Ridgmont School (Part 2)
At school, I resigned myself to a life of forced servitude, and I settled into the daily routine of learning reading, writing and arithmetic. I only have clear memories of specific things that made an impact or broke the monotony of my desk-bound confinement.
The school was built in 1878, and the original toilets were still in use in the 1950s. A water tower was built to serve Ridgmont in 1913, but the plumbing didn’t extend to the school toilets. The boys’ lavatory comprised of a long trough urinal, at right angles to a long-closed wooden bench. The bench had five bottom sized holes spaced along its length with buckets beneath that were hooked out and occasionally emptied by municipal workers. With no partitions for privacy, the place resembled an ancient Roman communal latrine. With shiny-hard Izal disinfectant toilet paper, the heavy aroma of Jeyes Fluid and other fragrances it was not a place to linger.
In contrast, opposite the school, on the Eversholt Road, was a pretty whitewashed thatched cottage with two homes. The front of each household was a mirror image of the other in perfect symmetry with identical windows and doors. At each end of the cottage, there was a low entrance door. Between the doors, each home had a small window of square lead-glass panes above which was a little arched bedroom window cut back into the thatched roof. The thatch came down to just above the level of the tops of the front doors. From the centre of the high sharply sloping roof there protruded a single brick chimney with two terracotta chimney pots. The strip of the front garden was only a few feet wide and enclosed by a low picket fence with two thick white posted gateways for each home. It was a wonder how the straw roof had survived so many Guy Fawkes Nights.
Once a year, on a suitably warm sunny day, we were released with small rigid boards, pencils and paper. Supervised by a teacher, we sat on the grass on the school side of the road and drew this picturesque cottage. After an hour of enthusiastic sketching, an old lady would come out of the cottage to inspect our work and award the most promising Canaletto, a shiny silver sixpence. My dad often returned from jumble sales with boxes of books, in one box I’d found a book with the fundamentals of perspective drawing. In 1958, I may not have been good at reading, but I understood the pictures in that book, and I put the principles to the test in my sketch. That year I won the sixpence, which was enough to buy a 1/2 pound bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate. And so I learned the value of art and books.
Other times on spring days, we went out for nature walks. It’s funny, but rainy days don’t seem to take up much of my childhood memory. We always took the same route along Eversholt Road into the lane leading to the roofless church in the abandoned Anglo Saxon settlement of Segenhoe. Standing in the ancient ruins, I imagined myself a Saxon noble confronted by mounted Norman knights in helmets and chain-mail come to announce the change of ownership of the country. In time I’d learn my ancestors, from the House of Ormand, were with those Norman invaders. Still, for the time being, I was content to be a Saxon ready to fight the oppressors.
Someone said a secret tunnel connected Segenhoe church to the Round-House at Brogborough, through which King Charles escaped the Roundheads during the Civil War. With no record of the event and the implausibility of a three-mile tunnel of such positional accuracy, we searched for a floor slab or grave that concealed this elusive passage. Proof, fake-news and conspiracy theories are not just phenomena of the Facebook generation.
Springtime was enchanting with woods full of bluebells and meadows carpeted with yellow celandines, cowslips and small white daisies. Bumblebees and butterflies busily pollinated wildflowers and hedgerow blossoms. Ponds abounded with newts, frogs, tadpoles, and dragonflies. And the blue sky was full of migrant birds, swallows and martins, returning from wintering in southern Europe and Africa. So many things seen for the first time.
The height of school technology was a Bush valve radio that transmitted educational programs from the BBC Home Service. ‘Music and Movement’ was one such program where a woman’s insipidly soft voice spoke to us as if we were introverted mice. She encouraged us to prance around looking for imaginary objects, pretending to be bears waking from hibernation or trees blowing in the wind, all accompanied with suitable sound effects. But, what I enjoyed best were the broadcasts on Greek mythology: Theseus killing the half-man half-bull Minotaur with the sword of Aegeus in the labyrinth. The adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. Daedalus and Icarus flying on homemade wings into the sun. This was what school was all about, stuff you could put to good practical use.
In late 1957 things began to change. Men arrived with long tape measures and peered at poles through small telescopes on tall tripods. The old toilets were demolished, and wooden stakes knocked into the ground.
By the start of 1959, we had two brand new bright classrooms with large windows. There was a wide corridor with pegs to hang our coats. These pegs were in rows of different colours red, blue, yellow and green, now we were divided into ‘houses’ and life became competitive. Suddenly we had proper flushed toilets and washbasins with running water.
Soon another change occurred that would have a fundamental impact on my life. The sympathetic headmistress, Miss Boswell, retired and was replaced by a new headmaster, another ‘B’. Mr Briggs looked like a stern man who was not to be messed with. However, first impressions can be deceptive. Not to be messed with for sure, but Mr Briggs was a man dedicated to the enlightenment of children. He introduced a revolutionary new subject into our lives, and for me, life would never be the same again.
I still remember with awe my first science lesson in the new classroom. To me, science meant Dan Dare, Flash Gordon, spaceships and ray-guns and I made sure I was at the front of the class.
However, the lesson didn’t unfold that way. Mr Briggs wrote ‘The Earth’s Atmosphere’ on the blackboard. He then took an empty one-gallon oil can and poured into it a cup of water. He pumped up and lit paraffin primus-stove and put the can on it. Before long steam emerged from the can.
He took the can off the primus and screwed its cap on tight trapping the steam inside. He turned off the primus put the can to one side without referring to it again and carried on with the lesson.
He told us the atmosphere was like an ocean in which we were submerged. It pressed down on us, like water in a swimming pool, with a pressure of 14 pounds on every square inch of our body. Distracted, I kept looking at the can wondering what it was there for. Mr Briggs told us the atmosphere was 20 % Oxygen and 79 % Nitrogen, and the other 1% was all the other gases, but mainly Argon. None of this meant anything to me at the time. As he continued talking, there was a strange creaking sound, and the can began to distort. The class looked towards the sound. Suddenly everyone jumped in fright, there was a loud bang and the can imploded on itself and fell over on the desk, crushed by some invisible hand. Mr Briggs explained that the steam had cooled and condensed, creating a partial vacuum in the can. As the vacuum increased, 14 pounds per square inch of atmospheric pressure squeezed the thin walls of the empty container and crushed it like a man would an empty cigarette packet. I wondered why the atmosphere didn’t crush me, then I realised that as the can at the start I was also full of air. To some, it might have seemed like a clever party trick. To me, it was a revelation.