|
There were quite a few staff houses at QVS so we were a separate community, almost like a village. There were not only teachers but instructors in such things as music (there were both military and pipe bands) and physical training and others such as school secretary, night watchmen and boiler man, all of whom lived in the staff houses with their wives and families. The Colonel and the Captain, who was in the Education Corps and was Headmaster, lived in a separate corner of the grounds.
I seem to have gone out to play at QVS straight away. Certainly home was not so far away as when it was on the second floor in Stirling. Play was safe too in the grounds of the school. Although we had our special friends, at times all age groups and both sexes would join together for games of rounders or, after dark, games like hide and seek with the one light (which was on the wall of one of the houses) as "home" after dark. The boys would all join in games of football and similar boys' activities.
For our family an important person was Mrs
|
Kay who came once a week to do the weekly wash and the heavy cleaning. She really earned her money and on the day she came, which was usually Wednesday, we came home from school to a house that smelted of boiled washing. Through all our constant questioning she never lost her patience or stopped working. A very special person, her first husband was killed in the First World War and she had forfeited her War Widow's Pension when she remarried.
My mother was o school teacher before she married and I am sure that had she been born later in time when women can automatically continue in their careers, she would have been a great deal happier.
Now to school and education. As I said we walked the mile and a half to Dunblane for this. When first starting school our legs were too short to get all the way home and back in the hour allotted so we stayed to lunch. There was no such things as school dinners so we took sandwiches and the wherewithal to make a drink (either an oxo cube or a screw of
|
cocoa and sugar with a medicine bottle of milk if the latter).
Our schooling was strict and discipline was maintained with the aid of the strap or tawse which was used freely. The Scots have always put a high value on education and the
teachers were determined we should learn. Something which my grandchildren wouldn't recognise in our desks were the inkwells. We wrote with pens looking rather like thinner pencils with a nib which frequently needed changing. I would emphasise that these were not fountain pens as they were a luxury. Our pens had to be dipped into the inkwells and the inkwells had to be regularly refilled, a job usually given to the teacher's favourite (teacher's pet!). Mind you, we didn't start ink writing till we were about seven, until then we wrote on slates with a special slate "pencil" which sort of scratched the writing onto the slate.
The bane of teachers seem to have been the Inspectors who descended periodically and were liable to pounce on any pupil to answer
NEXT PAGE
|
