St James' School (The Big School)
In September 1943 all those who had been in my class at Christ Church ‘Little
School’ moved to the Big School, St James’ C of E Junior Mixed School. It was
located much nearer to my home in Cotton Street than the little School. I had to
walk along 'Our Piece' turn right along Tew Street, down to the end of Avondale
Street, through the LMS railway bridges, and there it was on the right at the
far side of the bridges, opposite the Ninety Nine Arches. The image on the left
dates from 2004. St James' School has long since disappeared but little else has
changed, not even the trees across the path which are just as I remember them
from 1943. This 'path' is now known as Avondale Way.
The school consisted of four classes, known as forms. Each morning all the
pupils gathered in the playground and played around until the whistle blew. Then
we all lined up in our separate years, boys and girls at opposite ends of the
playground. It was a bit like a military drill movement. When we had dressed off
to the teachers’ satisfaction, Form 1 would lead off in single file into school,
boys turning to the right past the disgusting outside toilets, to go through one
entrance, girls turning left to go through the other entrance. Boys and girls
came together again inside the school so it was a bit of a mystery why we had to
go in through different doors. The two junior forms used the two smallest
classrooms at opposite ends of the building. The two senior forms had classrooms
in the centre of the school; those classrooms were normally separated from each
other by an impressive folding screen that stretched from floor to ceiling and
ran on a sort of miniature railway track at both ceiling and floor levels.
Sad to relate, several of the boys and girls seemed incapable of learning to
read or write and they took very little interest in anything. I could not
understand why many of the children had dirty faces, dirty fingers, dirty
clothes, and the boy who sat by the window was not the only one that had bad
body odour! Unlike at today’s junior schools, silence was the general rule. When
teacher was talking we had to sit up straight, sometimes with arms folded in
front of us and sometimes sitting on our hands. A child would only speak when
spoken to. Anyone who spoke out of turn had to sit with a finger across his or
her mouth; anyone who did it twice got a slap.
The 1st Form classroom was very cramped but 29 of us managed to fit inside. Our
teacher in the 1st Form was Miss Thompson and we all quickly began to idolise
her. She seemed very old and wise but in fact it turns out that she was only
about 20 years older than we were. Miss Thompson had been to London and that
impressed us no end. “Tell us some stories about London,” we regularly begged
and she usually obliged. London featured in the news on the wireless every day;
London was where the King and Queen lived; London was the centre of the British
Empire; London was our Capital City, the most important city in the world! All
that we learned from Miss Thompson, but London was nearly 200 miles away and
none of us, and probably none of our parents, had been there so we eagerly
soaked up all Miss Thompson’s stories.
The other teachers seemed to come and go at regular intervals – no doubt due to
wartime commitments. All the teachers were women except for the Headmaster. All
I can remember about the first Headmaster, Mr Moore, was that he was a great
advocate of corporal punishment for boys, strokes of a cane across the palm of
the
hand, and we lived in fear of him – but that was quite normal for the 1940s.
Later he was replaced by Mr Paterson, more of whom later. The female teachers
used to slap us, or throw the wooden blackboard duster at us, when we did wrong
and we just accepted this as normal practice. We certainly only spoke when we
were invited to. My parents kept my very first school report, December 1943,
signed by Miss Thompson and Mr Moore (see image). I came second in order of merit to Maureen
and I was not best pleased about that.