Lisa (My Corner of the World) has been writing today about a TV programme she watched on the subject of school dinners, which set me thinking about my memories of them.

On July 18th I wrote about my memories of infant school including the 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.

When I was at junior school the food came from a central kitchen (brought, as my sister said, in 'dustbins'), and everything was freshly made to a rather low standard (lumpy mashed potato, over-cooked vegetables, gristly, over-cooked meat, heavy pastry) though some of the puddings were rather nice, if very stodgy. (It has to be said that this is fairly typical of British catering at the time - I remember Bernard Levin's celebrated rant on the subject on 'That Was The Week That Was') Despite affectionate memories of rice, semolina, tapioca and ground rice puddings (I love milk puddings) and treacle sponge, chocolate sponge, cornflake jam tart etc. it cannot be said that these meals were a culinary delight.

On the other hand the standard of the way in which we ate them was superb. We sat round tables of eight with a teacher or monitor in charge. Monitors (older girls - never, as I recall, boys - of 10 or 11) laid these tables - knife, fork, spoon and fork, glass and napkin in napkin ring correctly set in each place, and the salt, pepper and jug of water in the centre of the table).

We all stood in our places while the teacher in charge of the room (5 tables per room) said grace, then the monitors collected the serving dishes for esch table, the head of table divided the meat or fish into eight portions and served it, while the vegetables and gravy or sauce were passed round for us to serve ourselves. This was done in silence except for requests for a small (half size) helping by people who did not much like that day's meat or fish. Once served we were expected to make polite conversation. Once the plates were empty second helpings were offered from the remains in the serving dish, and even if there was only one half portion it was scrupulously divided to be fair. After that the monitors cleared away the empty plates (and they had to be empty - no waste) and the serving dishes, and brought back the pudding. This served, polite conversation resumed. At the end we all stood for grace, and the monitors cleaned the tables and either readied the room for afternoon school (these two rooms doubled as the needlework and music rooms) or laid the tables for the second sitting.

I suspect that the napkins were unusual in a state school, but otherwise I think this is fairly typical of school dinners in England at the time. Our parents paid 5/- a week (25p in modern money) for them.

In the winter that I turned ten, there must have been more that 160 people (teachers and children) - 2 sittings x 2 rooms x 5 tables x 8 people - staying for school dinners so a group of about twelve trustworthy girls from the top two classes was sent off to another room (the servants' hall of the former vicarage) where we were expected to follow precisely the same routine, but completely unsupervised. We did this except that Susan, the head girl, did not feel it necessary to insist that we took on to our plates even tiny portions of things we really did not like. (I still have memories in earlier years of sitting in floods of tears at table after everyone else had gone trying to force down the leadenly heavy stodgy awfulness of apple pie.)
Moreover, because food only came in serving dishes for eight we had sixteen notional portions to share between about twelve children.

That we all knew how to behave properly at a family dining table was take for granted, but the school re-enforced the highest standards of domestic good manners.

Shame the food was so bad.

At the grammar school things continued in much the same way with tables of eight girls or, occasionally, seven girls and a teacher. Here there was a dedicated canteen with its own kitchen which meant that the quality of the food was slightly better. On the other hand we said grace only at the start of the meal and there were no napkins. I also suspect that the volume of the conversation was somewhat louder, although that could be as much the size of the room and the number of girls (at a guess around 180 to 200 per sitting) as to the conversation being more excited and less polite.

In my first year I sat at Mr. Higgs' table. He shared with Jane Thompson and myself an accute dislike of coconut pudding. This proved a boon to everyone as the five coconut lovers got pretty near double portions each, and Mr. Higgs sent Jane and me across the road to the tuck shops in Kelham Road with a shilling to buy two Kitkats - one for him, and one to share.

In the second year we sat with our very young form teacher, Miss Fisher, who only laughted when such things as plastic joke flies were introduced to other girls' plates, and told us stories about student life and about her and Fraulein's shared lodgings not far from the school.

When I was in the third or fourth year the canteen changed to self-service. A piece of fruit, a bowl of yoghurt or cheese and biscuits became an alterntive to pudding, and salad was always a main course option. That we all had two properly balanced courses remained the rule, and there was no possibility of opting for a plate of chips followed by a Mars bar. However increasing numbers opted out, and scived off to take their dinner money to the local Wimpey. This seemed very daring at the time as school rules were specific that we either stayed for school dinners or went home, and we needed written parental permission to leave the school premises except to visit the two designated tuck shops.

It was at these two tuck shops we bought such delicacies as cali and banana toffee - both of which I loved at the time - and where some girls, straight from a substantial lunch, would fill themselves up with filled rolls and sweet biscuits. I sometimes bought myself threepence worth of haselet to make up for a particularly poor lunch.