for KM

This is the title of the composition that my teacher daughter has set me, and I have to admit that the very word composition takes me right back to my desk at school, exercise book in from of me, pen in hand, excited by the title I am about to be given. I used to love writing on random subjects and I suppose I still do.

But this one has me floundering. What do I write about? What do I remember? What am I imagining? It was all such a long time ago.

September 1958 I suppose. My fifth birthday was on the 10th of that month so on the first I would have still been a rising five, which was the official time for starting school. I would have been one of the oldest in the class, but that was not an issue at that age for me. What was an issue, though, was my lack of English language skills. I could speak a little, I am told, and knew how to ask to go to the toilet and how to say please and thankyou, but probably not much more. Maybe I could understand a bit, but I really have no idea. I had been to nursery school for several years, but it was a Polish language one. All the staff, nuns mainly, had to learn Polish, rather than the other way around.

This was Avonmore School, between West Kensington and High Street Kensington. I wrote about it fairly recently. A very modern low glassy building, with large square classrooms and milling children and smiley teachers.

My first teacher was Miss Henley. I do remember learning to pronounce her name. There were about ten of us in the class whose English was not their first language.(There were about forty children altogether) I made friends with a German boy called Peter, because I could at least understand what he said ( My grandmother and father often spoke German to each other at home, so I must have picked quite a lot up somehow. All gone now, I’m afraid.)

I remember all of us sitting on the floor and enunciating her name ever so carefully – M iss HHHH en lee.

And then it’s all a blur. We all learnt to read and write. The natives and the foreigners together. We had the Beacon Readers.

Supplemented by flash cards, and some writing exercises. They were phonics based and very repetitive and I remember enjoying getting my tongue round all the new and very different sounds. I particularly remember learning the TH sound which was VERY difficult. Miss Henley had us in a semicircle on the floor and made us manipulate our mouths and our tongues and our breathing in lots of different ways. Until we got it. And then the complication of the difference in th in the words thin and then. A sense of achievement which remains with me to THis day

And that was it. I was able to decode all the sounds in English as spoken at the time.(Pronunciation has changed radically for some words since).

By Christmas I had read all the readers and was ready to go on to proper books. (I know this because my parents must have told me at some point – they were very proud). By then I knew I liked reading and that I was going to be a teacher when I grew up.

We must have had spelling tests, too. I seem to remember learning whole lists at a time – but my proudest moment was being able to answer what is the name for an animal doctor and being able to say and spell veterinary surgeon.

Yet I cannot say I understood all the stories I read or the words I could spell. That level of undertanding came much later.

I remember that at the end of every school day we would have a time when we were supposed to sit quietly and listen to a story that was read to us. One of those was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. Totally incomprehensible. Probably very culturally inappropriate, set in Victorian London, all I recall is the word chimney sweep, not a concept I could entertain.

That’s the story as summarised by Goodreads. I’ve just read a little more about it and most people who read it or had it read to them at a young age were more or less traumatised by its bombastic and bigoted moralistic do-goodery. I wasn’t affected because I never understood it and haven’t read it since. It would, however, probably come under my list of not recommended books. I won’t say banned books, because I don’t think anything should be banned. But you might want to put it aside after a few pages!

Because I was bored most of the time, and tired at the end of the day, I would  start to chat in my newly acquired language, to whoever would listen.  Miss Henley  - or it might have been Mrs Wormald by then - the teachers changed after Christmas -didn't like that much, and found a brilliant way to stop me.  She would put my mouth out of earshot of the other children. My punishment was to stand on the table for the duration of the story time. 

Wonderful.  I could look out of the window and daydream, and notice the parents and grandparents as they arrived to collect their little ones.

One day - in fact it was to be my last day at this school - I noticed my maternal grandmother (the first and only time) in the playground, bearing an enormous box of Black Magic.  I couldn't wait for  the hometime bell.

I haven’t written about liberty bodices, PE, Aladdin, woodwork, spitting or the Hobbit or Stella Baverstock. Remind me.