First day at school

But there are pictures proving that I showed up! Cute little tyke.
USA Gundy

I don’t remember my first day in school at all , but I do remember my brothers first day because I cried and screamed that I couldn’t go with him . He’s 16 months older than me I couldn’t start till the following year in 1958, when I was 5 years and 4 months old .
I started school with my best friend who lived across the road which helped a lot as I was very reserved .

I have very distinct memories of my first day at school. I was late as I had a hospital appointment first thing and had had drops put in my eyes which meant I couldn’t see very well. The teacher put a ‘reading card, with a picture and some words on it , in front of my face and barked at me to read it. I couldn’t see it . She then drew dots on the blackboard , asking me how’ve many there were. Again , I couldn’t see them. She seemed utterly exasperated and dragged me across the room to sit with a group of crying children. It was this same ‘teacher’ who broke my foot by making me jump off P.E. apparatus WITHOUT bending my legs. Later in my life , I got to meet her again at church. She was an alcoholic and I felt sorry for her as she seemed pathetic and sad but should she ever have been the teacher of such young children? Maybe the job drove her to it.

I hated it. We were given a rough book to colour in on the front. Apparently the teacher told us to use only 3 colours (assuming 5 year olds were numerate!) but I didn't hear that and used many coloured crayons. I got a ruler on the hand for that. I've never forgotten her. She was called Miss Stone and she had an alsatian dog. If you're reading this, I hated you! And any teachers reading, take are how you treat little kids.

l always went to catholic schools so didn't have friends locally and every time my dad was promoted at work we moved which was roughly every 2 years. l was an only child for 8 years and very self contained. My first school was in Cheltenham l just remember being on my own and the nuns asking the same girls to read aloud to the class. l remember thinking how boring Janet & John books were. l was only there a short time and then moved and went to a convent school Notre Dame. The school only had nuns teaching there. l was six and l remember the nun sitting at a desk on a raised platform. After prayers and catechism we had tables. Holding a cane the nun would point randomly and ask you a times table. You would go to the desk and give your answer. You would then hold your hand out palm upper most and if right you were given a sweet. If wrong you turned your hand over and she would smack your knuckles. Sr Gerard was the head and Sr Josephine the class teacher. l am 67 next month and can still remember the faces of those two witches. Lots of cruel things happened that were mentally scaring Needless to say my child did not go to a catholic school.

I remember that another new child was screaming when his mother left on our first day. we were given little white chunky cards with one lower case letter on each one so that we could make words. There was a large rocking horse in a corner of the room but I cannot remember anyone ever having a ride on it.
All pupils sat in rows of desks for two.

I’m shocked by how nasty some of your teachers were. What a bad example to you.

My memory is awful but I remember that day vividly. The war was not long ended and there was a shortage of teachers. My mother, who had taught for one year only in 1937/8 then married and had to leave, was persuaded to return to teaching, so long as I could start school a year early while a childminder looked after my 2 year old brother. The school she was to teach in was half way down a long hill and my school was at the bottom on the other side. I had no idea where we were going and when we got to half way Mother stopped two older children and instructed them to take me to the infants’ playground. Then she crossed the road and disappeared while the two big girls dragged me down the hill screaming my head off all the way.

After the register was taken we were asked who had not gone to Mass on Sunday and the one honest/foolish child ŵho admitted to it was slapped on the side of her head. I don’t think I had ever missed Sunday mass so I passed that hurdle. Children were also slapped for not having a hankie in their pocket.

Some months later my brother caught chickenpox and my father insisted mother leave teaching and she never went back. I on the other hand remained in school and went through school a year younger than the class. I hated everything about school except for years 3 and 6 when we had kind teachers who clearly didn’t believe in corporal punishment.

I remember the first day. I had driven my mother mad to go. When I got home in the afternoon she asked did I like it and I said it was alright but I wasn’t going again! I got that wrong. It was 1940 and we were in a Cornish village , and had another school evacuated to the village, so they went one day and we went the next! It wasn’t for many months, I was very disappointed when we had to go full time again. It was alright until I went to Grammar school and I hated it after that. I recall not feeling well and asking to be excused netball, I was refused and ten minutes later passed out in the playground. She never refused me again!

In my 40's I went into further education. As part of it, in our English class we had to write an essay on school memories. So here are mine.

School Memories

I was born and raised in the North East of England in a coastal town called Whitley Bay.
I had really been looking forward to starting school but not on my birthday! I had wanted to stay at home and play with my birthday presents.

My teacher Mrs Isherwood was a stern woman with sharp features and her black hair was swept back severely in a French pleat. The other pupils had started class before me. I vividly recall how she told the children to gather around the blackboard. She had turned to me and said ‘’Excluding M*******.’’ Being only five years old I didn’t know what she meant so I stayed in my seat anyway. Then she stared at me. I squirmed in my seat unsure of what she wanted. Then I thought she must have wanted me to join the others but as I stood up she yelled ‘’ I said excluding M*******.’’ So I burst into tears.

I stayed in Mrs Isherwood’s class until Christmas then moved to Mrs Swale’s class. She was really nice. The classroom was pleasant enough with an alphabet freeze around the wall. There were lots of toys that we were allowed to play with in the afternoons. A Wendy house. A sand pit and a water trough with funnels, rubber pipes and bottles. Mornings were spent learning the alphabet and using coloured blocks of different lengths that represented different numbers. The pupils had to make rows of patterns with them and they taught us how many ways there were to make up the number ten.

I didn’t want to leave the nursey unit and move to the main school. The main building was large and foreboding. In comparison to the nursey unit the classrooms were dull and boring. They were bigger than the nursey classrooms with high ceilings. The walls and ceilings were painted magnolia with the odd painting here and there.
The toilets were outside across the school yard. They were damp and cold and smelled musty. There were brick air raid shelters all along one side of the school yard. We not supposed to go in them. They were dark, damp and creepy, a haven for spiders and beetles. They also made good hiding places when we played hide and seek!

I could leave home at 8.55 a.m. and be in time for the school bell when I moved to the junior school because it was literally at the end of the street where I lived. This was a modern building with a low roof and long corridors. This school had the luxury of indoor toilets with two rows of washbasins opposite each other. Each basin had a bar of pink soap (carbolic I think). In the middle and above each row of wash basins were two mirrors opposite each other. When you looked through one you could see the reflection of the other and so on. This was my first experience of ad-infinitum.
Mrs How took us for sewing and craft classes but I represented a problem for her. I had learned to knit at home. My mother used to cast on for me, but being left handed I knitted back to front. It was the same with sewing I used my left hand. Mrs How flatly refused to help me when I made a mistake and insisted I learn to knit like right handed people do. I now knit as a right handed person and can sew with either hand!

In time I became a dinner monitor at lunch times. The meals were always delicious at the junior school. Dinner monitors had to set and clear the dinner tables but had first go at second helpings. I also became one of the school prefects and one of our jobs was to wash all the teacher’s cups and saucers after break time. There was a varied assortment of bone china crockery. My friend Hazel and I used to make up names for each item based on their design or names on the bottom of each piece.

My best friend was a girl called Janet and I was deeply saddened when she told me she was emigrating to Canada with her family.
Monkseaton Secondary Modern or Bygate as the kids knew it as had a terrible reputation. I was bitterly disappointed when I failed my ‘Eleven Plus’ and knew I would have to go to Bygate seniors. ‘’You’ll never survive’’ my brother D*** tormented me. ‘Bygate is the hardest school in this area and you‘re too soft’’ he chided. He warned me to keep away from Cathy B****s or she would ‘fill me in’ as he put it. Cathy B***s had left the term before I joined but she had been superseded by Jennifer Y***s who was nearly as bad. I once had my ears boxed by Jennifer for daring to do a handstand in front of her!

The school building was old with flaking paint, outside toilets again and was very cold in the winter. The main classrooms had glass panelled doors all along the sides of them. The back and front walls were brick. Built around a forecourt there were verandas on either side of the classrooms. The inside veranda had been blocked in with wooden panels and windows. The outside verandas were open to the elements and the North East winds used to howl though the ill fitting glass doors. Radiators had been installed on the inside of the pointed classroom ceilings and were neither use nor ornament.

There was one toilet roll in the girl’s cloakroom. That hard horrible Izal stuff (you know like greaseproof paper). The girls had to take what they thought they needed out to the toilets and God help them if they didn’t take enough!

The desk tops were covered in graffiti. Some in ink and some actually carved into the wooden tops, presumably with a pen knife. The underneath of the desks were made of really rough wood and the girls wore tights or should I say stockings in those days) at their peril because they would always snag on the rough wood. There were usually hard bits of chewing gum there too!

The boys at Bygate were awful. They used to punch or grab the girls as they walked past. They thought it was funny.
During the weeks leading up to the dreaded Christmas Party’s we had to learn to do old time dancing with them. If you didn’t like the person you were dancing with you barely touched them using just your finger tips. The whole thing was a farce. Any boy refusing to dance with a particular girl used to get the slipper off the sports master. The teachers were quite liberal with corporal punishment, usually the cane.
I was delighted to leave Bygate with its disgusting bottle green and yellow tie. It gave me the greatest pleasure to bin my bottle green knickers. Even if I did not learn a lot academically I learned to be tough. You had to be to survive Bygate!

My husband went to catholic schools.He was told to go to the priests office once and on the way a boy came down the corridor crying.He told hubbie not to go there so hubbie went home. He remembers some children didn't have shoes.He now hates anything to do with religion.

In the 1920s there were no nursery or pre schools so the first five of my life were spent every single day with my mother. The school was a small private school a few streets away so it was strange for me to be left there with a lot of other children especially boys as well. We were given exercise books ruled out where we wrote the letters of the alphabet in pen and ink.
I already knew these because my father had taught me.
My mother took me for the first two days and then I had to go alone.

Catholic schools were scary places.

Kate1949

Catholic schools were scary places.

Not all of them.

No probably not. Mine certainly was..

I went to a Catholic grammar school run by nuns, (cold, but not scary) but the majority of teachers were not. We even had male teachers.
It was a nuturing school, where someone like me, from a poor, deprived background was given the opportunities my parents never had and I able to eventually go to university.

How lovely Mary

It was 1952 and my first day I sat next to Joan. She cried,but I only found out years later that out teacher was her half sister,so I couldn’t understand why she cried! We had a real coal fire in the classroom with a huge fire guard round it.Wet knickers hung on it. We played with plastercine,I loved the smell of it.The Wendy house was fun to play in ,or the sand pit.There was a big old rocking horse,that everyone loved.We counted with those little shells.

Remember ….the classroom stove with guard around, milk in mini bottles - frozen in winter, boys and girls using separate playgrounds, outside loos, the nature table, scribbling on the back of someone’s shirt( & being told off), being an Angel in the nativity play, the “dunce “”facing the wall in the corner, some filthy children, desks with ink wells, handwriting tasks, being graded top to bottom each year, Father Xmas visiting us and giving out presents in the school hall.

I don't, but I do remember moving age 9 from Mt school to another following a row between my Dad and the 'dinner ladies'. I was in tears for weeks, as I apparently came from the posh estate, so was a target for town bullies until I left school at 16. Unreal that at 30 I trained as a school teacher :/

Before the mums left the classroom on the first morning (in 1953), I vividly remember a girl called Margo, being asked by her mother what she wanted for her lunch and she answered "Spam!" I had never heard of it so, when I went home at lunchtime, I asked my mother "What's Spam?" As my dad was a butcher, my mum just said "We only eat proper meat". It took me a long time to persuade them to buy a tin of Spam for me to try! I quite liked it too.

I had been reading for a year when I started school and it was all a real disappointment as inevitably a lot of the time was spent on teaching phonics. which was old hat to me; vaguely remember being taken to the doctors because I was so down in the dumps. Eventually I was moved up from class 1 to class 3 and suddenly all was OK.!

My first day was in 1955, and I do remember it. I think I was the only child that wasn't crying. It's not that I wasn't nervous, it was more because my Mum had asked me to be brave.

Kate1949 Thankfully, any teacher that behaved so unkindly and unprofessionally would be sacked these days. What a horrible start to your school life.

I can remember being slapped in the face by a teacher during country dancing. She shouted go left and I went right (not deliberately, I know what left and right are but I still, on the spur of the moment, get them mixed up). My Mum went up to the school and complained. I remember her name - Miss King. The others teachers, Miss Brown, Mrs Percy and Mr Morgan were all nice. We moved to another part of Wembley two years later and I went to another school.

We always had to have a hanky for school. I loved school dinners (especially semolina) and I still remember our plump, motherly dinner lady. In the playground I used to watch, with fascination, the crane flies on the classroom windows - they looked really huge.

Not really. We were privately educated so attended the kindergarten at school from about 3 ish. Remember being constantly told to sit down! And to stop laughing at just about everything!! I still ( embarrassingly so sometimes) see the funny side of most things so no change there with maturity!🤣

Slapped faces/slapped with rules/board dusters/across back of head with books!! All these dreadful forms of cruel punishment went unchallenged and if I complained to parents, their first question was " well what did you do?" No whisper of sympathy or even natural protective instincts! Then again got good hiding often and slaps etc across face and head from father too so they thought all was my fault and normal........