Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 128

We'd have a week's holiday at Easter time. Before the school closed for Easter, the shops in the vicinity used to throw these biscuits into the crowd of schoolchildren, and there was a scramble for them.

They used to roll eggs down the hill in Preston. They used to come up to the park and sit on the guns that were captured in the Crimea, on the gun emplacement, and you could go in to those shops – the little cottages adjoining the Park Hotel. One of those used to sell little red cakes, and the cost was only a halfpenny, and you also got a halfpenny bottle of mineral water. That was the thing done among schoolchildren.

I went half-time at twelve, when I went in a grocer's shop as an errand boy. Then I went into the mill, where I started at six in the morning. You finished at noon and had to go to school in the afternoon. After that, when I became full-time at thirteen, I went to Bank Top evening school, and there I took up continuation studies in arithmetic, book-keeping and accounts, and general correspondence. From there I went to St Barnabas Preparatory Technical College – I was about fourteen. I was there two years, and then I went to the Technical College for commercial classes. I sat for the various examinations – London Chamber of Commerce, Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Institutes – and I joined up. I got work in a solicitor's office for about twelve months, and then a mill office, John Thompson's. John Thompson was a well-bearded man. He used to come up every day in his carriage and pair, and from the office I could hear the harness rattling.