Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 133

We always set off in a gang. Farms in those days had more people and so more children on them, and there were no school buses, children walked. You were either in a happy gang or you were in a fighting gang – you know what children are, one day so-and-so was pals with them, the next day, not. It was a common sight in the nineteen hundreds to see the schoolchildren coming to school in gangs, some from Kimmerston, some from Hay Farm. And there would always be the odd one or two who didn't gang up.

You carried your bait – your bait was bread and dripping, bread and butter and a tin bottle full of tea. You gathered in the playground and had great fun until nine o'clock, when the schoolmaster blew a whistle and you ran into your classes. You cheated when it came to some öf the difficult sums, if you could. You peered over the shoulders of the ones in front of you or something like that. You knew the good scholars and tried to get the answers from them. If it was a wet day, you went to school and you sat there damp the whole day. At noon, you broke up for dinner and you took your tin bottle. There were always stoves at the school and you popped your tin bottle on top of the stove to warm the tea up again. If you didn't slacken the cork, when it reached a certain temperature it blew the cork up into the air, which the teachers didn't like very much because tea was splashed over the stove and created fumes.