Winter thoughts

Thursday 2 February 2012

I think winter has finally found England. No we haven’t had any snow…yet. Temperatures at 2000  is minus 3.5 and I daresay it will get colder during the night. It was a beautiful day today thigh, clear blue sky and I even had the sun shining in my office window for a while this afternoon. And the mornings are defiantly getting lighter. I remember some pretty hard frost when I was  a kid. You could tell it was frosty not only by the white stuff on the grass, but by the factt hat the sheets on the washing line would be stiff. And woe betide either of us if we hit them because they would surely shatter. Boy was it tempting.

In those days back in the mid to late fifties we didn’t wearer users too school, our legs must have been freezing. The boys wore shorts and lots of us girls wore gym slips. Lucky girls would have thick stockings to wear.  At Hutt Central School, if we took 3d for the day we could have a cup of hot cocoa made with the ubiquitous school milk. The smell of a hot drink in a plastic cup takes me right back to those squat plastic cups half full of lukewarm cocoa. Sometimes I would find a thermos flask of hot homemade soup. My thermos broke once spilling soup down my black gymslip I can still feel the rough wet fabric on my thighs.

The junior school at Hutt Central is no longer, I guess the diminishing class room size meant that the entire junior and senior school could be housed at that previous big school site.  I think there would have been 30 plus children and one teacher per classroom. We had our names on the hooks where we would hang our coats. On wet days pairs of black gumboots would stand to attention under the coats, while we wore our slippers. Lunches stayed in our bags which hung under our coats. Sometimes on special days Mum would let me buy my lunch.  The shop was in Victoria Street, about a ten minute walk from the school.

This is an excerpt from ‘My Story’ 

I’m starving and my tummy growls. I've some got money to buy my lunch.  I walk fast with the others to the fish and chip shop, and wait 'til it’s my turn. I  Clutch the warm newspaper parcel torn open at the top and walk slowly back to school. I nibble carefully at the steaming hot morsels they taste scrummy. In the playground I sit to finish my lunch, but some big kids are waiting, they all want to have a share of my chips.

It’s a long time before I ask to buy my lunch again.