Good riddance! Things you don't see anymore, thank heavens!

Well I am gutted that I was offered sanitary towels that were developmentally twenty years out of date. thanks for that mum. how to traumatise a teen The stick on ones were bad enough, like bricks.

My parents were late adopters of central heating so also remember freezing bedrooms.

My aunt had a house where the only loo was outside. They were there for a while before the lady next door died and they were able to buy it and extend their tiny cottage to include an inside bathroom. I remember going past the nettles to get to the loo, annoyed that we had to go past the first toilet door to get to the second, thus passing more nettles.

Corporal punishment at school. I still remember the humiliation of the 'light' spanking I got because I'd added my sums up as htu rather that £sd. I was told I was careless. I was 7 at the time.

I definitely agree with that one vampirequeen. Watching a very red faced male teacher getting little boys to bend down in front of the class where he then whacked them really hard on the bottom with his plimsoll is an awful memory I have of school. He did it fairly regularly even though it was often the same little boys so it obviously didn't work.

When I was about 6 I turned the wrong way in country dancing and the teacher - I remember her so well to this day - hit me round the face for being "naughty". My mum went up to the school and there was no recurrence but these days that teacher would be suspended.

I remember when I was 8 or 9, we had a male teacher who was on reflection 'a little strange'. For some reason he had me pretending to be a mermaid, sitting on a rock, brushing my long auburn hair, which had been plaited!
It made me feel uncomfortable, but I didn't know why.

@eloethan - That brought back memories of Junior School... One master, known as 'Eggy' because of his bald head, was the plimsoll-wielder. What really hurt was the fact that some of the girls, who were immune from such punishments, would find it all very amusing.

feetlebaum I didn't find it at all amusing. I felt extremely upset and uncomfortable. Some children (and some adults) giggle when they feel acute discomfort so I'd like to think that was what was happening in your class but perhaps I'm being too generous.

In Scotland it was a leather strap on the hand- I have never forgotten that. At home it was the same on my rear.

Having a bath and wondering whether to stay in the almost cold water for a bit longer or get out and experience the "heater" attached somehow to the light which was next to useless. I hated having a bath in winter for that reason.

Having a scratchy bri nylon carpet in the bathroom-it was cheap because a cousin worked in the factory so my parents bought it at cost price. I tried not to walk on it in bare feet.

Funny thing is, none of these things, except the sanitary towels and being hit (or threatened with it if your work wasn't good enough), seemed bad at the time. Children just accept things when they've never known anything else.

I didn't mind nylon sheets at all. (would hate them now ) I still use my, inherited-from-m-i-l, wood concertina clothes airer in the really bad weather in the Winter.

I positively crave the smell of a new gas mantle. And the ice on the inside windows made lovely patterns.

Funnily enough, I felt no sympathy at all when the boys got caned. Just a sort of fascination, and wondering how much it really hurt.

There would be serious repercussions if the teacher threw the blackboard rubber at a pupil, a common occurrence at my schools. Don't suppose blackboard rubbers even exist anymore.

Getting the ruler and having the blck board rubber thrown at you seemed to be the punishments used for extreme behaviour.

Blackboards were a dying breed when I taught, replaced by white boards on easels. Now it is all computer driven smart boards.

We had a maths teacher (male) who regularly threw chalk at anyone deemed to be 'not paying attention'!

(I know that sounds rather feeble compared to others' experiences, but this was an all-girls school and corporal punishment wasn't allowed)

Having to strip off naked for communal showers after PE, at secondary school. The one good thing about periods was that they provided a get-out, though PE itself was bad enough tight fitting shorts and bulky STs that might leak at any moment.

Glad to be rid of my liberty bodice and suspender belt, I find it hard to imagine that some men find them sexy.

I'd forgotten the humiliation of the communal shower. I was brought up in a family that kept their bodies covered (I was 15 before I realised that people usually took their clothes off to have sex ) so being naked with others was horrific. Then there was the water. Nine times out of ten it was freezing. We never had soap in the shower so I still can't see the point of it. We didn't come out any cleaner than when we went in, just colder.

Communal showers were a really bad idea.

I was really scared of them age 11 but by the time I was 14 me and my group of friends used to sprint back to the gym block after games, put our legs and arms in the shower, wet our hair and pretend to be drying ourselves by the time the Games Mistress arrived.

We had to say X if we had the time of the month when the register was called.

Oh, I hated those showers! I'd forgotten until now the embarrassment of being tall, skinny and flat chested when all the others were developing curves! Our gym mistress had an old ballet shoe (complete with wooden toe piece) and she would whack bare bums as they passed, seemingly at random. It hurt.

Do they still have communal showers? I caught a programme the other night about the Chinese way of teaching and was shocked at the way the kids are now in class. Bags on desks, texting, drinking and even eating a burger! is this normal? I'd quite like to visit a modern class room to see the changes.

Thankfully I was spared the communal shower experience - I wonder if this was because I went to convent schools and the naked body was considered shameful?

BlackeyedSusan's mention of the blackboard duster brought back one memory, not really on topic, but it was amusing. The nuns would ask one of the pupils to clean the blackboard for them at various points during the lesson. The teacher's desk was on a raised platform, and the blackboard was on the wall at the back of this platform. While the chosen girl was cleaning, the nun would invariable step down off the platform and address the class. One particularly daring girl quietly turned from the blackboard cleaning and crept up behind the nun and, holding the blackboard eraser over her veiled head, she gently tapped it so that all the chalk dust showered over the nun's habit. The nun was blissfully unaware. How the rest of us managed to keep straight faces I shall never know, especially when the nun thanked the girl (for cleaning the board of course )

Apologies for the diversion. As you were....

Oh yes - nuns at school. They terrified me when I was little. I thought they were witches.

And chilblains - I had forgotten them - how grim they were. I wonder why they are not so prevalent now - central heating maybe?

I can remember the leather strap at school as well. I remember getting it because I was not in my seat but happened to be standing on the floor talking to another girl when the teacher returned to the classroom after going out for a few minutes.
I started school on the same day as a boy.After our mothers had left us the boy started to cry and tried to follow his mother and the headteacher slapped him across his legs.I must have looked like doing the same because she turned to me and said ''You start to cry and I will smack you as well''.Imagine that happening today.
My brother had a teacher who was a priest and he used a metre stick to hit disobedient boys.

At Junior High we had a teacher who would stand behind a boy's chair. Tell him to stand. Then tell him to sit and as the boy sat down he would pull the chair away from under him.

The boy always ended up hurting his back. Sheer brutality.

My school, 1940s - 50s, didn't have the luxury of showers and, having read some of your accounts of these, I'm very glad we didn't. I don't recall that we were specially malodorous.

I was once caned, aged about 9, because the teacher spotted that I had a tiny little doll, about 3" high, sitting on the front of my desk. Granted it shouldn `t have been there, but the cane? The same teacher caught a boy passing a note, brought him out to the front of the class to cane him, stood him in front of the blackboard, one of those that revolved on a frame, raised the cane up, brought it down, but caught the blackboard and it came down and hit poor Gordon on the head. He cried, she comforted him..........then caned him a few minutes later!

I think teaching was one of the few options open to women. An awful lot went into teaching who really didn't like children. I have a friend who really must have disliked children although she became a headmistress of a junior school. She insisted her DH had a vasectomy. The head at our infants(we went to the same one) used to throw board rubbers and beat the boys. He was ex army and was a truly vile man. You would have thought she would have wanted to make a difference.