Junior School

I can see us now, a long crocodile of little girls all with woolly hats and swimming hats, setting out for the weekly trip to Hornsey swimming baths. I suppose swimming costumes and towels were pretty important too, but I don't remember anyone not being allowed to go for the lack of either of those two items. But it was back to lessons if we forgot either of our hats.
This was in our Junior school, a three-storey red-brick affair with Infants on the ground floor, Junior Boys on the first and us girls on the second. That wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that the loos were downstairs, outside and right over the other side of the playground. We became experts at not only running up the many flights of shallow, concrete stairs two at a time, but also jumping down them two at a time as well, which required a certain amount of agility.
I don't think school halls have changed a great deal since those days. The strong smell of polish on their herring-bone patterned parquet floors still doesn't quite get rid of the more subtle undertones of disinfectant and saw dust. We had assembly every morning in the course of which we said the Lord's prayer and sang two real hymns, not the politically-correct nursery rhymes that kids are often subjected to today. The nine classes of little girls filed in crocodile fashion, arranging themselves lengthways down the hall, with the smallest in each class in front and the tallest at the back. I was always nearly at the back no matter which class I was in, starting in class eight and working my way through classes five and three until I achieved the dizzy heights of class one and I was at the top of the pile, so to speak.
I remember once, (I think I must have been in class three,) making an utter and absolute idiot of myself in assembly and coming out of that assembly hot with shame. We were asked who St Francis was and my hand shot up. I had been reading abook about Sir Francis Drake and thought I knew it all. 'He won the Spanish Armada' I said. Whoops! The whole school seemed to be laughing, although I am sure that the younger ones did not have a clue what they were laughing about, but I have never forgotten that particular assembly.
Handiwork was big on the agenda back then. They made sure we learned to sew and knit before we were eleven. I still have the handkerchief case which I made when I was eight or nine, painstakingly embroidered in coloured silks using at least half a dozen different stitches.
With knitting I was neither enthustiastic nor particularly talented. I remember, once we were making some sort of knitted ball thing, and how my triumph in almost coming to the end of the wretched thing turned into despair when a hole was discovered near the beginning and I had to undo most of it and start again. I never did finish that particular item. A year later we were making mittens, and having taken weeks to battle my way through the two inches of ribbing at the bottom, I smuggled my knitting home and let mother practically finish it for me.
I remember how old clever cuts in our class finished about eight items by the end of the year and I had barely finished two.
In the next class we made an embroidered bonnet in the winter months, and a check summer skirt later on. I must have been gradually improving as I finished bothe items and they were actually wearable.
These skills that I learned while I was young, no matter how reluctantly or imperfectly, have always been useful, and I find it sad that not more importance is attached to them nowadays in schools. My ten-year-old granddaughter for example, bright as a button in academic work and computers, hardly knew how to thread a needle until I taught her, let alone master the complexities of knitting.
Meanwhile, a floor below us, the boys would have been beavering away with their woodwork, which was also a useful skill that probably stood many of them in good stead later on in life.
We didn't see much of the boys. A prominent white line separated the two halves of the concrete playground. And at that age we were not particularly interested in going over it. They could keep their noise and their footballs to themselves as far as we were concerned. We had our own games.
Skipping featured prominently and with all the practice we had, most of us got very good at it. We used to have all sorts of rhymes and jingles that we used to skip to and they always used to end in dubs (short for doubles I suppose) when for every skip, the rope had to go under you twice, so you had to jump quite high, and you were truly exhausted if ever you got to fifty or above. I think the record was about ninety-two. The turners would be suffering from repetitive strain injury by this time as well.
We used to say and sing all sorts of rhymes as we juggled two balls against a wall. That was a game that amused us for hours, both at school and in the street. I haven't forgotten most of the complexities of the game even now, how we used to have to stand on one leg, juggle using just one hand, stand a long way away from the wall, turn around and still catch the ball. But when you dropped a ball you were out and it was the next person's turn.
Apart from the old standbys there were lots of games which seemed to come suddenly into fashion, but then, after a couple of weeks or a couple of months, fade into obscurity. A ball, preferably a heavy, rubber one, knotted into the end of a stocking was one such game. Within a week of its first appearance we we all standing with our backs to the wall bouncing the ball in the stocking behind us. The another time we would all be making collections of the tiny woollen bobbles that tend to appear on well-worn cardigans and jumpers. We would probably look a bit like a troupe of monkeys grooming one another for parasitic insects, as we swooped on yet another unfortunate victim with a particularly promising, colourful, bobbly jumper. Soon, that particular game had run its course, perhaps because the weather turned warm so the supply of woolly bobbles dried up.
In the summer, us girls were allowed to play in the 'field'. I have put that word in inverted commas because 'bomb-site' would have been the more apt description. The health and safely people of today would have literally had a field day! There were bricks and rubble everywhere, not piles of it, just thinly scattered, between which patches of clover and tufts of grass were bravely putting in an appearance. But that field was far more interesting than the one in my secondary school which was just covered with plain old grass, and gave rise to all sorts of interesting games. From the bits of bricks we would build houses, just one brick high I hasten to add. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on a whole brick, that would be a dressing-table. There were always plenty of bits of broken mirrors around to stand on top of the brick, probably glass too, but I never remember anyone falling and cutting themselves. We were a hardy lot, us post-war kids. There were daisies and a few dandelions too, so we could decorate our houses, as well as make daisy chains when the mood took us.
Then suddenly decorating houses was no longer the rage and we were all bringing wooden cotton reels to school, with four nails sticking out of the top. French knitting had come into fashion. I remember it was quite tricky getting started but once you were, and the round multicoloured snake of knitting began to emerge from the other end of the cotton reel it became great fun. The trouble was with french knitting was that you never really knew what to do with the increasingly lengthy coils, so you just kept on knitting until you had used up all the spare bits of wool that your mother was prepared to give you. By that time we had got a bit sick of it anyway.
Why is it that I remember so much more about games we used to play than my actual lessons. Probably that is why I never got a prize. Indeed, the only time I was called up onto the platform and given a clap was to collect my swimming certificates. The same theme went through all my junior school reports "Josephine does not try hard enough" But if they didn't pick me for their end of year plays because I was too tall to be a princess, and my hair was too long and curly to be the king, and I had to sit through hours of mind-numbing rehearsals of a play that I was not even in, until, in spite of myself, I knew the whole play off by heart, I didn't see why I should kill myself with work. so I just coasted along, played with my yo-yo under the desk and chewed my pencils until they resembled palm trees and I got splinters in my tongue.