Teaching junior school

After the motherly Miss Drafan, we passed into Miss Robson's class. Miss Robson was another of those who had no chance to marry because of the lost generation of young men in WW1. She was more of a benevolent 'Grande Dame'. She was tall and slim and dressed in long clothes, smelt of scented soap and started us with numbers.  This was before the psychologists became involved in teaching and we learned by boys and girls standing in a row in front of the class.  There were no apples or oranges for illustration and none of us could remember having seen bananas.

      When it came to subtraction, six minus two for example, six of us stood in a row and two went back to their seats. She asked who was to be subtracted and it was usually boys because one or two of the girls came close to tears when they were chosen. Maybe she was more of a psychologist than we knew because she taught us not to pick on the vulnerable and to treat young ladies with respect; not that Grace, or Tiptoes as my dad christened her as she always looked ready to tiptoe through the tulips, needed any assistance over respect. When she deigned to speak to us, she ordered us rough rude boys around like a fairy queen.

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Cairndhu in WW2

Cairndhu- WW2 had started when we went to school. Because of the shortage of paper, we had slates with a slate pencil that made marks on the slate. If you made a mistake, all you had to do was wet a finger and rub it out, which was handy if you felt your neighbour had a better answer than you.
Our early teachers were maiden ladies who might have been married if a whole generation of eligible young men had not been killed in WW1.
The first of these ladies, motherly Miss Draffan, wore brown woollen clothes that she knitted herself and smelt vaguely of moth balls. She gave some of the less fortunate children their first touch of gentleness and encouragement.

      While anyone who dared to talk when she was saying something was 'shushed' by the class, those who might struggle with a word like ‘cat’ or ‘mat’ would be given stage whispered help. If you got help, you had to decide who was right, usually a girl, because there were sniggering boys who thought it was funny to mislead you.

      Miss Draffan had a complement for everyone's scrawl on their slate. There were special pencils for the slates and as the quality deteriorated as a result of the war, they could be made to screech across the slate. Girls didn’t do things like that, of course, their mission was to call out 'it was Jim Scott, Miss'.

       After some laborious copying of letters with tongues stuck out following progress, the slates were put neatly in the corner as only a class of five year olds can; the boys closely supervised by the girls, who straightened any slate that was out of line.

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When the war started in 1939 a few of the men, especially those who were in the territorials went off to France but coal was important for all sorts of things, the railways used it, electricity was dependent on it, the steel industry needed coke and the result was that most of the miners were exempt from army service. Some even turned miner to escape going away, though, at that time the mines were not particularly safe. For us boys it produced films about heroes and one boy, two or three years older than Rob and I was particularly affected. We had our pwn fantasies about cowboys and indians and the French Foreign Legion, which included Laurel and Hardy, of course and we lived those out enthusiastically but when this older lad wanted us to pretend, we knew it wasn't real and despite his enthusiasm, couldn't get into dive bombing ships, or being commandos at all. Dad saw him once throwing a pretend hand grenade at a pretend tank and he got the nickname of Sojer. We had Polish soldiers camped in the castle grounds and, of course, Sojer discovered an imaginary spy among them and wanted us to sneak about to find out who it was. Fortunately it was tea time and we were too hungry to become spy catchers.

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As wee boys we were noisy and one fine sunny day when one of the men who lived among us was on night shift and was trying to get some sleep we were whooping it up below his window. He gave up at last and opened the window and pointed an old WW1 rifle at us and shouted, 'Who must I shoot first?' As we ran off squealing we could hear his wife admonishing him for frightening bairns. How he had retained his rifle after 1918, we never discovered but he was one of the local worthies and some of his escapades nudge their way into a book now and then. The home guard were practising creeping down the burn across the road from the houses one day when he took charge and, using us as a decoy, (you can imagine how we got into the spirit of the thing), outmaneuvered and captured the trained troops of the 'enemy' in the wood across the other side of the field. The officer's swearing was something to hear! Real Dad's Army!

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I wanted to reflect how happy childhood had been for me in a Cairndhu type village but as I mentioned there were low points in the life of those villages and those are better reflected in Miss Kirkwood's story in A Land Fit for Heroes, which was written in memory of all those ladies who lost fiancees in WW1 and took to teaching. They gave us such a warm start to our schooldays that I felt they needed someone to recognise their contribution. Don't think it is doom and gloom, village life is always like tartan or a tweed, a healthy mixture. I had hoped to interest a literary agent and one does one's best but life is full of these little disappointments.

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Life in a village like the fictional Cairndhu had its downs as well ass ups. Three of us including my friend Rob were playing at  being a military band. Our drums were a mixture of one with diagonal stripes like the real thing, a plain red one and mine, with Mickey Mouse, Mini Mouse and Donald Duck chasing each other round the rim. The other two took turns at leading but when I insisted it was my turn to lead I was told Mickey Mouse drums always come last. Even at that age I could see the logic. I've since worked in some real Mickey Mouse operations and the logic still holds true. I suppose it all comes under the heading of Character Development.

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I shouldn't have described our house. It was small, only two rooms and a kitchen, but I don't want to create the reaction that several people have had to This Boy  and have them feel sorry for us, or feel how courageous we were to overcome our back ground, or think we were deprived. It was home, a place where we had the love of our mothers and the wisdom of our fathers. We were sorry for those who lived in ten room mansions with a governess, who barely saw their mother and whose fathers were remote figures they barely knew, and who had to go to boarding school and fag for bullies. Our common room was the moorland where the larks spiralled up into the sky singing a welcome, or the field above which the lapwing was doing acrobatics in the air, or the wood where the deer and rabbits lived and where you might glimpse a fox sneaking along or hear the rooks argue. It wasn't deprived, it was home!

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