Childhood: Complete Text.
School 1: Belleville.
School 2: Halbrake or St John's Hill House School.
School 3: Battersea Grammar or Sir Walter St John's.
School 4: St Paul's.
[This must be the infants section of the school - mixed sex. Later [p.28], it was clearly boys only.]
[14]
. . . ;
Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school. There were some boys and more girls whom I desired and sometimes struggled to sit next; and at least two whom I avoided. One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of "Lizzie’; the [15] other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull.
Of the mistresses I can see a tallish one, with pink complexion, high cheekbones and sleek light brown hair, whose home was a confectioner’s shop, so that it happened that she gave away sweets for slight merits; one dark and shorter, more likeable and hateable; and a stout, short, bustling head mistress in whom I never knew of anything but her appearance to prove her common humanity with the children and other teachers.
I learnt easily: perhaps my memory would record the sweets I earned but not the punishments, nor yet the morning and afternoon labours, whether well or ill performed, of five days in the week.
[28]
II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS
When I think of school I smell carbolic soap. I see the caretaker by the wall of one room ringing the bell. I deposit my weekly fourpence on the master's desk. I go round, as a privilege, filling the scores of inkpots from a tin with a long thin spout. I join in the one-verse hymn before and after lessons. I see large light bare rooms with a map or two, and boys in long parallel desks facing a master; for we were soon separated from the girls. We repeated aloud "Witney on the Windrush manufactures Blankets". We learned the names of the tributaries of the Thames for ever and ever.
["My weekly fourpence": A reminder that school was not free. But hadn't the 1880 Mundella Act made it so? And if so, what was the fourpence for?]
What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never fired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line of the Hebrides I think I actually loved.
One of the masters, named Jones, was little, with dark prominent eyes, round plump red face and quick steps and fiery temper; [29] another, named Spragg, was a tall fairer bony man, who had a deep resonant voice; and I think that once when the two quarrelled the tall one lifted the little one into the air. There was a third named Wigley, a mild man, a chewer of his moustache, who struck me as feeble even before Spragg got the better of him in a tussle.
The head master was short, square-shouldered, lean, pallid, bearded, took long rapid strides with head low and projecting, flat high overhanging forehead, deep-set eyes, always on the verge of anger, a harsh barking voice, a general expression of dark solitary determination. He appeared unexpectedly from time to time in the several classrooms which I passed through in the course of three or four years. Sometimes he went by me in the street, his hands in his black overcoat pockets, an umbrella under his arm, overtaking everybody, with rapid sidelong dark glances.
I remember crawling in and bursting out, but very little about school itself. We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap.
Addition, subtraction, multiplication, parsing, were easy to me, and I did them pretty well. Sometimes things were tediously easy to me, sometimes I took a pleasure in overcoming what looked hard and of course in earning praise, reward, a superior position. I rather liked wearing the numbered ticket on examination days, and took pride in having the numbers neatly [30] printed in black ink with a 4 rather than an open 4 and so on, as I did in saying, when questioned, that my father was an "Officer" in the Civil Service.
Discipline was strict. I think I must have been usually fully employed, save for glances at the clock. At any rate I know more about what I did before and after than in school.
The one moment in school at this time which I cannot forget is when I found myself being lifted from a grating where I had fallen, having been hit hard in the stomach by a boy on my way from the classroom to the main exit. In the hard asphalt playground we played rounders and egg-cap and games with tops, marbles and cherrystones.
Back to the top of this page . . .
Send me an email.Philip Boys ("HistoryBoys")