Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 21

Mother had what they called a breakdown. She was taken queer and they took her straight over to the asylum, and she was there till she died at the age of fifty-four. Well, Father had been just an ordinary fisherman. He'd been brought up in the workhouse and he'd come out at thirteen and was apprentice to a trawlerman at Yarmouth. Well, he had to leave the sea and he went as a labourer. I was eighteen months old. There was my sister four years older than me and my brother Reggie in between. Aunt Maria, she wanted to take the girl, and Annie wanted to take Reggie, but Father said no. ‘I'll bring them up all on my own,’ he said.

Any rate, I went to school when I was three and a half. We wore petticoats then and we were left in another room, and we all played together. It wasn't supervised by a teacher. Sometimes older girls looked after you. Sometimes my sister came down there for an hour and looked after us.

I went to St Mary's School when I was six. Our teacher was an old spinster – a proper martinet, but she had a heart of gold. In her desk there was always an apple or orange or something which she cut up in little bits for us. Then we went up to the big school at eleven. You had exams then, and you had to get so many before you could go up into the next class. If you didn't get that, you stopped down there. I know some boys that stopped in number one till they left school at fourteen. We had one teacher who could take everything – every subject the whole of the year. Within a fortnight he knew every boy, and within one month he had you all weighed up. Them what could get on with their work used to go up the back of the class. All what were backward he had down in front of him. Always forty, forty-five boys in one class.

We were harum-scarums. It didn't matter about clothes – there was no school uniform then. As long as your hands and face were clean, that was it. You could go to school and you'd see some boys with a pair of trousers on and you wouldn't know what was the original cloth, it was patched so much. The only thing he looked at was your face and your neck and your hands. If he caught you, you went out to the wash-house. It was cold water – and you washed yourself, too. If you didn't wash he'd send a couple of older boys to wash you.