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RECOLLECTIONS OF CNHS 1943-1952 After reading the Alumnae newsletter last year, Anne Kirkham was reminded of her time at the Central High Senior School and was inspired to put pen to paper. Here are her recollections... I arrived at CNHS at the age of 10 years and two months, having sat what was then known as “The Scholarship” the previous March. There was some discussion between my parents and Miss Leale, the Headmistress, as to whether I should start at the Junior House in Gosforth because I was so young, but Miss Leale was of the opinion that if I could do the work I should be allowed to enter the school in Form 3A. I didn’t realise at the time that the school had only recently returned from evacuation, nobody seemed to mention it at all. We were all told that we had to keep up the reputation of the school when out in Newcastle by dressing immaculately at all times and we were inspected by prefects on leaving the premises to make sure that we were wearing both hat and gloves. I was humiliated in the Summer term by having to wear my grandfather’s old Bowls Club genuine panama hat which my mother had cut down and altered for me, while my contemporaries all had a kind of imitation panama
which actually fitted them. In addition to this and winter felt hats with elastic under the chin we had a little hat called a ‘storm hat’ although it was ill suited to protect one from any kind of rain. Some allowances had to be made on account of clothes rationing and there was even an occasional sale of second hand clothes from one of which my mother triumphantly returned with some of Rosemary Graham’s vests. The school had had to drop the requirement for each pupil to have a white party dress for special occasions and it was never reinstated in my time there. Shoes were another problem. Our feet were measured periodically by the gym mistress and if they had grown we were allotted extra coupons. My feet stubbornly refused to grow for a long time and my shoes became progressively shabbier. At last the gym mistress (I think it was Miss Thorp), took pity on me and seeing that my foot still did not reach the line in front of it gave me a sharp crack on the back of my ankle so that my foot
shot forward and crossed the line to make me eligible. Meals were another wartime problem for the school. The puddings were the most memorable. We had boiled sultana (rather nice) baked sultana (rather dry), and occasional rice pudding (tasteless) which involved a Chinese whisper type question passed down the table “Does anyone want rice?” Once a week we were given semolina with a dollop of concentrated orange juice. When I eventually became a dinner monitor I discovered that the large cat belonging to the cook, Miss Bailey, was in the habit of sleeping on top of one of the piles of plates. Sport. We had some form of exercise every day, two sessions of gym, one of netball, a whole afternoon of hockey and swimming lessons. Hockey and its summer counterparts, tennis and rounders, were played on a field out at Paddy Freemans in High Heaton which belonged to the Sports Club of one of the Banks. We had to make
