Slated

Slated

The morning winter sun shone, watery, through the small panes of glass in the South - facing gable ended window, of the ancient classroom. I sat the furthest away from the window, hidden towards the back, in a dark corner, a sharp turn left as you came in the door, so that I was out of the first sight of any visitors to the room. Too my right was a row of shelves, painted the same dark red as the desks and almost as chipped. They were mostly empty of books; waiting for the future age of plenty, plenty of books, plenty of paper and the emergence of the plastic culture of plenty of everything including plenty of rubbish, famous as the effluent society. This was the time of real austerity where each pupil’s jotter had to be filled on each line and on each page. Complete with a signature from the form teacher to say that he was happy that it was full before you were allowed the nerve wracking trip along the echoing hallway of parquet flooring to the Head Teacher’s office for a new one. Miss Cates was always kind to the pupils but the mere fact of having to talk to another teacher – with an office, with a door that had to be knocked on - was enough to make us all nervous of getting the procedure correct.

I was sitting at a two-child desk with John Rogers. He was not really my best friend, Jack Lewry was that, but we had been separated for talking too much, Mr C Geen, our teacher,  had swapped me with Brian Hooper. Even back then I changed his name in my head to Mr Sea Green and thought of him as a sailor, even though he had been in the Army – the start of the strange brain thinking to come? He lived in the village in a bungalow with a name that always baffled me, Dulce Domum. It was many years later that I found out that it meant Sweet Home. Apparently he was something of a Latin scholar. The desk was all-of-one-piece. The framework was dark red painted angle iron with years of scratches from impatient shoes with steel ‘blakeys’ hammered in  toe and heel to make them last longer. The seat, for two, was a wooden bench. The top had two, sloping, wooden lids which we could, and did, slam down at the end of the class with many satisfying bangs in spite of Mr Green’s entreaties of ‘Pack up quietly please.’ Fingers were often caught in the bangs – revenge for imagined slights during the day. Our meagre stock of books was stored in the desk, under the noisy lids, ready for the next day. Homework was still in the future.

On the top of the desk, forward of the lids, were two ink wells that were topped up by the duty ink monitors from what looked like a small watering can. There were, of course, many ‘accidents’ during the day when ink would be mysteriously splattered across someone’s work or, even worse, a dress or shirt. We were each issued with a small square of blotting paper at the start of each school day. Between the ink wells were grooves in the wood where the pens were put down. As you may imagine, the wood in these grooves was soaked with the ink of years. The pens that lay in these grooves were wooden with steel nibs. They were only used for ‘best work’ as the nibs were in short supply and were constantly crossing over as the favourite trick was to press down too hard as we all tried hard to write with these devilish contraptions. When the tips crossed over, the pens would jam in the paper, tear a hole and leave a large blot as evidence. It took much persuading of the teacher to get a new nib as they were in short supply, many a nib was carefully bent back into almost working order. Most of us preferred the pencils we used in the jotters although there was always a queue to use the one sharpener for the class.

It was hard to write at all during this time of year as the classroom was always cold which made for stiff fingers. There was still coal rationing and the railways had priority over heating. When it was really cold, Mr Green used to get out the Valor paraffin heater and dispatch two of the biggest, strongest, boys to the hardware shop to fill the gallon tin can with Blue or Pink paraffin, paid for from his own pocket. The bonus with this was that we got an extra hot drink as a kettle was heated on top of the stove. We all looked forward to that hot cup of ‘billy tea’ mid morning when the kettle boiled.

      There were rumours of it for weeks but the day finally came. Sweets were off ration! All it took to make yourself very sick after eating too many sweets now was lots of money – and that was the parent’s problem wasn’t it? Now, instead of walking into a shop and asking, ‘What have you got for two stamps?’ you could march in and ask for what you wanted, the only limit was how much money you had managed to blag from your Mum, one penny or sometimes, even two.

      Today we were to have a session on  history. This turned out to be a discussion about the bad old days where your teacher told you how much better you had it than he did when he was at school.

      We sat there, half listening and almost believed it as Mr Green described the slates that each child had. It was about the size of today’s A4 with a wooden frame around it. You drew on it with a steel stylus but wo betide you if you pressed too hard because it would be difficult to rub out. All the writing and arithmetic was done on this. No paper was used except for the exams when paper, ink and pens were counted out and then counted back in. We knew what the desks were like because we were sitting on them. The school was the same. Most of the teachers were now ex Forces from the war but they would never tell us their stories.

      Mr Green then told us that the worst punishment that an unruly child could expect was to have their slate confiscated for a certain length of time. Without their slate they could  do nothing.  They were ‘slated.’