Junior School Lessons

But I suppose, at some point my patient or impatient teachers must have instilled a bit of knowledge into me, and I do actually remember a few bouts of enthusiasm. Even then I quite enjoyed writing, and when I was about ten I remember writing this long, long story about a shipwreck which ended with the hero sinking slowly into the briny depths and describing everything on the way down. I didn't appreciate the impossibility of the situation even when it was pointed out to me. Nothing would persuade me to change my poetic ending.
I used to like art too, and knew I was good enough to achieve mostly quite interesting results, even though I didn't always adhere strictly to instructions. Coming in from lunch time and seeing all the tables spread with newspaper and with a sheet of grey sugarpaper in each place, was a joy for me. I suppose we must have had some sort of timetable, but we never knew it, so each lesson was a sort of surprise.
We listenened to radio programs for schools twice a week. One was a geography programme with a booklet full of shiny black and white photographs which accompanied the programmes. the booklet for the nature-study programmes was in colour. Even now I can still see a beautiful picture of a red squirrel on the front cover and remember the smell of that new shiny paper.
Much of the rest of the time was taken up with grappling with the complexities of arithmetic. Children in these decimalised days do not realise how easy they have it, compared to us grappling with the old Imperial measures. We became experts at adding up £5 . 17s . 11d and £1 . 19s . 4d
for example, bearing in mind, that there were twelve pennies (d) in a shilling (s) and twenty shillings in a pound. And pennies could be slit up into half pennies and quarter pennies (farthings) just to complicate matters further.
Our problems were far from solved even when we lhad finally learned to divide and multiply with money. The measures of weights and lengths were waiting in the wings. Everything was measured in feet and inches in those days. Our wooden rulers which we keptin our cardboard pencil boxes under our desks, were one foot, or twelve inches long. Thank goodness we never had to get seriously involved in chains and furlongs, except for horse-racing, and we were definitely not into that. But weights, (not mass please note) were important. We used to buy our sweets two ounces at a time, and there were sixteen ounces in a pound. I remember my grandmother's old scales. I used to love helping her weigh the ingredients for cakes or sponges. All her cast-iron weights could be fitted into one another, with the large pound weight at the bottom and the small half ounce weight at the top and the tray where the ingredients went was all bent from the time I used to sit in it as a tiny child.
The first time I came across kilos was when I was sixteen and having my first holidy abroad. We were rash enough to ask for a kilo of plums from an italian street vendor, which he duly supplied us with, in a flimsy brown paper bag. Needless to say, half the soggy plums fell out through the bottom of the bag before we could eat them. A kilo was far more than I had anticipated.
But back to imperial weights, our weight was recorded in stones and pounds. I remember when I was about nine, weighing five stone four pounds, and my grandmother saying that I was too thin. There were fourteen pounds in a stone, and coal was delivered in hundredweight (cwt) and twenty hundredweight made a ton.
So by the time we had got our heads round all these weights and measures, learned our tables off by heart right through till twelve, and mastered fractions and decimals as well, we had arrived at the top of the school and it was time to take the exam that everyone had to take in those days,the dreaded eleven plus.
There were three papers, Arithmetic, English and Intelligence. I remember quite enjoying myself once the initial terror had subsided. It was the first exam I had ever taken in my life, and we all sat in rows in the school hall, all eighty of us. I say about eighty, because there were about thirty-five of us in class one, over forty in class two, and a fair sprinkling of kids that had stayed languishing in lower classes.
Twelve of us passed including yours truly. The exam was taken in Januaryand the results came out in May. I and my friends were on our way to grammar school.