A 1950s Childhood (14 page)

Your teacher taught you how to mould plasticine and cover the moulding with papier mâché, made from torn-up bits of old newspaper stuck together in layers using wet paste. You learnt a variety of crafts from painting pictures and murals to making collages, and talented teachers even taught things like basket weaving. In summer, your teacher would have been there on the school sports day to help prepare you for the sack race, the egg and spoon and wheelbarrow races; and in winter, he or she would have been there to encourage you on those awful muddy cross-country runs.

Why was it that you were always dragged out on the coldest and wettest winter day to do a cross-country run? And it always seemed to be cold and wet on the days you went to the swimming baths, with everyone shivering away in those poolside changing huts – or cupboards more like!

It was your class teacher that decorated the classroom with Christmas decorations and organised your school Christmas party where you were taught how to play party
games like pass the parcel, musical chairs and blind man’s buff. The teacher would bring records in from home to play during the party. Christmas songs like The Beverley Sisters’
Little Drummer Boy
and Harry Belafonte’s
Mary’s Boy Child
, as well as some pop songs like Cliff Richard’s
Living Doll
and Tommy Steele’s
Singing the Blues
.

From playing with small beanbags in the school hall to your first game of rounders in the playground, and even dressing up for a part in the Christmas nativity play, your primary school teacher showed you how to do it all … and still managed to teach you ‘the three Rs’!

In the 1950s, the cost of school dinners was subsidised by the government. The contribution made by parents had gradually increased during the previous decade so that by 1957 parents were paying a shilling a day for each of their children’s school dinners. Your class teacher would collect the week’s ‘five-bob’ school dinner money when calling the register on a Monday morning. It always delayed the start of lessons by several minutes because little Johnny couldn’t find all his money, and little Mary had forgotten hers completely – no wait! She’s found it, safely wrapped in a handkerchief and tucked up inside the leg of her navy blue knickers. Then the teacher had to deal with those children from families on very low incomes that qualified for free school dinners. Even through the eyes of a child, it was uncomfortable to see individual classmates singled out as being poor – every Monday morning!

Some kids just couldn’t stomach the thought of eating school dinners and so they would keep their school dinner money to spend on other things and pretend to the teacher that they were going home for lunch. After all, no child can
surely forget the horrible smell of boiled vegetables that engulfed the school buildings around lunchtime, or the taste of whatever was in that meat pie you had to eat, and the semolina pudding for afters – yuck!

There was always a lot of fun and tomfoolery going on in primary school playgrounds. In the morning before school started, and at break times, they were a hive of activity, with girls and boys competing for space to play all sorts of ball and chase games. Boys would mark out the best stretch of fence as a goal for their football game, while girls would bagsy any piece of high wall to play two-balls against. In summer, cricket and rounders would join the array of ball games being played and there would be balls flying everywhere, with many hitting innocent young bystanders. In autumn, although ball games remained popular, conkers was the dominant game, with small conker tournaments taking place all over the playground. The game required intense concentration and was only interrupted by the occasional wipe of a dripping nose with a coat sleeve. There was a lot of cruel teasing between kids in the playground. Anything that made you different would be targeted for name-calling during squabbles. It could be the colour of your hair or the braces on your teeth; nothing was safe in the war of words - four-eyes, ginger, lanky, fatso, snotty, anything that could be used to caricature a temporary rival. And that’s what they often were, very short-lived enemies who would be playing happily with you five minutes later.
The school caretaker would often bring quarrels to a halt as he made his way across the playground with a bucket of sand, which he was forever carting around the school to cover a freshly deposited heap of vomit in one of the school corridors.

Generally, you weren’t allowed to go out to the lavatory during class time, and since there was never any toilet paper in the lavatories you quickly learned to hold onto anything other than pee until you got home in the evening. By the time breaktime arrived, bladders were full and there was always a queue for the loo. Unless you were in a newly built school, all the lavatories were situated in the playground. They had no roofs, and sit-downs had no locks on the doors, if any doors at all – alfresco, you might say! It was because of those bulging bladders that young boys quickly discovered the ‘boys only’ school lavatory game of ‘highest up the wall’!

Skipping ropes were always in use somewhere in the playground, with groups of girls chanting rhymes with key words and phrases that prompted the skipper to do certain skipping tricks. The girls loved those rhymes. Rope skipping, French (elastics) skipping and ball juggling games were all done to rhymes. Young girls would often be seen forming circles to play rhyming games and sometimes they would just stand around singing.

The tuck shop came back into full use after sweet rationing ended on Wednesday 4 February 1953. All sorts of penny chews and tiny packets of sweets went back on sale at school tuck shops throughout the country. It was the first time in their young lives that schoolchildren had known the delight of a fully stocked tuck shop; after all, sweets had been subject to rationing since 1942. The tuck shop was open during mid-morning break, but money was still scarce and many schoolchildren could only stand and admire the delights on offer. Those that did have some coppers jangling
in their pockets usually went for their favourite loose sweets that were sold in ones and twos, and cost very little. Aniseed balls and malted milk tablets were very popular because they had strong flavours and you could suck them for ages. The malted milk tablets were like the Horlicks tablets that were sold in chemist shops at ninepence for a small tin.

Everything you learned at primary school was in preparation for the eleven-plus exams, which you took soon after your eleventh birthday. You were used to being given a set of sums to calculate, or a composition to write for English, but you had never before experienced an examination. Your parents and teachers drummed the importance of the exam into you, and everyone got very nervous about it. The eleven-plus examination was used to determine which type of school you were most suited to go to later that year when you finished at primary school. The idea was that different skills required different schooling and the exam was intended to determine whether you were best suited to a grammar school, a secondary modern school, or a technical school. This was a life-changing event for which you had sole responsibility, and sadly, the result could only go one of two ways – ‘pass’ and you were an academic success and going on to grammar school, or failure, which meant you were going to a secondary modern school with the prospects of leaving school at fifteen with little or no qualifications unless you went on to college. Many kids had no real understanding of what the differences were between
grammar and secondary modern schools. They just wanted to go to the nearest school because they didn’t fancy the thought of travelling, or to the same school as their elder sibling, and many were happy just as long as they went to the same school as their classmates.

On the morning of the exam, there was a real air of importance and secrecy that you had never known before. You did the exams with all your classmates under teacher supervision in your own classroom. You were told not to talk to anyone, pass messages, or look around at all until after the examination was over. The examination question papers were placed upside down on your desk in front of you, and at the appointed hour, when the papers had all been distributed, you were told to turn the papers over and begin.

The exam was in three parts, arithmetic and problem solving, general English (including comprehension and an essay), and general knowledge. Try these two c. 1950s eleven-plus-exam questions:

Remember this was for eleven-year-olds; there were no calculators and you had to show all your workings-out on the paper, including crossings-out, and children were mainly taught to use fractions rather than decimals when doing calculations.

The method of revealing eleven-plus exam results left a lot to be desired. Many schools just read them out after morning assembly, creating an atmosphere of great tension and distress among the children. It was a moment of great joy to the few lucky ones that passed, but it left some of those who failed absolutely distraught, particularly as it was sometimes left for them to tell their parents the news. The saddest thing of all was seeing some of the cleverest kids in the class fail. It can only be down to nerves that they failed, but it was heartbreaking for them to learn that the results of one morning’s tests had been used to judge whether or not they were academically qualified for grammar school. Once the emotions of the results day had calmed down, there was then the overwhelming realisation that friends were going to be split up and sent to different schools. Some that lived a distance apart might never see each other again. However, passing the eleven-plus did not in itself guarantee entry to a grammar school.

All grammar schools and some secondary modern schools required applicants to attend selection interviews from which the school would pick the best of the bunch. Parents would be required to select and list three schools in the order of their preference, and that list would come into play if you were turned down by your first choice
school. It was rumoured that schools didn’t look too kindly upon applicants who had listed their school as being third choice. The school interview was the second-biggest life-changing occurrence in your young life over which you had influence. It would determine whether or not you were to go to your school of choice.

Whatever school you ended up in, you then had to come to terms with being one of the new kids – what a turn of events! After all, you had come from the comfortable and familiar surroundings of your primary school, which, after some seven years, had earned you position and respect as one of the ‘top dogs’ in the playground, and now you had been instantly relegated to being among the smallest, weakest and dumbest in this new and unfamiliar playground. The whole ethos was different. You were now surrounded by huge spotty youths with attitude, whose main occupation during break times was to stand around in groups talking, and some might even use you as sport for bullying. To protect yourself, you soon learnt that there was safety in numbers. Some of those gravel-voiced teenagers towering over you were like fully grown adults, with chin stubble and everything – and they were just the girls!

Within days of joining your new school you began to feel much older, and with the task of survival high on your agenda, the childish games of old were soon erased from your mind. You had to contend with ‘sums’ becoming mathematics, the learning of foreign languages, world history and geography, boys doing woodwork, domestic science for girls, but then there was the exciting possibility of learning how to make stink bombs in the chemistry laboratory. Many had to deal with the disappointment of
being placed in a single-sex school, and if you went to a grammar school then there was the additional burden of having to learn confusing subjects like economics and Latin. And then there was the homework! You were set loads of homework to do, which was a complete shock to the system; it took up most of the evening and completely changed your way of life, particularly grammar school homework, which covered several more academic subjects. The old routine of school, tea, play, relax, and then to bed, quickly turned into a new routine of school, tea, homework and bed. And on top of that, some had to fit an hour’s school detention and visits to the library into their evening’s schedule as well! Yes, part of your schoolwork and homework required that you make regular visits to the local library to look up information in reference books. This was a time when the word ‘computer’ wasn’t yet used in everyday language, and even commercial computers, which were the size of a room, were rare. The hand-held pocket calculator hadn’t yet been invented, and all mathematical calculations were done using pen and paper with just the aid of your brain. From a very young age you were taught your times tables (multiplication tables), and were constantly tested on your ability to recite them and answer on-the-spot questions put to you. Maths teachers would randomly point at individuals around the class and fire questions at them – Nine eights? Twelve sevens? Eleven fours?