The Baby Boomer Generation (6 page)

Starting primary school was the first real milestone in our young lives. The occasion broke many hearts and brought about major changes to our daily lives. We were forced to completely alter our daily routine and we had to learn to get through each day without mum's help. It was a very stressful and confusing time for us; suddenly torn from our mother's apron strings and from the safe comfort she provided at home during the day. It was the start of growing up and there were so many things we would miss. We were waving goodbye to the wonderful taste of Farley's Rusk biscuits and the thick syrupy welfare orange juice we loved so much; these would soon be just a memory to us. Fortunately, as growing children, we would need to keep taking our daily spoonfuls of Virol malt extract, and most of us thought that was l-o-v-e-l-y. The bad news was that we had to continue with our daily dose of that awful-tasting cod liver oil. There were also some new unwelcome tasks that we would have to contend with at school, like the frequent inspections carried out by the school's ‘nit nurse', and the humiliation of regularly stripping to our underwear and standing in line to wait for our routine medical check-up, which was done by the school doctor. We had to quickly adjust to the discipline of school life because there were lots of rules to obey and these were strictly enforced. The teachers did adopt a gentle touch when dealing with the infants in their charge but there was no pampering or fussing over any of the sad-eyed new arrivals, not when the teacher had forty-plus infants to manage. Fidgeting and whispering were the teachers' main enemies in the classroom and you soon learnt to sit still, be quiet and pay attention. There was no sign of any cuddly toys or any hint of an afternoon snooze. Punishment for misbehaving in class soon progressed from being made to stand in the corner to a slap across the back of the legs with the flat edge of a ruler.

During the Monday class register call we would hand over our tightly protected 5-bob school dinner money to the teacher. The kids from poorer families stood out from the rest because they were never called up to pay their dinner money and it was obvious to the other children that they were getting free school meals. We had a school assembly each morning when we were told of any important things that were happening, like special church services, new rules we had to obey or things we were doing wrong. We would also say prayers for the starving children in Africa and the people suffering in Soviet-occupied eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland. At mid-morning on every school day we would each get a small (1/3 pint) bottle of free school milk to drink. The majority of us liked the free school milk but not in the freezing cold of winter when we were made to drink it even when the bottles felt like blocks of ice.

School uniforms were commonplace and again the rules were usually strict, even in infant school. The uniforms for primary school were designed to be unfussy and affordable, and mums found that by shopping around on the high street they could put most outfits together. Girls commonly wore a white blouse, grey gymslip or pinafore dress and a lightweight summer dress. White socks and the regulation navy blue knickers were always evident and girls never wore trousers to school. Boys would wear white or grey shirts and grey flannel trousers with long, grey woollen socks. Most schools had a school blazer, mainly for boys, and some schools made the children wear caps and bonnets as part of their uniform. It was normally mum's job to sew the school badge onto the breast pocket of the blazer and on the front of the school cap or bonnet, but sometimes a metal badge would be pinned to the front of a girl's bonnet instead. Everything to do with the frugal fifties was practical and sensible, so there was no room for fashionable footwear at school. We all wore heavy, black leather shoes or boots that were indestructible and designed to last a lifetime. When holes did start to appear in the leather soles, dad would apply a pair of Phillips' stick-on soles in the hope that the shoes would last another ten years, during which time one of the younger siblings might also get some use out of them. We had nothing like the designer trainers that have become essential everyday wear since the 1970s. Our only shoes of comfort were the black canvas plimsolls we all had, but these were not designed to take much in the way of kids' daily rough and tumble and so they were generally only used for school games or PE.

At infants' school we were taught to recite the alphabet and we were shown how to do some basic arithmetic using an abacus. We also learnt how to write short words with chalk on a small, hand-held blackboard. Our teachers read stories to us and we sang lots of nursery rhymes and did loads of drawings and paintings. We were taught how to make easy things using a few basic materials and we learned how to co-ordinate our movements through dance and games. We played loads of throwing and catching games with small beanbags, and we learnt how to kick a ball in a straight line. After spending a year or two in the infant school we moved up to primary school and began to mix with the big kids. By the age of 6, we were using pencils to write, rather than the early learning tools of blackboard and chalk, and within a very short time we were being taught how to write with pen and ink. However, we used a crude type of pen not much better than the old feather quill pen; it was made out of a short wooden stick with a metal nib fixed to one end. We each had an inkwell fitted into the top right-hand side of our desks (we were all expected to be right-handed) and we would dip the nib into the inkwell to load it with enough ink to write a couple of words at a time. The nibs were not at all reliable in controlling the flow of ink and the pages in our exercise books would get covered in splodges of ink, as would our hands. It was very messy and a difficult task to master. Some kids never managed to get the hang of it, always getting more ink on themselves than on the page.

The post-war baby boom meant that there were a lot more families with young children in the 1950s, and families tended to be larger in number than they are today. Accordingly, schools had to accommodate lots of pupils, especially in urban areas, and so it was normal to have a large number of pupils in each classroom (often more than forty to a class and just one class teacher to teach them; there was no such job as classroom assistant in those days). We did loads of creative things like drawing, painting and model making, and we practiced singing a lot. The classrooms usually had large loudspeakers installed high up near the ceiling so that we could listen to some of the ‘Schools Radio' programmes that were broadcast back then. These included a weekly programme of sing-along songs, mostly sea shanties and the like, and we would all sing along to these using special ‘Schools Radio' music books that contained all the words of the songs. The radio control switch was usually housed in a cabinet somewhere outside of the classroom in the central part of the school and we were regularly made to jump when it was switched on by mistake, blasting a sudden burst of loud noise into the otherwise quiet classroom.

The amount of exercise we got was not limited to what we did at playtime in the playground; we also did lots of PE, sport, swimming and cross-country runs, usually having to walk long distances to the school playing fields and the council-run swimming baths. We certainly did lots of non-academic things at primary school but we were left in no doubt that school was a place for learning. While we were taught the basics in science and nature, the main emphasis was on teaching ‘the three Rs': a long-established term used to describe the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Our primary school education was always geared towards the ultimate life-changing test we would take in our final year at primary school: the 11-plus examination. The exam was in three parts: Arithmetic and Problem Solving, General English (including comprehension and an essay) and General Knowledge. As the name suggests, we did our 11-plus examinations when we were 11 years old. The results were used to determine which type of secondary school we were most suited to. The idea was that different skills required different types of schooling and there were three possibilities: grammar school, a secondary modern school or a technical school. If you passed the 11-plus then you were expected to go to a grammar school to follow an academic education, which might lead to you going on to university. However, passing the 11-plus did not guarantee a place at grammar school because there was an application process and this included at least one admission interview with the head of the school you were applying to join. Being rejected by three different grammar schools often resulted in the applicant having to go to a secondary modern school instead. Pupils who failed the 11-plus usually ended up going to a secondary modern school with the prospects of leaving school at 15 with little or no qualifications, unless they went on to a further education college afterwards.

As with everything about the 1950s, it is often the simple things that we remember most about our primary school years: the taste of aniseed balls and malted milk tablets we used to buy from the school tuck shop during mid-morning break; the enjoyment we got from swapping stamps, cigarette cards and coloured beads we used to keep in old tobacco tins; the fun we had modelling things with plasticine and papier-mâché; the awful cross-country runs we did in the rain and mud; the dreadful experience of using those brick-built lavatories in the playground. There are a thousand and one everyday things we remember about our 1950s schooldays, like the embarrassment of country dance lessons, motherly dinner ladies, paper-chains and party games, wooden pencil cases and leather satchels, conkers and marbles, and we can all remember shivering by the edge of the pool at the local baths while learning to swim. We can still picture the scene of young girls playing two-balls up the wall while singing skipping rhymes – ‘salt-mustard-vinegar-pepper… '. We remember the disappointment of being cast in the role of ‘second hump of a camel' in the Christmas Nativity play. Then there were all of the hopeful ambitions we never did achieve at primary school, like being made pencil monitor with extra responsibility for handing out the paintbrushes, and hoping we might get to play the tambourine rather than the triangle at the next rehearsal for the school orchestra. This small assortment of memories represents a tiny part of our overall primary schooling experience. We all had bad days that we would rather forget, but most of us tend to look back fondly on our early school years. Even those who disliked being at school will remember the contentment we felt in the shelter and safety of our classrooms on cold wet afternoons when our class teacher read short stories to us. The teacher would dramatise the action by using a different tone of voice for each character, just like a play on the radio. We were totally mesmerised by it and nothing could distract us from the plot. Perhaps they were the best days of our lives.

Whether we loved or loathed our time at school, we were always glad to get home when each school day ended, even if only to play outside with our friends. Home life was idyllic, quiet and unpretentious compared to the average family lives of today. As with our schooldays, the memories we retain from our childhood family life of the 1950s are frequently quite simple ones: the wonderful smells of mum's roast dinners and freshly baked cakes; the cosy nights we spent by the fireside listening to the wireless as dad snoozed in his favourite armchair and mum rolled a fresh ball of knitting wool from a skein stretched between a child's tiny arms; afternoon tea at auntie's, patiently watching the clock as mum caught up on all the latest gossip; Sundays spent at granny's, with talk of drawing rooms and parlours and aspidistra plants; an ashtray in every room and ticking clocks all over the house; rooms filled with brown wooden furniture and comfy armchairs stacked with lots of cushions, all engulfed in a heady mix of musty smells sweetened with furniture polish. Homes were so very different then; there were no flick-of-a-switch sources of entertainment except for the radio, but some of us had the added luxury of a wind-up gramophone and an upright piano; this, however, was the full extent of our home entertainment equipment and there were no fancy electronic gadgets to amuse us. People spent a lot of their leisure time at home reading, listening to the wireless or pursuing one of the popular hobbies of the day. Adult hobbies usually involved practical things to do with the home. The skills of needlework, knitting, darning, cooking and baking were handed down through generations of women and every mum seemed to be an expert and eager to show their daughters how to do it. Men were the gardeners and the fixers – anything that involved an engine or a hammer. As for us kids, when we weren't playing hopscotch or annoying the neighbours with games of ‘Knock Down Ginger' and ‘Tin Tan Tommy', we would be plaiting our plastic
scoubidou strings or honing
our yo-yo and hula hoop skills. We rarely got bored. Even if we were stuck indoors we would find something interesting to occupy us; whether it was reading books and comics, sorting through our collections of stamps and beads, or constructing something from one of the Airfix or Meccano kits, we always found a way to pass the time. In the evenings, families would often do things together, and not just at Christmas. Board games like snakes and ladders, draughts, Monopoly, and Ludo were very popular forms of family entertainment, and we would play loads of different cards games, from Happy Families and Snap, to Cribbage and Pontoon. We kids liked listening to the wireless as much as our parents and we especially enjoyed radio shows such as
The Clitheroe Kid
,
Dick Barton
,
Educating Archie
,
The Goon Show
,
Paul Temple
and
Meet the Huggetts
. Many of us begged to stay up late so we could listen to the scary science fiction serial,
Journey into Space
: the stuff that kids' nightmares are made of.

While teenagers hung out in coffee bars, youth clubs and dancehalls, we children burned up our excess energy playing in the local streets and alleyways, and on any piece of open land available to us. Many of our towns and cities still bore the scars of the Blitz bombing raids that left over a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone. These bomb ruins and derelict buildings, together with all of the wasteland that was created through post-war slum clearance, became our natural playgrounds. We may have twisted a few ankles and got some bumps and bruises while playing amongst the hazardous rubble but we had some wonderful adventures, and the bomb sites provided the perfect place for us to build our bonfires each Guy Fawkes Night. We also came across an unexploded bomb or two and I suppose we should count ourselves lucky to have survived our childhood exploits.