BRUCE FELLOWS’ BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, but not for everyone. Patrick McGrath tells us of one such in his fine novel, Last Days in Cleaver Square. It’s 1975 and Francis McNulty, poet and ex-volunteer stretcher bearer, now lives in London with his cat, his daughter and Dolores, whom he rescued from Madrid. The poems have dried up and he’s haunted by memories of betrayal and by apparitions of the man behind it all, General Franco. This is a gripping tale of memory and regret, with a moving portrait of a father-daughter relationship, a great ending and a cast of fully-rounded characters, including the cat.

In the enthralling and lyrical English Pastoral, James Rebanks writes as grandson, son and father, to describe life on the mixed farm he grew up on and now farms himself. His grandfather made him love the place and understand the importance of birds, wild creatures and everything below ground that makes the soil fertile. Now, food is so cheap that farmers use machinery in ever bigger fields they spray with ever stronger chemicals that break the chain of life. It’s a dim prospect but don’t despair, in this wonderful book Rebanks points the way from the past to a brighter future for all our descendants.

The Lowlife, a contemporary novel when published in 1963, now has a real historical aura to it but is no less riveting for all that. Alexander Baron’s London is poor, crowded and still to recover from the War. Harryboy is Jewish and makes a living by gambling but he’s so addicted he can’t stop while he’s ahead and finds himself flirting with hoodlums. When a family with a young son moves into his boarding house, his life suffers dramatic changes. This terrific novel is wonderfully humane and despite his faults and a bad conscience stemming from his haunting back story, Harryboy is an appealing hero.

Paul Hayward’s excellent study, England Football: The Biography does what it says in the title, tells the fascinating story of 150 years of the England team: selection by committee until 1963; early players paid peanuts though the crowds were huge. The world progressed but England didn’t; in the fifties we lost 6-3 to Hungary. We hear the stories of a stream of managers, the good, the bad and the so-so, right up to our beloved Gareth; and of wonderful players, Finney, Duncan Edwards and Greavsie as well as the more recent ones. This book’s for anyone whose heart’s in their mouth each time we play.

In the library with a knife. That’s the murder that DI Strafford must investigate but the culprit wasn’t Professor Plum although it happened in the County Wexford home of Colonel Osborne. John Banville reveals all in his intriguing and atmospheric mystery, Snow. It’s 1957. The Irish Civil War is a strong memory, the Catholic Church rules the roost and the victim is a priest. Strafford questions the family, an eccentric lot, tramps the snow to meet other eccentrics and resists his boss and the bishop to reach the truth. Read this page-turner by a warm fire lest the icy winter portrayed seep into your bones.

Over the past few months, I’ve written a number of articles in this magazine about what it’s like to go to primary and secondary school today. This has been based on my own teaching experience, the experiences of my children who are currently in primary school and secondary school, and based on the feedback from many school leaders, teachers and specialists in particular fields, such as behaviour and careers.

Over the next few issues, I’ll be sharing the experiences of a range of local folk who went to school – or worked in schools –over many previous decades, comparing such stories to the experiences of pupils today. Please note that any names used have been changed for anonymity.

Whilst researching my articles, many facts that I heard about education in the past shocked me. The fact that there was once a time when there was no national curriculum – I just always, naively, assumed that there had been one as it is now so integral to modern day teaching and my own years of teacher training in the early noughties. Pre-national curriculum, it appears that there was quite an inconsistent standard of education in past decades based on the experiences of those that I spoke to. For example, one of my interviewees was taught heraldry (the art and science of designing and using a coat of arms in very basic terms) for a year because his teacher had a personal interest in it! It’s fair to say that this wasn’t much use to him in later life. Another remembers having to help his teacher work out how much paint he needed for his boat and assisting him with painting it in class!

Other tales have been equally eye-opening: that there were no computers in schools until the 1980s – just look how far and how quickly that’s evolved! One retired teacher I interviewed remembers how lucky she felt to have a BBC micro computer with a concept keyboard and a cassette player that brought up images (slowly!) on a

She also remembers a world before the introduction of the photocopier (in today’s schools these are an invaluable, muchfought-over resource) and she had to make all of her own resources then use a Banda duplicator machine to copy each page painstakingly slowly one by one by the turn of a wheel.

Lessons offered for pupils in previous decades were also highly influenced by social assumptions outside of school. In many establishments, only boys could study metal work, technical drawing and woodwork and, for the girls, needlework and home economics – those important domestic subjects deemed vital at that time for a soon-to-be housewife. According to one pupil of the 1970s, boys had to choose one ‘technical’ subject at his school: woodwork or metal work. Girls were only allowed to learn dressmaking, cooking or typing. Seemingly, education was about setting pupils up for their anticipated future. Indeed, most of the boys in his class took up a trade or worked as an apprentice and most of the girls accepted office or shop work then married and left work to raise a family. Sue remembers only being allowed to study woodwork for a term at her school, unlike the boys. Eventually, she was able to do a carpentry course after leaving school and got a successful job in the furniture-making industry. I could not imagine a world where my son and daughters weren’t allowed to study the same subjects as each other due to their gender. Equal rights have certainly come a long way, as have equal aspirations for boys and girls in school and in wider society. was also in the 1970s that first and middle schools were introduced, with pupils then moving on to high/upper school aged around 13 – a ‘three-tier structure’ as it was known. Middle schools started to decline in the late 1980s, in part as a result of the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988 with its key stage divisions and corresponding attainment targets (more on this to come in the next issue).

Other memories include all resources being printed in black and white until commercial colour printing came into its own in the late 1970s. All that the teacherin-me can think about is how much harder this would have made learning for anyone with dyslexic tendencies, where colour can really help to make educational materials significantly more accessible. And how dull teaching resources would have looked! Nothing like the very readable and representative textbooks around today. Interestingly, textbooks are undergoing somewhat of a renaissance in many contemporary classrooms, with Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) and teachers still recognising their worth in the classroom despite some people regarding them as obsolete due to the development of the digital age. Physical dictionaries, however, might just be on their way out –I asked a pupil the other day whether she could use a dictionary and she said there was no need as she could just ask Alexa!

A wonderful chat with a local 103-yearold revealed the impact that the second world war had on her education. During this war (1939-1945 – but you all know this from your history lessons as discussed in a previous issue!!), most schools had only female teachers – usually untrained – as the majority of the local men were conscripted to fight. After the war, a significant number of children failed, unsurprisingly, to reach the required levels of English and maths. Many school buildings were bombed so children were taught in various makeshift buildings with huge class sizes due to evacuee children also joining them. Key parts of the daily timetable were writing to soldiers on the front line, collecting eggs for wounded soldiers, raising funds for the war effort and knitting for the troops. She loved school and remembers warm, strictbut-fair, nurturing teachers.

Another insight that was new to me was the fact that single-sex schools were the norm up until the 1960s, whereas this is now regarded as a unique selling point. Many interviewees also went to separate infant and junior schools. From the 1970s, these started to be merged into single primary schools, even though a good number remained as separate establishments. It

More ‘recent’ memories reveal a hugely different world from schools today: the staff room that radiated fumes from all the pipe-smoking teachers. Teachers spitting on tissues to roughly remove the make up on the faces of teenage girls or using acetone from the science lab to remove their nail varnish. Jen recalls her maths teacher (in the early 1980s) leaving the class unsupervised every week to go on an extended cigarette break whilst pupils worked from a textbook. This resulted in significant gaps in maths for the class by the end of the year. Margaret remembers ‘a naughty boy’ being locked in a stationary cupboard for the whole lesson for his misdemeanours. John remembers his teacher being openly and repeatedly racist to his friend during the 1980s. Tom remembers the classroom’s ‘shaky’ chair, on which children who had misbehaved had to stand facing the blackboard. His teacher then shook the chair whilst they had to try to not fall off. Others recall tables in the classroom kept aside for the ‘thickies’, ‘backwards’ or ‘retarded’ pupils as the teachers openly called them, with the dunce’s hat worn by those pupils deemed too slow at learning. Shockingly, there are some cases of schools still using a humiliating ‘dunce’s’ corner up until the 2000s, resulting in it finally being outlawed in 2010 due to its breach of human rights.

Then there are those memories of corporal punishment systems. Corporal punishment – using physical punishment to discipline – was only prohibited in 1986 in state schools and, shockingly, continued until 1998 in fee-paying schools. This ruling was appealed by the heads of many schools at the time. Disciplinary measures that were diligently recorded in school ‘Punishment Books’ included trousers being pulled down to smack children in front of the class, children being hit with a thin, broad, flat paddle on their backsides, and hitting children on the hands with rulers - especially those who dared to write with their left hand. How grossly unjust. Many remember teachers delivering ‘six of the best’ cane strikes for bad behaviour and Margaret recalls being boxed across the ears for burning her lamb chops in her cooking class and for not being able to sing in tune. She remembers the teachers at her school as sadistic with no qualms about making her cry. One interviewee, Mark, recollected his memories of attending a local Catholic school in Bristol run by clergy, who each kept a leather strap in their cassock, used to regularly beat the boys. He vividly remembers one occasion when a boy stood up to the teacher and punched him back, much to the class’ delight. His fate is unknown but the fate of these particular teachers would be a lengthy term in purgatory, according to Mark!

And then, linking to this, there’s that lack of safeguarding – action taken to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm - in many schools of the past. Schools were far, far less responsible for protecting children from harm in any form. In some cases it was the teachers causing the harm. Sarah remembers many teachers bruising ‘daydreaming’ pupils by throwing blackboard rubbers at them or ‘giving them the slipper’. She says in her school there was no such thing as a ‘trusted adult’ and all teachers were creatures to mistrust and avoid as much as possible. Helen recalls predatory behaviour from a teacher and having her bra strap pinged on a daily basis. John remembers having to shower naked amongst his peers and the bullying that occurred within this daily routine. Tom remembers how his school mini-bus driver ran off with a young pupil and had two children with her – something that would now result in a lengthy prison sentence. Thankfully, all of these actions would now be completely unacceptable in today’s schools.

Such recollections highlight just how far school policies and schools cultures have evolved, ensuring that all functions are now carried out with a view to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. Behaviour systems must be fair and consistent, with the main focus on reinforcing and praising good behaviour – there is no throwing, hitting, smacking or sadistic cruelty to ‘discipline’ pupils of today. Teachers must abide by a set of standards which outline the requirements for their practice and conduct. As part of this statutory conduct, every teacher must treat pupils with dignity, building relationships rooted in mutual respect, and at all times observing set policies and proper boundaries appropriate to a teacher’s professional position. Every teacher has a responsibility to provide a safe environment in which children can learn and every school must ensure that they support both the physical and emotional welfare of pupils – essential foundations for successful learning. Buildings are required to be ‘safeguarding friendly’, with all classrooms visible through windows in all doors. Anyone now working with children must be DBS (criminal record) checked and fully trained in safeguarding. As this all suggests, the safeguarding of pupils has made tremendous strides and schools are now a vital part of the wider safeguarding network system monitoring the safety and well-being of all pupils.

Of course, many tales of the schools of the past also include numerous positive stories. There are those schools and individual teachers who really made a wonderful mark on the lives of pupils across the decades. Research carried out by Cadbury Roses in 2022 found that almost six in 10 adults yearned to turn the clock back so that they could say thank you to an inspirational teacher. And two thirds revealed their favourite teacher gave them self-belief and confidence for which they would always be grateful. Many people shared with me the warmth and kindness of particular teachers, including the 103-year-old, who still remembers her favourite teacher telling her that she’d go far with such an inquisitive, keen mind.

And there are those very personal, special memories that I was lucky enough to have shared with me. The weekly school lunch of spam fritters and chips that just can’t be replicated however much Mark has tried; trading Star Wars cards or football cards in the playground (not much has changed there – it’s still footie cards or Pokémon cards today); lighting a Bunsen burner for the first time (still happens); using the magic ‘e’ to help with reading (now called the less-than-magical ‘split digraph’). Other delightful memories include that playtime when pupils witnessed the first full eclipse of the sun in the 1950s; mass dances on the school field; school tuck shops; listening to ‘The Secret Garden’ at story time on the carpet at the end of the day; writing on slates wiped clean with worn-out jumper cuffs; the smell of Quink (a type of ink); guessing whose feet were sticking out of the door of the outside school toilet; Gill getting stung on the eyelid by a wasp on her very first day of school and having to go straight to the school nurse (now a rare sight in a school); listening to Music and Movement on BBC Schools Radio, which ran from 1934 to 1969; Hannah witnessing the top of a boy’s finger getting chopped off by a heavy school door (not allowed these days under much stricter health and safety laws) and being ordered to scoop it up and run it under cold water; lunchtimes spent at home, going for walks or playing bulldogs have all been shared. What a wonderful sprinkling of memories from days spent at school over the past half a century and more.

Next month, I delve a little into the history of education – the types of schools that pupils attended, qualifications studied and the history of the development of the national curriculum and all the changes this brought with it – to give some wider context to these memories. I also share more marvellous accounts from local folk –past pupils and teachers – about their own school days.

© Georgie Mountjoy, 2023

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