Submitted by Christine Shepherd, Sheffield u3a
I clearly remember my Infant School days. It was a West Riding school, built of red brick with the classrooms looking onto a central hall (now built on with modern houses). For the last two years we had Mrs (May) Gibbons as our teacher. She had been ‘emergency trained’ according to my father who worked with her husband, and was an excellent teacher. I liked her. She coped with about 42 of us. We did a daily session of mental maths in which she held up large painted wooden domino-like boards, I remember. We learnt to cope with pounds, shillings and pence by the time we were six.
My news book featured a coloured drawing or a glued in cut out picture (often from my mother’s Woman magazine, I think) with a few of my sentences and it contained items like ‘ The Queen Opens Calder Hall’ or ‘The Queen and Trooping’ The Colour’… we were, after all , in the New Elizabethan Age’. It was exciting. Her Majesty was undoubtedly a role model, though not consciously, I suppose. We had a nature table to which we contributed grasses and such like. I remember painting using easels. The paint was powder and you mixed your own colours, experimenting with differing amounts of one or another. I was chosen to be May Queen in 1955 and by the age of six, I was ‘The OLD Queen’, but my Prince Charming was consort to the ‘New Queen’. This puzzled me slightly even then, but I learnt later that it was probably because he had all the appropriate gear!
I contracted Scarlet Fever in the November of 1955. There was an outbreak at school and a classmate friend of mine, whose father was the Medical Officer of Health, also got it. We were allowed to write to each other. My library books were taken away to be fumigated. I was treated with the then relatively new, wonder drug, penicillin, and along with amounts of home-made lemon or orange barley water, my kidneys were fortunately unaffected. I was nursed at home for I think almost six weeks and received the pounds shillings and pence work in little home-made books from my teacher via her husband and my father, I presume! I enjoyed doing jigsaws and playing Ludo. After the first spell, my parents moved my bed downstairs into the sitting room where they lit a second coal fire for me. Coal was quite expensive, I think. It snowed one day and my mother brought some inside in a bucket for me to sample! Our doctor came daily and only ‘signed me off’ on Christmas Eve. My parents sent a telegram to my maternal grandparents to say ‘the coast was clear’ and they travelled by bus and train (and on foot) on Christmas Day from Mossley, Lancashire (now Tameside), via Huddersfield to arrive finally at our house in Wath-on- Dearne, near Rotherham, a journey, as the crow flies, of 35 miles. It must have been after 2.30pm. I recall it was still daylight though!
My mother had saved them some Christmas Dinner (tasty turkey from a farmer and his daughter from Upper Cumberworth who regularly had a Christmas stall on ancient Market Hill, in Barnsley.), but we had already had ours! As my father had a rating conference (he was Treasurer at Wath UDC.) each October, I was fortunate to visit London, going by (steam) train from Doncaster each October until we got a car in 1957. We waved to Anthony Eden as he left 10, Downing Street one quiet midweek morning in1956 which, of course, was in the midst of the Suez Crisis. Back then, you could stand nearby. It was a normal street without the gates. Anyway, those are some of my memories of the 1950s. All in all it was a great time to be a child, even though rationing didn’t come off till 1954! Christine Shepherd (nee Langley)