Education in the Country - Some Early Experiences

After the war my father who had been an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force settled in Edinburgh, Scotland where I was born. He had a teaching job there but he and my mother favored the country life so after a few years he became the headmaster of a small country school in Morayshire where I attended myself when I became about five years old.

My first educational memories are of slates and slate pencils; can you imagine learning to write on a heavy slate with a squeaky slate pencil? Every morning we had to write down the names of the continents and whatever arithmetic tables we were learning. I think we were supposed to recite the tables to ourselves while writing them down but they made very regular patterns that were easy to reproduce by writing the numbers vertically, diagonally or in whatever way was most amusing. I was never caught but I'd been told that God was everywhere and could see everything so I was a little uneasy.

Mrs K, our formidable teacher, took 3 classes in the same room (one of which I thought she called the 'Fire Infants', actually 'Higher Infants'!). She had a robust no-nonsense approach to education and a fierce tenacity in dealing with the less quick to learn. She would stand over a weeping child at a desk until a task was done and if it wasn't, the unfortunate would be kept in until it was. I am appalled to remember offering to stand over a small girl and stamp on her feet if she made a mistake. To her credit Mrs K did not take me up on this but what a testament to her standing as a role model! She was probably not unusual by the standards of the day though and took what she saw as her moral responsibilities seriously. When something went missing and everyone, with absolutely no evidence, accused the class scapegoat of stealing it, she chided us and explained patiently that the correct thing to do was to ask if he knew anything about it.

The school dinners we had in the same classroom could be fraught. War-time austerity dictated that food wasn't to be wasted and if you didn't like a dish you stood in line for a compulsory teaspoonful of whatever it was; the macaroni cheese lines were by far the longest! For some reason I was allowed off to take soup with my father's class but gave this up after being taunted by Mrs K. The meat we had was fatty to say the least and I had a great aversion to it. Everything had to be eaten up so I solved the problem by depositing the fat under my desk. Unfortunately, a rancid accumulation was found by the cleaner several weeks later and word got back to my father. (Hmm - maybe that's why I got into trouble for throwing a stone at the cleaner's car!) I never had my father as a regular teacher but as headmaster he presided over school events such as Empire Day (renamed Commonwealth Day in 1958) where we all had to line up and Salute the Flag.

There was no electrical supply in the district although at some stage the school, but not the schoolhouse, was equipped with its own generator. The local village hall also had a generator and once when it failed, during a whist drive I think, several cars outside had to shine their headlights through the windows to keep the games going. At home, we listened to Tommy Handley and Charlie Chester on a large radio with a gigantic battery. The redundant 3 bar electric fire that had been banished upstairs was to me an exotic symbol of modern technology whose time was yet to come. A large Rayburn stove in the schoolhouse kitchen kept us warm. I think we used a Calor Gas cooker for most meals but sometimes my mother would do baking in the Rayburn oven. This demanded a fairly stable temperature for reasonable results and involved much stoking and poking of the fire on the part of my father.

My education outside the classroom was probably more valuable than inside. I learned to cycle on my mother's old bicycle. I got bitten in the Post Office learning that dogs are not always up for enthusiastic patting. I roamed for miles by myself exploring the woods and countryside; children could in those days. I almost learned to pronounce "agriculture" when my father became active in the local Young Farmers group. I tried (unsuccessfully) to poison the family dog with the engine oil left out from servicing our Austin 8. I listened to baffling arguments about people with curious names like "Attlee" and "Churchhill" and clearly remember my Grandfather pontificating on Prisoners of War: "We can't just tell them they've been naughty boys and send them home!" he would say.

It's easy to look back askance at some of the educational practices of those days but children are robust and my own memories of that time are almost all happy ones. But I had advantages where others did not and the full weight of classroom repression that descended on some must have been hard to bear.