Forty Years On - Plus!

I'm the one just to the right behind the teacher.

 How many of us, singing that song in school assemblies all those years ago, could imagine ourselves forty years hence, let alone meeting up with our old school mates? Yet thanks to the wonders of the Internet, many of us have done that. Of course, the occasional newspaper stories about childhood sweethearts meeting up at school reunions, in some cases resulting in disrupted lives, can be a worrying aspect.

            Understandable then, that it was with some apprehension and nervousness, that a few years ago, I committed myself to attending a reunion of the 1955-57 leaving years of Farnworth Grammar School, originally located near Bolton, Lancashire, now sadly demolished to make way for the ubiquitous housing association development.

            While at school, I did not make friends easily, partly as a result of moving around with my parents’ jobs – as anyone who has read this blog before knows, they were in domestic service – and partly due to my own reserved nature. Joining the 1950 intake of Farnworth Grammar School late in the first term, by which time tentative friendships had been formed, and particularly when many of them had known each other from earlier school days, did not help either. I suppose I was lucky really; I could so easily have been bullied but for some reason I was not. I was teased but in a good-natured sort of way, made worse by being given a nickname by, of all people, our form-master, who used to read out the register until he got to the name of Anne Williams, almost the last on the register, when he called out ‘Wiggy.’

            So the anxiety and concern were perhaps justified. I had been such a nonentity at school, always on the outskirts of what was going on, the last one to be picked for team games, the one who was useless at PE. Would it be the same, I couldn’t help wondering, when I met up with them again? Thankfully, I was somewhat reassured by a couple of emails and a telephone conversation with the organisers.

            As I no longer live in the area, attending meant staying overnight at the hotel where the reunion was to take place. This could be a problem if the occasion turned out to be a disaster but I consoled myself that I could always sneak away early if that turned out to be the case. Walking into the lounge where we were to meet for afternoon tea, I was hit by a horrible thought. What if no one remembered me?

            I needn’t have worried. With my question ‘Is this the Farnworth Grammar School Group?’ a small, still slender woman with a vaguely familiar face rose to greet me and ask me my name, ticking if off a list.

Rita, the person who’d arranged this reunion and whom I’d spoken to on the phone, came forward then and said immediately ‘Anne, you haven’t changed a bit.’ Oh, no? What about the grey hair, the face in which gravity had taken over, not to mention the saggy bits on what had once been a skinny frame? I soon discovered though, that beneath the physical exterior of everyone there, you could still make out the youthful features of former schoolmates, so presumably it was the same for me.

This was confirmed when another woman, slightly frail looking but with an eager smile on her face said ‘It’s Anne, isn’t it? Didn’t we used to call you ‘Wiggy’?’ Oh, that dreaded nickname but which at least gave me some kind of identity.

A man came and sat at the side of me, apologising that he didn’t remember me. I didn’t recall his face either, but together we examined our form photograph taken in Coronation Year, 1953. That was him? But I remembered him as being tall and with abundant sandy gold locks! ‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I stopped growing shortly after that’ he laughed, ‘and lost my hair’. It didn’t matter, what he lacked in height and hair, he made up for in humour. ‘Later’ he joked, ‘we all compare our ailments and what tablets we’re taking’.

            There were many such exclamations of wonder and amazement. Names were dropped, memories long forgotten re-surfaced, seemed as fresh as yesterday. There were shrieks of laughter over photographs produced and reminiscences of that teacher, this pupil, came to light.

            The mood continued over dinner that night when I found I was able to relax and really enjoy myself, even raising a laugh or two, something I’d never have been able to do all those years ago. But then, I’ve led a full and varied life and after a successful career, I’m no longer the shrinking violet I once was but well able to hold my own in company. Listening to the others talking, I couldn’t help reflecting on the many stories that made up our very differing lives.

            When it came to parting the next day after breakfast, everyone lingered, seemingly reluctant to say goodbye. There were many hugs and promises to keep in touch and meet up again next year. I left rather earlier than the others as I had further to travel than most of them, who still lived in and around the area, but as I did so, it with was the warm feeling of belonging in a way I’d never felt all those forty – plus – years ago.

            Sadly, I never did keep in touch. I wonder why?

Navy Blue Knickers, Gym Slips and School Dinners

Farnworth Grammar School

It’s been a while since I posted a memoir-based blog (apart from last month’s ‘Stranded in New York City’), the last one being ‘Four Schools in One Term’ so I thought it was about time I continued the story with my time at Farnworth Grammar School.

The school itself was situated on the main road between Bolton and Farnworth town centres. A large imposing red brick building, probably mid to late Victorian, it was set back slightly from the main road and bordered by rather grand iron railings. The space between was occupied by netball courts. I soon discovered that these particular courts were the bane of the girls’ lives, being the only ones immediately adjacent to the school. The reason we hated the front netball courts was because we had to play in skimpy pale blue tunics with splits up both sides, revealing navy blue knickers. To our chagrin, men and boys used to stand and watch us from the roadside, peering through the railings, obviously enthralled by the sight of unfettered pubescent bouncing breasts (not mine.) not to mention the occasional glimpse of navy blue as we jumped up to basket a ball.

              In January 1951, it was time to return to school, this time wearing the navy blue uniform of Farnworth Grammar School. Those were the days of the box-pleat gym slip, in this case worn with a green braided sash, white blouse and navy and green striped tie. The blazers were navy edged with green, while the hats were navy blue velour with a green band and the school badge. The hats were anathema to everyone as they came down over our eyes. The only way we could make them wearable was to place a tuck in the back.

              I used to behave decorously within a mile or two of the school in case of being seen by prefects. Like everyone else, once away from its confines, I threw caution and the hated hat to the wind, plucking it off my head and squeezing it into my satchel. One day this backfired on me because I was seen by a prefect who didn’t normally go by that route. I had to stay in a couple of nights to write out a few hundred lines, ‘I must wear my hat at all times, I must wear my hat …, I must …’ It didn’t stop me, or anyone else, I still continued to take my hat off whenever I could.

              The rules also stipulated that girls had to wear short white ankle socks, summer or winter, or thick black stockings, attached to a liberty bodice with rubber suspenders. Since we neither liked liberty bodices nor black stockings, very few of us would do that and consequently suffered badly from chapped legs and chilblains. The boys had to wear short trousers until they were about 14 or 15. Some of them looked absolutely ridiculous. I remember one dark-haired, dark-browed boy called Bill, who must have been shaving by the time he was 13, still being forced to wear short trousers.

              Discipline was strict at the school. There were the usual, ‘arms folded’ or ‘hands on heads’ routines and although we didn’t have to stand up and recite our times tables, we were expected to learn them by rote. For the girls, discipline was enforced by the Senior Mistress, Miss Westwood. She had iron grey hair, steel-rimmed spectacles and wore severe blouses and skirts beneath her academic robe. Every now and then, she would descend on a classroom when the bell rang at the end of a lesson, keep the girls behind and do a spot check of nails, teeth, hair, etc. If we ever gave a hint that we were in a hurry, she would give us a lecture about being ladylike. She did not approve of us showing our legs above those neat white socks and, I believe, would have enforced the rule about black stockings if she could.

That's me, second row third girl from the right

              Being a Victorian building, the school was based on a large assembly hall, with classrooms around the outside on two levels, and some portable classrooms. I was a thin sickly child, always catching cold. One of the worst things was the constant changing of classrooms, particularly from the main building to the annexes especially during the winter. Invariably when we got to the next classroom, one of the masters or mistresses would have opened the windows ‘to get air into our lungs and stimulate our brains’ and the room would be icy cold. One of my most lingering memories throughout my school days was of being cold. That, and milk so cold in winter, it had shards of ice in it, so warm in summer that it had gone off.

              The school worked on the system of having a form master or mistress but with other teachers for different subjects. They all wore academic robes too. Some of them were real characters. One, Mr Taylor, who took us for English one year, was tall, beetle-browed, heavy set, deeply spoken, in all a bit of a mystery figure, whom we called Brutus. Miss Heather taught us history. Everyone liked her including, on one occasion, the window cleaner. Once, as we were all piling into the classroom for a lesson with her, she was already there, half-sitting, half-leaning on the desk. As the window cleaner set his ladder against the window and saw her, he let out a piercing wolf whistle which we all heard. She went a startling shade of red.

              Friendships were still a problem. Boys simply ignored me but the girls had formed themselves into groups. It wasn’t that they were deliberately cruel or set out to tease me, it was just that I was, as they say in Lancashire, ‘a bit slow on the uptake.’ Their quick wit and smart replies confounded me.

              Farnworth Grammar School broadened my education in more ways than one. Being very unworldly, never having had any close friends, I knew almost nothing about life. Mum had, almost hesitatingly, told me about menstruation, because she hadn’t wanted me to find out the hard way as she’d done. She was nearly 17 before she’d had her first period and thought she had injured herself in some way. The girls at school talked about all sorts of things besides periods. Rather than risk their ridicule of my ignorance, I kept my mouth shut and gradually, by listening, I was able to piece together nuggets of information, the rest I filled in by guesswork. It’s a wonder I haven’t ended up with all sorts of hang-ups because, listening to their stories, I was horrified. I remember thinking, with some embarrassment, that my parents couldn’t possibly do things like that, not any more, for surely they were too old.

              Academically, I was with children much brighter than myself who were not given so much to day-dreaming. My school report shows that I started off willingly enough, averaging about mid-way through a class of 30 (except maths where I was always in the bottom three). After 1952, it takes a definite downward slide from which I only occasionally arose. Part of the reason for this was because during my second year, I became very ill with pneumonia brought on by the very damp conditions of the house in Farnworth and I was off school for weeks.

              I can’t recall much about actually being ill, apart from the fact that my bed was brought downstairs, in order for me to be kept warm. I remember staring at the fire for hours, comforted by the dull glow from it being banked up at night. I suppose I must have read books by the score and listened to the radio but it is the fire and the persistent cough that seemed to dominate that time. A major piece of history occurred while I was ill. I was lying in bed in the kitchen-cum-sitting room, listening to the radio, when the broadcast was interrupted by the news that King George VI had died that morning. With little better to do, I followed the royal events as they unfolded, feeling very much a part of it.

              Along with the young queen, my own life was about to change dramatically. Mum and Dad had had their name down for a council place in Horwich, where I’d been born, for some time. Now, because I had been so ill, they stepped up the pressure, with visits to the Housing Office and pleading letters. Sometime after my illness, word came through that we’d been allocated a two-bedroomed flat in Horwich. Our very own home! It meant that Dad could still carry on with his bus driving, while Mum would try and get a job in Horwich, perhaps back in the mill where she’d once worked as a towel weaver. I was to continue at Farnworth Grammar School, even though it meant a two-bus ride from Farnworth to Bolton then on to Horwich. And that’s what I did for the next two years, in all kinds of weather, all the time wearing those silly ankle socks. I don’t remember schools ever closing because of snow in those days.

              The worst thing about travelling to and from Horwich every day was that I had to go back to school dinners. How I hated them. Thick lumpy gravy which congealed on your plate, mashed potatoes that still had hard lumps in, vegetables boiled so much all the goodness had gone out of them, nameless blobs, more fat and gristle than meat that you didn’t know about till you got them in your mouth, then you didn’t know what to do with them, followed by thick, lumpy and invariably burnt custard or, worse still, milk puddings. The mere thought of them makes me feel sick and they’re all the things I can’t eat even now. As soon as I could persuade Mum, I started taking a packed lunch. This meant that I had to sit apart from the others taking school dinners, isolating me even further. I didn’t care. Anything was better than the nameless horrors being presented under the guise of school dinners!

More Memories of a Birmingham childhood

That's me in the middle, my cousin George on the left, my cousin Richard on the right

Birmingham was a time I became more aware of relatives. With moving away from the Bolton areas where most of our relations lived, I’d missed out on much of the extended family where everyone got together for birthdays, Christmas, New Year, weddings and funerals, keeping up with each other’s doings. In those days, families tended to live close together, often in the same street, with aunts, uncles and cousins maybe in the next street. There was the disadvantage, of course, of not being able to do anything without the family knowing.

This lack of extended family was exacerbated by my having no grandparents or siblings (at least then.). Both grandfathers were killed within a month of each other during the Gallipoli Campaign. My maternal grandmother died in 1924; my paternal grandmother died in 1936, just before my parents met. I’ve always been saddened by the fact that I never knew my grandparents.

The rare visits of certain of our relatives are captured forever on film, tiny black and white pictures, now too fragile to scan. Our most frequent visitors were Auntie Mary, Uncle Syl and their family. Auntie Mary was Mum’s oldest sister by some five years and although they looked alike, particularly as both got older, that was the only resemblance. Mum was the live wire, the go-getter of the family while Auntie Mary was the home-maker, who’d married young and settled in the same place all her life with her family. She and Mum were very close. Certainly throughout my growing-up years, she was the one relation we saw the most of.

 

Then there was my cousin George, her son, a couple of years older than me, who terrorised my life with his teasing. He had a broad, flattened thumb, deformed as a result of an argument with a clothes mangle when he was little and he delighted in pushing it under my nose. 

Although there are no photographs to record it, one incident with cousin Sylvia, George’s older sister, sticks sharply in my mind. She came to Birmingham when she must have been in her late teens. Her visit coincided, as it may well have been designed to, with a large garden party which Mr Barclay was holding to celebrate the purchase of the new garden. It was such a large event with so many guests that Mum and Dad couldn’t cope on their own and extra staff had been hired to help.

One of them, an old soldier by the look of him, with bleary eyes and a bulbous nose, had been hired to organise the parking of the cars. Unfortunately, one of the hired waiters kept giving him glasses of the beer provided for the staff. The poor man became so drunk that every time he endeavoured to carry out his less than arduous duties, he fell over. He did this so many times that his nose was raw and bleeding from its contact with the drive and bits of gravel were embedded into it. In the end, he had be packed off home and someone else had to take over his duties.
 

 My cousin Sylvia was young, petite and pretty with startling blue Irish eyes, blonde hair and a flirtatious laugh (which she retained all her life). It was no wonder that she attracted the attention of one of the younger waiters. He plied Sylvia, who was helping out with the washing-up, with the remains of the champagne provided for the guests, liberally helping himself too. Some innate caution must have stopped Sylvia from having too much, though she was still tiddly but Roy, the waiter, was hopelessly and helplessly drunk. Eventually, he disappeared but everyone, including Sylvia, was too busy to bother about him just then. Even I helped, collecting glasses and taking them to where others were washing up. As the party was finishing and the clearing-up beginning, one of the older waiters came to the kitchen. ‘Ron, I’ve found Roy but I think you’d better come and take a look,’ he said. Being small, no one took any notice of me as I tagged on behind Mum, Dad, Sylvia and the older waiter. The sight greeting our eyes was not pleasant, nor easily forgotten. Roy had visited the toilet and obviously become ill while sitting there. Somehow, he had smeared his own faeces over the walls, the floor and the bowl itself. He was slouched, having passed out, against the wall and the floor. Somehow he’d managed to get his trousers up but they too were badly soiled as were his hands.

Mum, gagging at the sight and the smell, turned away. ‘I don’t care how you do it but get that lot cleaned up,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not going to do it and neither is Ron.’ Catching sight of me for the first time, she grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me away. I’ve been wary of the power of champagne since then. You’d think I’d have learned from that incident but I didn’t; I was once very ill after getting drunk on cheap Spanish champagne cocktails.

 Mum’s other sister, Annie, came to visit us in Birmingham, too, with her husband, Eddy Robinson and their son, Richard, a good few years older than me. Aunty Annie had missed out on the Morris good looks for she was tall and ungainly, with soft frizzy permed hair and red cheeks. She and Mum were more alike in temperament and sometimes had rows when they wouldn’t speak for ages.

 With typical childish intolerance, I never took much notice of Uncle Eddy. He was tall, with a bristly moustache, always with a pipe close at hand. He was also deaf, which made communication difficult. My cousin Richard was too grown up to be bothered with little Anne. He seemed very superior. He wasn’t, of course, he had a bit of a stutter and this made him shy. 

We also had a couple of visits from Dad’s brother, my Uncle Mark and his family. They always seemed to have the kind of lifestyle that spoke of riches to us, especially as they owned their own house in Sale, Cheshire. Auntie Lenora, his wife, always seemed posh, a bit condescending in her manner. I was a bit afraid of her sharp tongue although I later learned to appreciate that her scolding often covered up a deep concern. They had two daughters, Patricia and Pamela, both younger than me. For some reason, both sets of parents thought Patricia and I should be friends, being closer in age. It never worked then and we’re not in touch any more to find out if it ever would.

 

 Relations were about to become more important for we were on the move again. Although we always seemed, in the nostalgic recesses of my mind, to eat well, severe rationing was still in force. Mr Barclay was in the habit of ringing up at the last minute, having invited someone round to dinner. ‘There’ll be four of us for grub tonight, Millie,’ he’d say and she’d be left to find something substantial for dinner out of what was often lean pickings. Occasionally, there were pheasants or grouse from a shoot or chickens and eggs from a farmer friend but more often than not, Mr Barclay and his friends would end up with our rations while we ‘made do’. In the end, the strain and constant worry began to tell on Mum and they decided to leave, much to Mr Barclay’s regret. In 1949, we were to move back to Bolton, Lancashire, where Dad had been brought up.