My School Days
I have mixed memories of school, as I am sure do most people. One thing I have never managed to quite grasp is why some people insist that schooldays are the best years of your life. I can only assume that they have rather poor powers of recall or are trying to be ironic.
Having said that, of course, it all started fairly well for me. I remember infant school as being a place where there was plenty of time allotted for play, most of the learning was achieved using either play or fairly interesting methods and the teachers were all female, safe and reliable mother substitutes, guaranteed to reassure even the most nervous of children of which admittedly, I wasn't one.
One of my main memories from life up to the age of seven is school assembly. We all had to close our eyes, put our hands together and bow our heads during prayer. I was always being told off for not closing my eyes yet never gave an explanation when asked why.
The fact is, when the head teacher read the prayer of the day she used to stand right at the front of the stage. She also had a habit of rolling back and forth on the balls of her feet while she was doing this. I was convinced that one day she would roll so far that she would topple over and fall off. They could tell me off all they liked but I was damned if I was going to miss that when it happened. It never did and I was rather disappointed when it was time to move up a school as I was still certain that it was going to happen one day.
Next stop was junior school and as we had moved two miles down the road, which meant that we came under a different catchment area, my new school did not really know what to do with me. Erring on the side of caution, they decided to place me in stream 3 (of 4) and see how I did. Picking up the phone and asking my old school obviously did not occur to them.
Due to this piece of administrative genius, however, I ended up in the class of Miss Parslow who quickly became the...
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