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St. Barnabas School in wartime
Summary
Jenny (born 1935) remembers her first days at St. Barnabas School and "refugees" from London.
Transcript
I went to St. Barnabas, I cant remember when it was built but there was a little school, founded very early really, I think the curate started a school and then it moved down to premises they built but this little school was built up on the West Hill because there was an orphanage next to the Catholic church on Springfield Road. The children couldn’t be taken down to the big school, it was a long way down the hill in bad weather, so they put up this little school, it had just two classrooms, one for the infants and then a big classroom, which sometimes was juniors and seniors and sometimes just juniors. There was a big wooden partition across and a grand piano where the gap di not quite reach. So, you played the piano with a song or hymn for prayers in the morning and everyone could join in. So, I started, my very first day at school there was threading beads, well I had been brought up doing handicrafts. We didn’t have many toys, so we learned to do things, so I had threaded my beads in no time and had to be given something else to do. My brother was in the same class, but he was eighteen months younger than me, so he took me to school and looked after me for those first few days. Then we had to learn to read so we stood around the teachers desk, around six or eight of us …….and we used to have butchers skewers as pointers and we had books called beacon readers and we either read it together or take turns depending on how able we were and then we would have to read the same stuff again so I don’t know how reading was taught but it certainly wasn’t “Look and Say” unless you were bright and thee were pictures with it but there was nothing of that. We learned to count. Wet playtimes were interesting because we couldn’t go in the playground we had to be entertained in the classroom. In the infants there was a map of England and we used to play “Guess Where” and someone would say “A town beginning with B” and we would answer and so we learned which parts of the country where some of these places were. So, my general knowledge from an early age was beginning to be quite extensive. When we went into the juniors or seniors, they had a map of the world, so we played the same game but learned places in the world. We had refugees from London, who came from the bombing, who lived in Redcliffe Bay, so I don’t know how they got to school because they didn’t have buses then and they didn’t get delivered, whether they walked I don’t know. But they were very tough, and they used to get Government Provision jumpers that had collars on and these poor children had to wear these horrible jumpers and they were smelly, they didn’t get washed very often and I don’t think the children were very happy. They had funny haircuts and we found it very difficult to sit by them in school and to help them to play in our games so when we talk about friends I think we had a lot to learn and Grandma was “church” and taught us how to love and to give and to share and to care and I think those early feelings and experiences were very good for us.
