Derek Barnett's schooldays - during WW2

Our school was a small, red brick Victorian building on the edge of the village. I remember the smell of chalk dust, of newly opened exercise books in which we wrote with ‘Waverley’ and ‘Relief’ nibs, and the fresh woody aroma of plain brown utility pencils.

The headmaster, Mr Chidlow, was a strict but kind man in grey flannels and brown tweedy jacket with leather patches at the elbows. He took us for more advanced lessons as we got older and also for ‘games’ like rounders and handball in the small rear playground. We wore coloured bands of red, green, blue or yellow across the shoulders like bandoliers to distinguish opposing teams.

It was in the playground, too, during ‘playtime’ as it was called, that we enjoyed our own games such as marbles, conkers, tick and hide and seek. We carried our marbles, or ‘olleys,’ in home-made marble bags with a drawstring around the top.

The teachers were mostly elderly maiden ladies with their hair done up in buns. Miss Baker, whose fingers always seemed to be stained with red ink she used for marking our work, taught us reading, writing and arithmetic, and sometimes took us into the woods to learn nature study first hand by opening up horse chestnuts or dissecting wild flowers and showing us how they were pollinated by the bees,

Then there was Miss Houlbrook, who did her best to teach us a love of music. She would strike chords as she stood at the piano (we always wondered why on earth she didn’t sit at the instrument) and then point to a boy or girl and fire the question “What key was that in?” We were sometimes allowed to sing as she played and the room would resound to the out-of-tune but lusty strains of ‘Rose of England’ ‘Hearts of Oak’ or ‘Killarney.’ The names of some of the other teachers I have forgotten. But Miss Jenkins and Miss Williams were both somewhat younger. Miss Jenkins taught only the ‘infants’ class, so we didn’t see much of her. Miss Williams was courting an army officer who would sometimes meet her at the school gates four o’clock when they would stroll off arm in arm. We always giggled and thought it ‘soppy.’ There was one other teacher, a winsome young woman with raven hair and big, bright brown eyes. Though we would never admit it to each other, most of us boys secretly adored her. Ironically her name eludes me, though I can still see the pretty blush which suffused her face whenever she happened to notice one of us boys staring at her in rapt adoration.

Now and again our play would be interrupted when one of the former pupils who had only recently left school would sit astride his bicycle at the school railings and regale us with grand takes of life at work,until Mr Chidlow, who never seemed to lose his authority with the old boys, told him to clear off back to his factory or farm instead of boasting to his chums. Mr Chidlow did not object to our having a little fun but came down hard on anyone guilty of infractions of school rules, particularly when they concerned safety. One of these rules was never to interfere with the stirrup pumps and fire buckets placed in the cloakrooms in readiness for air raids. Well, one hot summer day, I and a fellow ruffian, who was later to become a respected builder in the Chester area, decided that the other pupils standing in line waiting for a singing lesson, needed cooling down, and while I was at the pump and buckets he manned the hose. The cloakroom was filled with hissing water and the cries of boys and girls running hither and thither to escape the inevitable wetting.

Suddenly there was a silence. There stood Mr Chidlow, eyes blazing with anger and head dripping from the spray which had caught him as he opened the door to investigate the din. He cuffed both of us soundly around the ears and administered a vigorous and – on reflection – deserved caning for that particular outrage.

On Friday mornings the Reverend Thomas Oliver Cromwell East came to school to look after our spiritual needs and the most literate of us were called out in front of the class to read the Lesson. This was invariably done to the accompaniment of rude whispers, nudges winks and giggling amongst the other girls and boys who revelled in tying to ‘trip up’ the reader.

An even worse fate occurred with the dreaded visit of the school dentist, a brusque elderly man who was never seen to smile and threw all of us into fear and trembling. A pupil whose name began with ‘A’ was always first for the ordeal in a room set aside for a makeshift dental surgery in the nearby village hall. This boy or girl would then act as runner, coming back into class and calling out the name of the next victim. These little horrors would add to the sense of dread and foreboding by relating fearsome stories of their own nasty experiences in the chair. They took a fiendish delight in fibbing “You’re down to have six (or seven or eight) out”. We rejoiced at anything which took us out of the classroom, especially when we were taken in a crocodile to see geography or other documentary films in the village hall. Surprising though it might sound to today’s more sophisticated children, we were taken several times to the village’s one and only telephone box to learn how to use the phone! Even more popular were the times when we descended into the damp-gloom of the school shelters to learn the drill for air raids or gas attacks, carrying our gas masks in square cardboard boxes with string shoulder straps. Sometimes the departure from the schoolroom was purely imaginary. This was when, about twice a week, we listened to the BBC’s ‘History for Schools’ programme on the school’s radio. To the Woods and Fields Several times unexploded land mines in the surroundings fields meant that we would all be sent home for the day. And in winter, if the classroom was too cold or the outside lavatories froze, that also got us out of lessons so we would joyfully rush out to spend the time sliding on ponds, tobogganing or having snowball fights. There were times when it was whispered that a certain boy had put a tiny piece of ice in the schoolroom thermometer to bring about the temperature necessary for our release!