Christ Church, the 'Little School'
In August 1940 I started my formal education at Christ Church Infants School on the corner of Thornes Lane and Mark Street just beyond Bridge 58. It was not the nearest infants school to our house but perhaps my parents chose it because it was a Church of England school. Curious really: there was I, the son of a Roman Catholic father and a Methodist mother now starting his education in a Church of England school. Everyone called it the ‘Little School’ to differentiate it from St James’ Church of England Junior School, which was the ‘Big School’, just up the road. Christ Church itself was demolished many years ago but the school buildings were still there until quite recently. Now everything has disappeared, including Mark Street itself, under an industrial development.
This
image from 2008 shows Mark Street. Christ Church Infants' School, The Little
School, was behind the fencing on the right and Christ Church itself was beyond
that. The Vicarage was on the left.I can clearly remember arriving for my very first morning at school. This is what the site looks like in 2008 - the school was behind the metal fencing and Christ Church itself was beyond that. The Vicarage was on the right of this picture. It was about a 10-minute walk from home and sister Kathleen must have come along in her pram but I can’t remember for certain. I had with me my gas mask in its small cardboard box slung across my shoulders. It was mandatory for everyone to carry a gas mask at that time. The exact date, 12th August, has always been synonymous in my mind not only with the start of my formal education, but with Granddad Winter’s birthday and the start of the grouse shooting season, even though as a city child I had no idea what grouse were, nor why they had to be shot on that particular day.
I had been excited when I left home but I clearly remember crying when Mum left me to the tender mercies of the assembled staff waiting outside the main door just before 9-o-clock. I also remember how reluctant I was to leave the school when she came back to take me home for dinner three hours later. I’d made lots of new friends and had a thoroughly enjoyable time because everything was so different from anything I’d experienced before.
Just inside the front door of the single-story school was the cloakroom. We each had a peg on which we hung our outdoor coats, cap and gas mask. The cloakroom led directly into the large, main classroom which I soon discovered was used for just about every activity, including mid-morning milk breaks, dinners for those who had them at school, and general games when the weather was too poor to play outside. In one corner of the room was a large, black, well-worn teacher’s desk containing such treasures as pencils, paper, and stocks of plasticine, the colourful, rubbery plastic modelling clay. Off to the back of the room was another door that led, via a short corridor, to a smaller classroom for the final year pupils. The major difference between Christ Church School as it was in the 1940s and infant schools today is that the classroom walls were bare – no colourful displays – in fact no displays at all.
After that first morning I made my way to and from school on my own, like almost all the other infant children did, whatever the weather, however dark the winter mornings and evenings, or the summer mornings in Double British Summer Time when local time was GMT +2 hours. No caring parent would now dream of doing that these days.
It took me quite a few weeks to realise that the bridge over the LMS railway was
a territorial boundary. The railway separated the relatively well-off families
on the Denby Dale Road side (beyond the bridges in this 2008 image) from the
less well-off families who lived in the back-to-back terraces either side of
Thornes Lane (behind the photographer in this image). Certainly, none of the
boys or girls in my class lived on my side of that bridge and I had never met
any of them before. That was not entirely surprising because until then I’d
rarely ventured far from Cotton Street except to go to the Co-op or the fish and
chip shop with Mum and the occasional foray on Saturdays into Wakefield town
centre with both my parents.