Child from Home (20 page)

We were then put in pairs and marched to the main school ‘hall'. This was actually two classrooms made into one by pushing back the folding glass and wood partitions, which had hinged, military-style, brass handles that folded down to lay flat within a circular recess. In these morning assemblies we had to endure the boredom of communal hymn singing, starting with a hymn such as
He who would Valiant be
or
Jerusalem,
led by the vicar, the Reverend K. Donald, whom I recollect as being a kind, gentle and understanding man who seemed old to us but was probably middle-aged. It was customary when prayers were being said to stand with our eyes closed and our hands held with the ends of our fingers pointing upwards and touching the chin. From his high place on the platform the vicar looked down on the heads of our now quiet and subdued group. He and the head seemed very posh to us and we held them in awe, as they were figures of authority far removed from our way of life. They inhabited a different world to us and, unlike the kids of today, we would never have dreamed of approaching them to ask anything.

The headmaster reiterated the fact that God had placed us where we were in the social order and that to try to change this preordained scheme of things would be sinful in His eyes. We were instructed that we must order ourselves lowly and reverently to our betters at all times, and had to listen to an arid lecture on morals and decent standards of behaviour that, literally, went over our heads. Once we were in a quiet and humble frame of mind the first lesson – Scripture – commenced, during which stories and lessons from the Bible were read.

At the morning break the children collected a straw and a small, wide-necked, glass bottle of milk, which held a third of a pint, from the milk monitor. On pushing in the cardboard seal with our thumb, we sometimes soaked ourselves with a fair portion of the contents, before drinking the remainder. For many of the scruffy evacuees, the free milk and dinners were about the only things that interested them in the elementary education system. Unless they were exempt, the children had to pay a ha'penny for the milk. We were told that it strengthened our bones, thus reducing the risk of rickets, and we had seen too many skinny, bow-legged children hobbling around in callipers in the streets of Middlesbrough before the war. If it was dry we were allowed to play outside, but we did not get out much during that first month because it was very cold, with days of snow and ice interspersed by slightly milder wet ones.

The alphabet was chalked on the blackboard and facts were relentlessly hammered into us by means of soul-destroying, rhythmic repetition that we chanted day after day until it was assumed that we knew them by heart. We learned parrot fashion. Again and yet again we rhythmically chanted saws like: ‘Twelve inches in a foot', ‘Sixteen ounces make one pound', ‘Fourteen pounds make one stone', etcetera,
ad infinitum,
and the multiplication tables were taught by this same time-honoured use of rote. We repeatedly chanted our ‘times tables' ending up, hopefully, still together with ‘and twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four'. The four fundamentals of sums were taught by using a range of coloured counters for adding, taking away and simple division.

The younger children were read to; the older ones had to take their turn at standing up to read passages out loud, and the-powers-that-be seemed to expect children to progress at the same rate. We now know that this is not the case. Miss Francis tried to enrich our vocabulary and use of words by means of group discussions but she was not able to give us as much individual attention as she would have liked, as there were far too many in the group.

I enjoyed Art, which involved drawing, painting and making things from all kinds of materials; Miss Francis allowed us a certain amount of free play and gave us pictures to copy. Sheets of newspaper, thick with paint as they had been used over and over again, were spread out for us to work on and most seemed to enjoy making a colourful mess with paints and crayons. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was better at pencil drawing than most of the other children, but I do not recall my latent talent ever being encouraged or exploited. In those early war years our work often revealed our inner fears and anxieties, and most of our drawings and paintings at this time took the form of lurid war scenes portraying soldiers fighting or ships being sunk by enemy U-boats. We often drew pictures of German aeroplanes, with black crosses on them, firing at people adrift in the sea. Following reports of raids on York, our pictures showed bombed houses with ambulancemen putting dead or injured people onto stretchers. It seems that we were regurgitating things we had seen in the papers or heard on the wireless.

Physical Training, known as PT, was of the ‘arms stretch, knees bend' variety; Harry, Jimmy and I called it Physical Jerks. We were stood in lines in our white vests and baggy, navy-blue football shorts that were held up by a length of elastic in the waistband (if you were lucky like Harry), whose group had PT outside in the schoolyard where they shivered in the cold. Our PT lessons were carried out in St Mary's hall with the benches and desks pushed back to the walls or on the field out the back when the weather was fine. We had to run, jump and stretch to the commands, ‘One-two, one-two' etc. The girls wore white blouses, and baggy, navy-blue school knickers with elasticated legs, that often had a small pocket on the front in which they kept their hankie and other mysterious objects. Both sexes wore plimsolls, known as ‘plimmies' locally, which were usually carried to and from school in a cloth bag with a drawstring, but to us Middlesbrough lads they were always known as sandshoes. The girls sometimes had dance lessons accompanied by a teacher playing the piano and the older boys played football on the sports field behind South Lane.

I was paralysingly shy and extremely self-conscious among what seemed confident children, and if I became the object of attention for any reason, I tended to turn scarlet with embarrassment. If you wanted a pencil or needed to go to the toilet you had to raise your hand, and I had seen others doing it, but I had an irrational dread of being noticed. I tried to make myself small and kept my head down, putting my arm round my work so as to keep it hidden in the hope of going unnoticed. I hated going to the old brick toilet block in the playground, which reeked of urine and Jeyes fluid, but I would ‘pay a call' just before going in to school and then try to last out until playtime. I was often bursting to go but would never ask to leave the classroom if I could help it. I could not get the slits in the thick, finger-like strips on the end my braces onto the buttons at the back of my trousers and, to my intense mortification and acute embarrassment, the teachers had to help me. I developed a strong aversion to trouser buttons, which exists to this day. People tried to hide their phobias in those days, unlike today, and I still dislike the look and feel of buttons. The introduction of trouser belts and zips was a godsend to me.

We ‘vaccies' were often looked on as non-persons and were blamed for anything that went wrong and, in the ‘big' school, there were sometimes fights in the playground between vaccies and the locals. It is easy to forget the mental pain that we suffered as children. Life, at that time, seemed fragmented and unreal as I tried to find my way in a strange and daunting environment. The longing to be accepted by our peers and to be a member of the pack can be very powerful and we choose to forget the devious, shifty and furtive methods we used to achieve this. I tried at all costs to avoid the wrath and the withering scorn of the adults in power over me. Children in those days did not have half of the confidence and assurance of the modern variety. I was a dreamer, like Mam, and was too timid to ask for things to be repeated when I did not understand them. I had a fear of appearing silly in front of my peers and, consequently, I did not learn the basics of most subjects and therefore failed to make much progress. In those days children were expected to be, as Mrs Harris repeatedly pointed out, seen and not heard. Speech was silver, silence was said to be golden; so who was I to challenge these tried and tested, time-honoured laws?

A lad in Jimmy's group that I got on well with was called Bernard Fisher, and when we played football in the field on the other side of North Lane, Jimmy and I always wanted to be in the same team as him. He was a very good player and his team always won. He was one of a large family living next door but one to us and was the eldest son of Mrs Mabel Fisher (née Brooke), a chubby, motherly and loving sort of woman who usually wore her dark straight hair cut quite short. Bernard was destined to become the Hull City and – at a later date –Bradford City goalkeeper. His brother, David, was four years old at that time and he had a cute little two-year-old sister called Maud.

All of the Fisher children were born at home – delivered by Nurse Lealman – as was the normal practice in those days. Being the district nurse-cum-midwife, she was a regular visitor at the houses over the years. Although a bit bossy at times, she was well liked in the village. Maud became a pretty, wavy-haired, rounded little girl; ‘a right little moppet,' as the local folk said. I would often see her running about in her little cotton frock with white ankle socks and sandals as she played in their front garden. We were repeatedly told by Mrs Harris not to mix with the other children and
never, ever
to bring them to her house.

Maud's grandfather was living with his daughter and her family on Usher Lane. He had served his apprenticeship as a gardener and I remember him as a thin, serious and gaunt-faced man who always wore a black trilby hat with a muffler, tied tightly at the neck and tucked into his collarless shirt. We often saw him going about on his old bike carrying a scythe and sickle. In his later years he worked as a lengthman for the council maintaining a set area of the local roads. Maud's grandad slept in the box room, and she had initially slept in a drawer as a baby.

Talking of sleep, we infants still had a half-hour catnap in the early afternoon but we did not lie down as we had at the nursery school; we rested our heads on our forearms on the deeply etched lids of our old wooden desks. It was often difficult to sleep, especially when the great circular saw was whining and screeching, as it sliced through the great balks of timber at the carpentry business along the lane. On quiet days sound travelled a long way. The teachers were ordered to carry out kit inspections on the evacuees at least once a week, and if clothes needed repairing or replacing their parents were contacted. Mrs Harris was forever sending letters to Middlesbrough asking for more clothes for us, but for some reason we didn't always get them, even though Mam and Aunt Hilda swore that they had sent them.

A local ARP unit had been set up and they came to our school to give demonstrations; and they put up aircraft wall charts showing the silhouettes of British and German aircraft. They told us where we could and could not go and what to do if an air raid took place. They showed Jimmy's group how to use sand, stirrup pumps and buckets of water to put out small incendiary fires, explaining how to deal safely with the strange-looking butterfly bombs which had a metal casing that split open on impact to look like wings. We carried out regular air-raid drills when – on the teacher's command – we practised getting down quickly to sit cross-legged underneath our desks.

We practised putting on our heavy gas masks. On duty the wardens wore wide-brimmed tin helmets with a white W painted on them and a navy-blue, one-piece, denim boiler suit with a badge on the breast. They put up a poster that stated: ‘Hitler will send no warning – so always carry your gas mask.' The rubber mask had a large, lozenge-shaped, celluloid eyepiece, and at the front was a canister that had small circular perforations, which filtered out any gas but allowed air through. The chin was placed inside and the mask was pulled over the top of the head by placing the thumbs under the three white canvas straps attached to the rubber by metal buckles at the back. They could be adjusted to give a close fit and the mask was removed by pulling the straps forward over the head from the back.

The fitting instructions were printed on the underside of the lid of the box, ending in a warning printed in bold capital letters and underlined, which stated: ‘D
O NOT TAKE RESPIRATOR OFF BY PULLING THE CONTAINER UPWARDS OVER THE FACE
'. Initially, I experienced an awful choking sensation when the mask was on and I would start to sweat, which caused the eyepiece to steam up, at which point I began to cry and panic before quickly ripping the mask off. Later, Miss Francis was given a supply of green demisting capsules to rub on to the visor, and when these ran out we used soap to keep it clear. In time I got used to wearing it, as did thousands of other children. To test that the mask was properly fitted an ARP man placed the palm of his hand over the front of the cylinder for a few seconds, and if you struggled to breathe it was correctly fitted. The rubber sides of the mask would sometimes make a rude fluttering noise as we breathed out, like the present-day whoopee cushion, and we laughed until our sides hurt. Embossed on the lid of the box was the word TOP which enabled people to find the lid in the dark.

In my class group there was a shy little girl called Eva Pulleyn who was usually better dressed than the rest and lived in a big house. Behind it there were a number of old brick outbuildings surrounding a long courtyard. Eva came from a large family and her father was a bricklayer and a brickmaker by trade. He used the ground floor of the granary as workshops and her elder brother, Bill, kept a vintage Lanchester car in the stables. The old car dated from before the Great War. Building materials, such as cement, bricks, timber, sand, flagstones and the like, were piled up around the yard or were stored in the outbuildings.

On the eastern side of the yard there was a huge two-storeyed barn half full of rectangular straw bales where Eva kept a lamb. With its winches, wooden steps and trapdoors, it was a paradise to Jimmy and me when we played there. We would leap about on the straw and jump down from the loft into the area where her three squealing pigs were kept. Next to it was another brick building in which there was a wash-house and copper. On a shelf in one of the outhouses, above the iron mangle and the fluted, aluminium poss tub, there were bags of Sharp's meal, which was mixed with the potatoes that were too small to sell and boiled-up for pig feed. Rhode Island Reds and scarlet-combed Wyandottes busily clucked, scratched and pecked at the grain scattered on the concrete of the yard, and the family kept battery hens in the old brick granary above the stables. Nearby were tins of Jeyes Fluid, which was used to sterilise the hencoops that always had a slightly sour smell. On other shelves there were packets of Colman's starch with red and black labels; packets of Sunlight soap; red-and-white boxes of Reckitt's Blue Dolly Bags; white cardboard boxes of Borax; Lux Soap Flakes and other washing products.