I’m afraid I can’t actually remember it. It must have been September 1959. I was just six. I should have been seven, but somewhere along the line I missed a year. I moved up from Marlborough Infants School, putting Mrs Brock and Mrs Edwards safely behind me. A lot of my friends came with me – there were forty of us in the class, ( do you want to know their names?) and I remember the cramped rows of desks, the high windows and the green tiles.

For the next four years we had the same teacher, Mrs Washington, but I have a strange feeling that she was not the original teacher when we arrived at the beginning of the school year. I don’t know how soon after that she arrived, but I do remember her surveying the classroom very precisely one day, and complaining to us? another teacher? that the floorboards were hard and unhygienic. Within weeks our classroom had linoleum. She was obviously a mover and a shaker and knew her way around the Inner London Education Authority’s finance department, because over the years she would tell us how she had managed to buy supplies for us for art and and sewing. And my goodness we did a lot of sewing over the four years.

I can actually remember her teaching us how to thread a needle. And do cross stitch on Binka. Skills very useful when I taught children with special needs forty years later, who found embroidery of this kind very calming.

This was my first effort. I remember that we had to pay a small sum in order to be able to take our work home.

But this is by the bye.

Mrs Washington came to teach us and teach us she did. I remember her as strict but very clear. She was always very well dressed in shirt waister dresses, of a weight suitable for the weather, and always wearing a hat and gloves outside. in 1960 she must have been about 54 or 55. She retired in 1965, a year after we left.

She taught us all subjects and it will not surprise you that I remember many of her lessons. We did a lot of spellings – which I found easy, and mental arithmetic, which wasn’t too bad.

She was good at helping us make connections. One of things was the rule of eight: how many half crowns in a pound? how many furlongs in a mile? how many pints in a gallon? how many ounces in half a pound? how many thruppences in two shillings? She would bark out these questions randomly during arithmetic tests, and somehow we learnt them. We would chant times tables ad infinitum – but I still know them now.

After the rule of eight came the rule of three – or men working sums. This may have been a year or two later, but they mingle in my mind. eg if it takes 6 men six weeks to build a wall then how long will it take three men? You set it out on three lines, thus!

6 men = 6 weeks

1 man = 6 x6 = 36 weeks

3men =36 divided by 6 ( I can’t find the symbol! ) = 6 weeks

We must have done some other stuff, but these two things have stuck in my mind for ever. and very useful too, if I may say so.

I don’t remember her listening to me read – I think it was understood that we could do that ourselves now. We went once a week to the school library, where I remember struggling with the Wind in the Willows and Pollyanna – my English wasn’t yet up to all those apostrophes, but I remember Alison Uttley and other picture books before I went on to Little Women etc. She would also order sets of books form the schools library service and we could ask for specific books if we wanted to.

Reading was easy – but handwriting was not. We used pencil at first and print and then came the big day when she announced that we would be learning the Marion Richardson type of handwriting.

And this is what I learnt. This example does not show you how the letters join, but they did. My problem was not the actual formation of the letters – I still rather like th x and z, though you hardly ever see them written that way any more, but the use of ink. We had double desks with lift up lids and a bench to keep us all sitting down. There were holes at the top of the desks for inkwells. Ink had to be poured into them very carefully by the ink monitors. Luckily I was too clumsy at the outset to have to try and manage this feat. The ink was bright blue. We were given wooden nib holders with scratchy nibs and taught how to use the dip pen. Pages of copying out. I still have mine somewhere.

Not easy to not smudge. Left handed children especially had a hard time because the inkwells were place to the top right hand side of each desk.

I found this sort of display writing hard enough. But I remember showing my mother once one of my best pieces (still with a blot on it ) and she told me that when she was at school, if she had produced a piece of work like that she would have been made to do it all again. I was a bit deflated, but glad my school was not as harsh.

I loved writing – but not handwriting. Eventually after a couple of years we were allowed to use fountain pens. Our first Parkers. I even had a tiny Conway Stewart Dinkie Pen.. But this was even before the days of a cartridge pen; you had to fill the pen using the lever at the side, from a bottle of blue black permanent Quink. I loved the smell of it. But I can’t say my writing particularly improved after that.

The most memorable time of the inkwell filling was when one of the children missed the pot and ink went flying everywhere – especially on Mrs Washington’s brand new summer dress – yellow and white stripes. She was livid. She shouted a lot. But I wonder who it was.

This is obviously more than my first day. or even my first year. But let me just tell you about Geography and Art.

All the general geography I know to this day is from Mrs Washington’s stories of her travels. She had travelled a lot, especially before the war, all over the world, but especially Africa. She seemed to have been quite an independent woman in her twenties and thirties ( many years later I discovered that she got married during the war – and unfortunately her husband never returned )and so she used her school holiday times well. She seemed to have an anecdote for almost every place I ahve been to over the last 40 years or so, and they have stood the test of time. It makes me laugh now to think that she told us about only drinking Schweppes tonic water when she travelled on the Nile. When we stayed in a hotel on the Nile they didn’t have any – and that was in the early 21st century!!

On Friday afternoons we would all go to the main hall to watch a film. That s probably the only time some of the teachers got a break. They all taught every subject. No, I lie, Mrs Washington refused to teach us RE. unusual at the time, but she would have nothing to do with religion. For that we had Miss Copping. And for music we had Mrs Ketts-Kemety. All I can remember of that is spitting te te into a recorder. I could never get my fingers round the holes!

But art was my favourite subject. Not because of the drawing or painting which I enjoyed, but wasn’t particularly good at, but because we were allowed to get on with our pictures while Mrs Washington read us stories. She read us the Greek Myths, retold by H Guerber, which most of us must have loved, as I remember her reading them several times over. When I left the school I made my mother buy me my own copy of the edition she read from. I still have it, in pride of place on my new bookshelf.

I could go on about the school and Mrs Washington and about my friends for ages, but those are subjects for the future. These four school years (1959 to 1964) were certainly the happiest of my educational life and provided a welcome escape from the vagaries of my home life at the time.

Let me know what you would like me to write about. I’ll try.