when her parents moved house.

Pat Leesing shared my birthday (February 16th) and on this basis we knew that we ought to be friends, and remained so throughout our infant years and on into the juniors though the quality of this friendship steadily deteriorated the older we got and the less we had in common. Her other best friend and near neighbour was Julie Heaton. At first Julie wasn’t particularly my friend, but we were put to sit next to each other when we were in Miss Thompson’s class (year 1) and continued to share a desk until we left the juniors six year later, and again in the fourth and fifth forms at the grammar school. Friendship with Julie was easy and undramatic, and lasted comfortably in some degree throughout our time at school.

Lynn Dickinson and Jane Casujuana were the class stars – apart from anything else they could both sing in tune from this very early age and were given solos at Christmas. They were both regulars at my birthday parties and I at theirs, but when we left Thrunscoe I went to St. Peter’s and they to Bursar so that was that. I fully expected to see them again when I went to the Girls’ Grammar School, but both mysteriously had managed to fail the 11+. This was clearly a miscarriage of justice and one of the reasons I am so set against selective schooling today as Lynn went on to be head girl at Beacon Hill Seconday Modern and Jane joined us in the sixth form from the same school and is now head teacher at Signhills Infant School.

The other friend in the same class was Helen Toole whose mother had, I think, been at school with my mother – anyway, it was one of those friendships which was parent led, and ended when they moved away towards the end of our infant school years. Two more friends also moved away: Elaine (Clarke?) whose house backed onto the same eight-foot as ours and with whom I sometimes walked to school, and Peter Manton who was my best boy friend.

SCHOOL READING

Those of us who could already read were not rewarded with interesting books, but were made to crawl through all the school readers from the first Janet and John reader Here We Go (“Look, John, look” “Come, John, come” “See my aeroplane fly”) all the way through to Once Upon A Time with its retold fairy tales and pink cover with two black mice on it, and effectively punished for being able to read fluently before we started school. Thrunscoe had a policy of adding in more of the small consolidation readers for those who got through the main books too fast just to keep the whole class somewhere near level, when, of course, it was the slow readers who needed the consolidation. I also remember that Jane managed to get ahead of me on the reading books because of Miss Robinson's custom of hearing the children read in alphabetical order, boys then girls, which meant that on some days she would never reach T for Turner although that never stopped her going back to the beginning of the alphabet the next day. In order to get through all forty - which quite often she didn't - she only ever let you read one page.

It was wonderful when I got to St Peters where Mrs. Tuplin etc. just spot checked our progress and let us crawl or gallop through the Wide Range readers so that Liz and I, and Stephen, David, James and Richard all finished the lot of them in record time, and every other book in the school's less than extensive class libraries. I will never forget "Tales of Greece and Rome" or "The Radium Woman"? I seem to remember that in the last term in Mr. Crossley's, having finished everything on the top readers' shelf, Liz and I alternated having 'The Secret Garden' as the only thing available which was good enough for constant rereading.

The free readers were equally disappointing at Thrunscoe in that there were hardly any proper books. There was a book corner (a hinged display rack) in each class with some skinny little apologies for books – the ones I remember best were those of Aesop’s fables – but nothing approaching the sort of books I read at home. At five I had already read - or rather had read to me - Little Women, What Katy Did, Five Children and It, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden (which I had already seen on television) and The Hobbit for the first time. By the time I was seven I had reread them all for myself - the first two only after my grandmother had exchanged her own nineteenth century copies with their tiny print and huge margins for modern (but still unabridged) reprints which wouldn't strain my baby eyes. My personal reading at five was 'The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes', 'Fun in the Frozen North', the 'Animal Shelf' books,'Cubbin's Farm', 'Jane's First Term' and 'Brian's Goodnight Book' - most of them not deathless literature, but a good deal more entertaining and demanding that Janet and John and Dick and Dora which we had at school.

On one occasion I remember watching with interest the slow dawn of realisation in a lady who came in to listen to reading when she had to deal with half-a-dozen of the best readers who had finished their written work first instead of her usual slow readers.

CLASSES AND ORGANISATION

For some reason the classes at Thrunscoe were numbered from six to one so that six was the reception class. As I have already said, Miss Cowton was in charge of this.

I think it must have been Easter with the arrival of the new intake when we were moved up into Mrs. Kilvington’s class. I know that some children were held back in Miss Cowton’s, but seem to recall most of us moved on.

I don’t know quite how they played the numbers game, although I do remember that, when we were in the top class, a table of eight children from the next year down was moved to join us after Easter, as a year earlier one table had been moved from our class a term in advance to be rejoined by the rest of us in September.

However it worked, there were six classes – ostensibly two each for reception, year one and year two. In class 3 we had Miss Thompson and I cannot remember the name of the woman who taught the younger half of the year in class 4. Class 1 had Miss Robinson and class 2 had Miss Milligan. These classes were arranged in pairs with a cloakroom outside them and boys’ lavatories at one end of the cloakroom and girls’ at the other.

In the classroom we sat arranged in five tables of either 6 or 8 which were composed of three or four double desk/tables pushed together. Each desk had a shelf under it in which we had a cardboard box containing our books and pencils. Part of the classroom was given over to art, craft, sand trays etc. In Miss Cowton’s there were two or three steps dividing the two sections together with a bank of drawers including the one which contained the despised knickers. In the corner of each classroom was a store cupboard with a counter in front of it which was generally used as a make-believe shop where we exchanged cardboard coins for empty packets and were supposed to learn how to count in shillings and pence. (I knew – I had been counting out change on my granddad’s fish stall on Market Rasen market - and sometimes also at Brigg and in the Cleethorpes shop - for two years before I started school.)

PLAYTIME and PE

There were two playgrounds – the baby playground which was embraced by two arms of the building which had a climbing-frame-cum-slide - I can remember Jane (now, I am told by some teachers at her school, seriously windy about health and safety) hanging upside down over the concrete playground from it - and the big playground behind the school. There was a semicircular wall behind the school (like those on the promenade) with steps going down on either side to the playground proper. The semicircle was the exclusive property of girls in the top class – no boys and no babies allowed! There was a winding (well, very slightly bendy) path leading through the fruit trees between the playground and the playing field to the swings. These were always under control of two or three ‘big’ girls who counted out each child’s twenty swings before the next child went on. At the top end of the path was a wooden climbing frame. I liked going right to the top and once got a splinter in my hand from it.

Sometimes we were in small groups playing mothers and fathers, hospitals, schools, ponies and all the other games little girls play (and occasionally let the boys join in) and the boys were cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and pirates – often monopolising the climbing frame and never letting the girls join in. At other times there were games like Grandmother’s Footsteps, What Time is it Mr. Wolf? and Nuts in May which seemingly involved the entire school.

If there was 100% attendance for a whole week that class would have extra playtime on Friday afternoon. I remember one occasion when I had been off with chicken pox and we were given the extra playtime anyway because I had come back on the Tuesday or Wednesday as soon as the doctor said I was out of quarantine instead of waiting till the next Monday.

While I was in the top class a climbing net was added to the attractions in the playground (actually on the playing field) and it is my proud boast that I was the very first child over the top. Since this is my one claim to athletic prowess I remember it particularly well. I was tiny and an agile climber, but somewhat uncoordinated and slow: I could neither skip nor catch a ball nor throw a beanbag with any accuracy and the best place I have ever achieved in any running race is last.

In PE I quite liked apparatus work although landing on those coir mats and doing a forward roll bare-footed and bare-backed was distinctly painful. I mentioned the gym knickers earlier – these were all we girls wore fore PE in the hall, and I think the boys just wore their ordinary grey flannel shorts. Better than either indoor PE or outdoor games was Music and Movement where we danced and mimed along with thousands of other children all over the country to music played by the friendly instructors on the wireless.

SCHOOL DINNERS

My mother was an excellent cook, and – as well as traditional English fare – we were eating proper curries and spaghetti at a time when for most people the former was still foreign muck and the latter something that came out of a tin. School dinners, however good, could not compete, and I did not stay for them very often. My particular bete noir was beetroot salad: I loved salad: quartered tomatoes, sliced cucumber, lettuce leaves, lumps of cheese and whole carrots, but the in the school salad everything was chopped up small, mixed together and dyed an unattractive pink by the inclusion of beetroot!

On one occasion we were served mince in runny gravy, not with mashed potato as we were accustomed, but with quarter slices of white bread. Not one of us knew what to do – some scooped up the soupy stuff with their bread while others (including myself) broke the bread up and sprinkled it like croutons. All were told off the former group for bad manners and the latter for babyishness! A couple of years later my great-uncle Frank taught me how to deal with a bread bun and soup in adult society, but it did require a spoon, while I have still to figure out how five year olds supposed to manage soup with a knife and fork!

To begin with I always went home for lunch, and quite often my granddad would collect me in the car to take me home. One day he forgot me, and I remember waiting all on my own outside the school gates for ages before I plucked up the courage to go back into the school and tell Miss Nocton that nobody had picked me up. She phoned granddad and it was soon sorted out, but imagine a time when four year olds were sent out to the school gate unaccompanied and nobody noticed that one has not been collected, and imagine what could have happened – a year or so earlier a child had been murdered in Weelsby Woods, and it was not so long before the horror that was the Moors Murders, not to mention (even with the ligher traffic of 1959) the dangers of a child so young deciding to walk home alone.

SELECTED AT SIX

Miss Nocton was not, as I have already remarked regarding my mother’s experience of her, a perceptive woman, but she was very firmly convinced of her own rightness and she (aided and abetted by Miss Robinson and some of the other teachers) had the future grammar school pupils selected by the time they were six. I don’t know why she was so confident of her judgement and I can only speak of those children in my class, but her predictions in this case were far from accurate.

By Miss Robinson’s class I was on the third or middle table (so was Julie) mainly on account of my untidy and uncoordinated handwriting, and the fact that Miss Thompson had firmly established favourites of which I was not one. My year in her class had reduced me to biting my nails and developing strange little illnesses which would last from getting up to about 9.30 in the morning. She had black hair and was, I suspect, rather beautiful, but she seemed to me like a cross between the wicked queen in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Cruella de Vil. After the lovely Miss Cowton and pleasant Mrs. Kilvington my second year of infant school was a cruel let-down and I was absolutely miserable for most of it. Nor was my final year there any better.

There were no SATs in those days, but we did some sort of test before we were sent on to the wider world of junior schools. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies! When it came to taking those tests the questions were read out and we had to write the answers down, and the level of the questions was graduated. After the first few sections the children were sent out to play table by table as the questions reached the level Miss Robinson predicted that table should reach. I think that some of us on table three actually put our hands up to ask if we could stay in to do the rest of the test, but we were told not to be cheeky and were sent out regardless.

The 11+ is and always was a poor and inaccurate system, but its failings are as nothing compared to this. Suffice to say that of the eight children on table 1 who were confidently predicted to pass the 11+ only one girl and two boys ended up at the grammar schools, and not a one from table 2, while virtually everyone on table three went on to grammar school and – mostly – on to higher education.

NAMES

These are the children I can remember from infant school, although John Grant, Richard Spicker or David Stagg may have been at St. Peter's Infants. Ellen Rimmer and Carol Whotton were in the other class in my year, and I think that Linda Hall may have been a year older, as Lorraine Cust certainly was.

Helen Bulman (died several years ago)
Annette??? (Helen B’s friend)
Jane Casujuana (Head of Signhills Infant School)
Elaine (Clarke?) (left area)
Paula Collinson
Lorraine Cust (Left Area)
Lynne Dickens(on)
Linda Hall (in my year?)
Kim Hall
Julie Heaton (still in the area)
Diane (Jackson?)
Patricia Leesing (still in the area)
Elaine Maw(son)
Barbara Nurse
Ellen Rimmer (was manageress at Smiths Bakers, moved abroad)
Dawn Showler
Elizabeth (Stevens?)
Helen Toole
Carol Whotton
Pamela???
Yvonne???

Simon Adams
Charles Brown
Jack (Bulman? Bulmer?)
Christopher Curtis
John England
Stephen Farrier
John Grant
Peter Manton (left area)
Geoffrey (Moss?)
Peter Quarmby
James Peters
Richard Spicker
David Stagg
Hugh???
Martin???