Ridgmont School (Part 1).
In September 1954, I started school. It’s difficult after 65 years to form a complete picture of my primary education, which is now a series of discrete, fragmented but enduring memories with a lot of blank spaces. For example, I’ve travelled the road from Brogborough to Ridgmont so many times in my life, but I still have no recollection of the first journey. It’s one of many things that are ingrained in my psyche. I can even recall almost every detail of the way on that road. One thing is clear though, from the top of Ridgmont hill, on the way home to Brogborough that first afternoon, I would have seen the view west across open country almost as far as Northhampton. At that point, I would have realised the world was undoubtedly a bigger place than I’d imagined.
Being confined all day was tough. Fortunately, we had a few playtime breaks and some free time after lunch to let off steam. Genders were separated, the girls had an area at the back of the school closed off by a high wooden gate, the boy’s playground was at the front. With no genteel moderating influence, the boy’s playground was something of a battlefield.
The school day started with morning assembly, supervised by our three bespectacled spinster mistresses. Their brittle grey hair neatly pinned into buns on the back of their heads. Assembly started with the Lord’s Prayer and a hymn. I liked ‘All things bright and beautiful’ and ‘We plough the fields and Scatter’. However, my favourite hymn was ‘To be a Pilgrim’ by John Bunyan. It was stirring stuff starting with, ‘Oh He who would valiant be, let him come hither’. Bunyan, a local Elstow man, wrote the hymn and a book called, Pilgrims Progress. A 17th-century Puritan nonconformist, he was a Protestant who wanted to purge the Church of England of all Roman Catholic influence. He believed that the reformation had not gone far enough. He was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for 12 years because he, “perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service, and having held several unlawful meetings”. Protestant or not, with total disregard for the law, Bunyan was a man to be admired. He would have been puzzled that his hymn was the favourite of a young Irish Catholic boy.
Mind you, he wouldn’t have been as perplexed as my father. One day, after a BBC Radio school broadcast lesson on folk music, I came home singing the Irish rebel song, ‘The Minstrel Boy’.
“Who taught you that song?” he asked.
“They taught it to me at school, dad”.
During the war, my father was in the Irish Army, and at one time stationed at the Curragh Camp, County Kildare guarding IRA prisoners. He was overtly proud of his nation’s fight for independence against the British, the Easter Rising, the forming of the Free State and all that stuff, and yet he was a committed Anglophile. He told me that England was the greatest country in the world. He wasn’t happy about his son going around the streets of Brogborough singing like an Irish insurgent; typically Bipolar Irish.
However, all this pales in comparison to what the recent German prisoners of war must have thought hearing the hymn ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’ sung to the tune of their national anthem. ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
The temperaments of our teachers ranged from the gentle headmistress, Miss Boswell, to the occasionally moderate Miss Bolton down to the very severe Miss Busbee. This was a perfectly natural progression of demeanours as all new children started in Miss Busbee’s class. By the time they’d moved up the line they had been suitably battered into submission. I often wondered why our teachers had never married, well, not so much, Miss Busbee. It was only in later life that it occurred to me that they were young women at the start of the First World War. With over a million young men killed and many more seriously maimed, they had probably either lost or never found love.
After assembly I’d go to Miss Busbee’s classroom. There we recited our times-tables and the alphabet: two ones are two, two twos are four, two threes are six, and letter A says ah, letter b says buh, letter c says cuh etc, etc. We learnt these things like parrots. I’m not criticising the method, to this day I can happily get by without a calculator. I only wish someone had discovered I was dyslexic, it would have saved me a lot of pain.
Raise, Rays, Rase, Raze, Rehs, each sounds the same and their (or is it there?) meaning is clear in context, written or spoken. So why are they spelt differently? And as for that i before e except after c rule, it’s just not true! At least with maths, you know where you stand.
We had oak desks with hinged lids with messages cut into them, at great risk, by past inmates. On the far right-hand corner of each desk was a recessed black inkpot and a groove for a metal nibbed, wooden dip pen the size of a pencil. With these implements, we carried out the arduous business of scratching out words on ink splattered paper. Poking the metal nibbed pen into the back of the child in front was a sure way of gaining their attention.
I became very good at writing provided I had something to copy; otherwise my spelling made my pros quite unintelligible. In 1958, when I’d moved up to Miss Bolton’s class, I received the Award of Merit from the Children’s Newspaper in the National Handwriting Test.
The following year the school presented works for the Brook Bond painting competition. The subject was ‘Teatime’. Miss Bolton moved from desk to desk, encouraging the children’s depictions of teapots, cups and plates of sandwiches.
When she came to me, she enquired. “Bernard. What is that?”.
I’d painted a blackbird, a worm in beak over three open-mouthed chicks in a nest.
“It’s teatime miss” I replied in all sincerity.
“Dear me” she exclaimed and moved on to the next child.
When the results came out, I was awarded the First County Prize and went with my class and Miss Bolton to the Bedfordshire Show to collect my certificate. It sometimes pays to see the world through a child’s eyes.
Back to Miss Busbee. She kept a large bag of cut squares of materials, and when at a loose end – excuse the pun – of things for us to do, she would, under the guise of ‘Crafts’, distribute these patches to the class. We then had to pick the threads out of the cloth until each pupil created a pile of cotton waste. It was a cruel sort of weaving in reverse. Some might have found it meditational, to me it was mind-numbing which probably amounts to the same thing. Another tedium was making bloody pom-poms. This involved cutting two cardboard disks, putting them together and winding wool through the hole and back over the top while moving around the disc, over and over until you had a woollen doughnut. When finished, you cut around the doughnut’s circumference between the two cardboard disks, tied it off, removed the discs and fluffed it up, voilà, a pom-pom. No experience is wasted, in later life in electrical engineering, I was the only one in class who could hand-wind a toroidal transformer.
A more endearing memory of Ridgmont school was the time around Guy Fawkes Night.
As the 5th of November, approached, the Ridgmont Post Office started selling fireworks. With the omnipresent Health and Safety Executive of 21st Century England. It is now incongruous to think that a gang of five to eleven year olds could go into a shop and purchase objects filled with gunpowder and the matches to set them off. Even more unbelievable. The shop at Alec White’s petrol station, opposite the school, was stacked out with boxes of explosives from the Standard Fireworks Company, which were also for sale to children. Mind you, Mr White, having spent his war years in Bomber Command, must have considered a few fireworks inconsequential compared to the odd 1000 pound bomb or a 10-ton Grand-Slam.
Well, that’s enough about school for the time being. Having started, possibly more memories will return that I can share with you another day.