If I lay on my back I could see two things. One was a round window near the ceiling made of different-coloured glass which had patterns I could turn into dragons. The other was an old-fashioned framed picture of a mother talking to her children. My mother had taught me big letters before I started school, so I could read what was underneath the picture. It said:
WE MUSTN’T SING ON SUNDAYS
BECAUSE IT IS A SIN.
BUT WE MAY SING ON WICKED DAYS
TILL SUNDAY COMES AGAIN.
When we got up, Michael had to lace my clogs and tie the bow because I didn’t know how.
My first proper writing, January 1940 (© the author)
Miss James taught us for a year; then we went to Miss Bratt. We called her Polly because her voice sounded like a parrot. My mother said when children were in Miss Bratt’s class they got too noisy to live with because Miss Bratt was deaf and everyone had to shout, and they shouted at home; and so did I.
Miss Bratt’s room was not in the Infants part of the school. It was next to the hall, where we had Prayers, and it was horrible.
There were two windows, set between carved stone, high up, so we couldn’t see out; and it was dark, because the branches of the holly and yew trees in the vicarage garden pressed against the glass all the time and weren’t ever cut back.
Next to Miss Bratt’s high desk was an iron stove. It burned coke, which was kept in the playground without any covering and was always wet, and the smell made us cough.
In front of the stove there was a wire mesh fireguard with a brass rail round the top. If any of us got soaked with rain on the way to school we had to stand against the fireguard until our clothes stopped steaming before we could sit in our desks. The stove was so hot it made our legs blotchy red and white, and sometimes it made us cry, but Miss Bratt went on teaching because she didn’t hear us.
And Miss Bratt wouldn’t let any of us be excused during a lesson; so if we wet ourselves in class the boys had to stand at the fireguard to dry, and for the girls Miss Bratt took their knickers off and hung them on the brass rail. The smell of pee made us cough more.
One day, the smell was so bad I ran from the classroom, through the hall, out of the porch and up School Lane. Miss Bratt ran after me, shouting, ‘Richard! Richard!’, but I didn’t stop and ran all the way home.
My mother was cross and said she’d tell my father, and then I’d get what-for. But it was the end of the afternoon, so she didn’t take me back to school.
When my father came for his tea, my mother told him what I’d done, but he laughed when I said how Miss Bratt had chased me and called me Richard. I said I didn’t know why she’d called me that, because she knew it wasn’t my name. And my father laughed even more, and then he told me how my uncle Dick had done just the very same thing when he’d been in Miss Bratt’s class, and she’d run after him shouting at him to come back, and she hadn’t caught him, either.
My mother said my father must smack me, but he was laughing so much he gave me a hug and rubbed his whiskery chin against my cheek, and my mother went to wash the pots.
After Miss Bratt, we had Miss Fletcher. She was fierce, but her classroom was big and light, and she’d built a museum with rocks and fossils and sea shells and butterflies and beetles in a glass case. And on Friday afternoons she read real stories to us: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and she did all the voices differently. But the rest of the week it was Class Reading, and that was Milly-Molly-Mandy books, and we had to read them aloud in turn or all together. This was boring, except when we had gas mask lessons, where we wore our gas masks the whole time.
We put our gas masks on by dipping our chins into the rubber mask against the tin breathing part, which had woolly asbestos in to stop the gas, and then pulling the elastic straps over the back of our heads with our thumbs to hold the mask fast.
The eyepiece soon misted up so we couldn’t see properly, and if we breathed hard the rubber sides of the mask made rude noises, but Miss Fletcher didn’t say anything.
I liked Miss Fletcher, even though I got into trouble.
One day, when there was an air-raid warning, I lost my balaclava in the shelter and the teachers had to look for it after school.
The next morning, at the end of Prayers, Miss Fletcher called me out in front of everybody and told me what a nuisance I was. Then she lifted me up into the air with one hand by the back of my braces and spanked me. Because I was swinging in my braces it didn’t hurt much, and I didn’t cry, but it made me feel silly.
Afterwards, though, the same day, when we had Class Reading, Miss Fletcher gave me one of her very own books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all to myself. And I sat and read it with my fingers in my ears and breathed hard in my gas mask so I couldn’t hear that Milly-Molly-Mandy.
I could read big letters but not little ones. I was being carried out of the house through the porch and I saw the bricks of the house on the corner of the road opposite and the iron plate painted white with the black letters STEVENS STREET. Then I was put down on a bed in a van with grey windows and tucked round in a blanket and a man in a hat with a shiny peak sat by me and held my hand and I went back to sleep.
The van was moving when I woke up and through the window I could see four black lines across the sky and they were dancing up and down and I asked the man what they were and he said they were the wires between telegraph poles. I watched them and went to sleep again.
There was a sharp pain at the bottom of my back, the sharpest worst pain I’d ever had and I woke up.
I was lying on my side on a stretcher in the open air next to a glass door. A woman in a blue dress and a white apron had her arms round me and another woman was holding a big needle and bending over the pain and telling me it would be all right. Then she helped to put me flat and I was carried up steps and through the glass door and along a corridor and the two women were holding my hands and talking to me and I was crying though the pain had stopped then I went to sleep again.
When I woke up I was in a bed. Someone spoke next to me but I couldn’t move my head. I looked sideways and could just see one of the women sitting on a chair near the bed and I could smell smells I’d smelt before and I knew I was in Monsall.
I’d been in Monsall when I was two and had diphtheria which was one of my big words. Another was ‘fumigated’ because that was what was done to the house after I’d gone to Monsall.
(© the author)
I remembered the woman was a nurse and she told me she was going to look after me but I mustn’t move or try to sit up and she gave me something to drink out of a small white teapot and put the spout between my lips and I could swallow but I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I had a headache all over. I couldn’t move at all.
I went to sleep.
I kept waking and hurting and sleeping. The nurse fed me from the teapot in the day and in the night. Her voice and face and the colour of her hair kept changing but she never left me. I could see sky through a big window on the right and there was a small round window on the left in the door of the room. Sometimes a man in a white coat came and felt my neck and turned my head