Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 113

I attended Tranmere Higher Grade School, Lancashire. It was a fee-paying school and the quarterly bills were sent to my father. I started as a small boy in the Infants and we used slates and pencils, which were marvellous because you could easily cheat. You just had to lick your answer out and copy what the person next to you had written. We had reading, writing and arithmetic. Spelling was a matter of repetition. I remember getting out early one day at the age of six because I was the only one who could spell the word ‘yacht’. We were reading very fluently between six and seven. We sang our times tables. We had geography lessons, which were taught by rote at first. At seven, I remember reciting the rivers of England: ‘Tyne, Wear, Tees …’ all the way round. I didn't know where all these rivers were, but I knew the names and I could look them up on a map. As we moved on, we did geometry and algebra, and at the age of eleven we started Latin. It was a very wide syllabus and very well taught. The discipline was excellent. The boys played cricket and football and the girls played rounders. After that school, I went to the Liverpool Institute.

My brother and I used to take the half past eight Rock Ferry boat to Liverpool. It took twenty minutes. We would pass four or five big sailing ships – it was still the days of sail. We went across to the landing stage by the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and Mersey Docks Building. From there, we walked up Duke Street to the Institute.

The headmaster there was ruthless. When he arrived at the school, he came into our form room and set a history exam. During it, he spotted a history textbook under a desk, so he ordered us all into the school hall, where he stood us up on the platform and he sticked every one of us. ‘I'll purge you lot!’ he said. He was the only master who gave the stick. Usually, you went into his study and you were tapped down below to see that you didn't have an essay paper shoved down your trousers and then you received three strokes. Once, he spotted me running down the corridor and he sent me straight to his room and caned me. He wouldn't let me explain why I was running. The next day, he found out that I was running a message to a physics master, so he sent for me, apologised, and gave me two tickets for a Shakespeare play on the Saturday.