On your first day the teacher said “sit there” and that was where you sat for evermore. Then the serious work began, lessons were mostly the “three Rs”, reading, writing, and arithmetic and neat “right-handed” handwriting was mandatory. Lots of practising your letters on slates and later lined jotters (notebooks) and sometimes you got help with tracing paper. Reading practice from your Janet and John book, if you were getting a new book, it was the law that had to be covered in wall or wrapping paper as soon as possible. There are still questions about why that age-old tradition is a thing. Some believed it was to keep the books clean, while others say it was a way for parents to recycle their old decorating scraps. One way or the other if your book wasn't covered you would be getting in big trouble.
We took part in spelling B’s, learned tables by rote – you had to memorise the tables. Davina Kelly has owned up to cheating fifty odd years later. She admits that she was reading the words from the back of her jotter (notebook) and admitted she cheated and read them from the back of her uncovered jotter!).Other tables which were recited were the weights and measures ones “twelve inches to a foot, three feet one yard, one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards to a mile”.
You learned that you were not to speak unless you put your hand up and were given permission. You found out that when you used your eraser to rub out the wrong answers to your sums, you sometimes left a big black smudge on the page, you were better to wait until you got home and your mum would give you a piece of white bread to do the job.
The classroom was a riot of different smells, the woody smell of a freshly sharpened pencils after you had grinded it in the hand crank pencil sharpener on the teachers desk. The smell of chalk, dust, polish, soor milk and plasticine. That smell clung to your hands long after you had played with it. Occasionally there was the unwelcome smell of drying wet underwear, that had been placed on the radiator after an “accident”.
One teacher taught all subjects but had help from the British Broadcasting Company. A big radio was wheeled into the classroom and used for listening to “Singing together”. I can still remember “Soldier, soldier will you marry me with your musket fife and drum”. Very occasionally another visiting teacher came to teach dancing. Senga Jackson recalls “this teacher tried to teach us country dancing, my white sannies(sandshoes) had just been whitened. As I thumped up and down, trying to do a “paddy ba” the clouds of whitening saturated the air around my feet. It looked like I was dancing on a cloud”. We experienced “study in motion” thumping about the hall, pretending to be swaying trees, in your stocking feet or black sannies and sometimes in gym knickers, arms flailing about to the sound of disparate music.
One memory still lingers for Maureen Smith. “On the first day of primary, Miss Quinn sang this song to us. She was birling around. I had no idea what was going on. One minute she was this strict lady I was scared of, then she’s twirling around singing and she seemed to want us to copy her:
“Hot peas and barley, barley’o, barley’o;
Hot peas and barley, sugary cakes and candy;
This is the way the teacher stands;
This is the way she folds her arms;
This is the way she claps her hands;
and this is the way she dances.”
