MUM'S WAR MEMORIES 6

PRIVATE SCHOOL

I think it was 1940 when Welholme Road school was closed. I had just gone into the Junior School. We thought it was great we didn't have to go to school, we could play in the streets and fields all day. Old Clee fields started at the end of Convamore Road in those days so we spent hours jumping ditches and generally tearing about and when we were tired we just sat down and chatted or in the summer made daisy chains.

I think looking back my mother had so much to do and worry about she just let me be and I lived on the street, only going in when I was hungry. There was no traffic of course, hardly anyone had a car and if they did have a car there was no petrol. The odd horse and cart came by and if the horse 'obliged' near our house I had to run out with a pan and brush to sweep it up for my grandfather's alllotment. He thought that horses and sheep provided the best manure you could get and he certainly grew good vegetables.

One of my favourite pastimes was to get up early and look for shrapnel (broken pieces of bombs and aeroplanes) that had dropped from the night's air raid. A piece with German writing on was worth a lot - I could swop it for two 'Film Fun' comics (popular comics of the time featuring film stars such as Laurel & Hardy and Old Mother Riley). Perhaps this was the start of my trading skills!

There were 8-10 children playing out every night until dark so sometimes we would go to Grant Thorald Park and play rounders, using our coats as 'stops'. We played 'Oyster Blob' a game that needed two teams. A boy or girl from one team would draw a map on the alley wall with chalk and put an X where his team would hide. His team would run off to the X spot and the other team had to count to 100 then look at the map and decide where the spot was. There was a labyrinth of passages in Convamore & Welholme Roads, so the task was not always easy.

We were as free as birds. We had a den in the Cordage Yard and a poor man who we called 'Peg Leg', he must have been a watchman, he only had one leg and rode a bicycle with his one foot fastened into a pedal. If he saw us he would chase us out but we were young and fast and he never caught us. He was doing this for our own safety as there was a brickpit full of water in the Cordage and it was said to be so deep that a horse and cart fell in one day and disappeared.

I spent many hours up against the cordage wall throwing a ball and singing songs to the rhythm of the ball. We threw the ball under our spread-eagled legs, behind our backs singing

Old Ma Brown
Went to Town
Riding on a Pony
When she got back
Toook off her hat
And gave it Ma Rooney
Where have you been
All day long
Courting Sally
In the Alley
Picking up cinders
Breaking windows
All day long

We had to keep the ball going without dropping it until the song was finished. There were many 'ditties' but I have forgotten a lot of them.

We also played hopscotch, drawing the lines out on the pavement with a piece of chalk and kicking an old tile, shiny side down. There were always plenty of tiles about with the bombing. We also played lots of skipping games, but I think my favourite game of all was playing marbles in the gutter. We each had a bag of marbles and a bag of glass alleys. An alley was twice as big as a marble and worth six marbles. Marbles were always glass but glass alleys were sometimes made of china. We threw the marbles in the gutter trying to hit our opponent's marble, if we did then we had won his marble. Perhaps this was the start of my love of bowling in later life! I now shudder to think we spent days and days playying in the gutters but it didn't seem to kill us off. In fact in spite of the war we were happy, hungry perhaps, thin, very fit, in fact regular street urchins.

This was to come to an end sadly as one day my mother said, 'I am tired of you looking dirty and wild and your Grandad is going to send you to a little private school in Bourne Lane (now Ladysmith Road). Apparently a young woman who was a teacher and whose husband was a pilot flying from Binbrook Aerodrome had decided to come to Grimsby to be near him and opened this little school.

Well I was cleaned up and off I went. There was only one clasroom and the ages ranged from 7-11 years. I think I was eight. Every day when I came home my grandfather would ask me what I had learned that day and I would say that I had to walk round the classroom with a cardboard clock and teach the other children the time. I had had a 'Snow White' watch since my fifth birthday.

After a few weeks he said I am not happy paying money when you don't seem to be learning anything. I think I will come and see your teacher, but before he got round to doing so the poor woman's husband was shot down and killed so she closed her little school and went back home somewhere in the south of England.

So 'smashing' (a word used then, it would be 'cool' now) I was back on the streets again!

A few months laster one Monday tea time there was a knock on the front door and the next thing I knew my Headteacher (Miss Beeson) was standing there. I was sat having my tea - I don't think I have ever been so amazed or embarrassed since. She said that although they couldn't open the school yet, they had reinforced one of the cloakrooms and she wanted some pupils to return, me being one of them. My mother and grandfather were delighted but my heart sank. It would have sank even deeper if I had know how boring it was going to be sitting on a hard bench all morning under the pegs reciting tables and doing spelling tests every day. I can still remember all the tables and my spelling was good for years but now at 77 years old I can't always remember if there are one or two 'r's or 'l's in words!