LITMIR.BIZ

      My first proper writing, January 1940 (© the author)

      Miss James taught us for a year; then we went to Miss Bratt. We called her Polly because her voice sounded like a parrot. My mother said when children were in Miss Bratt’s class they got too noisy to live with because Miss Bratt was deaf and everyone had to shout, and they shouted at home; and so did I.

      Miss Bratt’s room was not in the Infants part of the school. It was next to the hall, where we had Prayers, and it was horrible.

      There were two windows, set between carved stone, high up, so we couldn’t see out; and it was dark, because the branches of the holly and yew trees in the vicarage garden pressed against the glass all the time and weren’t ever cut back.

      Next to Miss Bratt’s high desk was an iron stove. It burned coke, which was kept in the playground without any covering and was always wet, and the smell made us cough.

      In front of the stove there was a wire mesh fireguard with a brass rail round the top. If any of us got soaked with rain on the way to school we had to stand against the fireguard until our clothes stopped steaming before we could sit in our desks. The stove was so hot it made our legs blotchy red and white, and sometimes it made us cry, but Miss Bratt went on teaching because she didn’t hear us.

      And Miss Bratt wouldn’t let any of us be excused during a lesson; so if we wet ourselves in class the boys had to stand at the fireguard to dry, and for the girls Miss Bratt took their knickers off and hung them on the brass rail. The smell of pee made us cough more.

      One day, the smell was so bad I ran from the classroom, through the hall, out of the porch and up School Lane. Miss Bratt ran after me, shouting, ‘Richard! Richard!’, but I didn’t stop and ran all the way home.

      My mother was cross and said she’d tell my father, and then I’d get what-for. But it was the end of the afternoon, so she didn’t take me back to school.

      When my father came for his tea, my mother told him what I’d done, but he laughed when I said how Miss Bratt had chased me and called me Richard. I said I didn’t know why she’d called me that, because she knew it wasn’t my name. And my father laughed even more, and then he told me how my uncle Dick had done just the very same thing when he’d been in Miss Bratt’s class, and she’d run after him shouting at him to come back, and she hadn’t caught him, either.

      My mother said my father must smack me, but he was laughing so much he gave me a hug and rubbed his whiskery chin against my cheek, and my mother went to wash the pots.

      After Miss Bratt, we had Miss Fletcher. She was fierce, but her classroom was big and light, and she’d built a museum with rocks and fossils and sea shells and butterflies and beetles in a glass case. And on Friday afternoons she read real stories to us: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and she did all the voices differently. But the rest of the week it was Class Reading, and that was Milly-Molly-Mandy books, and we had to read them aloud in turn or all together. This was boring, except when we had gas mask lessons, where we wore our gas masks the whole time.