Our Village 80
Years Ago: The Girls and School
Some eighty
years ago, several children lived in cottages just opposite the Recreation
Ground in Mackney Lane. This was their play area where girls would skip with
long and short ropes, run hoops, and learn to ride any old abandoned lady’s
bicycle. But above all they would run to meet Mr Stanley Kew and his cart
because they know there were some “Tommy Loaves” for them for them. Mr and Mrs
Kew also gave the children these small loaves from their bakery in the village
street.
At this time
most of the land around the village was permanent grassland. In spring and
early summer the girls would go
out into the meadows and pick bunches of cowslips, ragged robins, moon daisies,
buttercups and other flowers to give to their mothers to decorate their cottage
windowsills.
On school day, a
mother would say goodbye to her five or six year old at the garden gate, but no
further. He or she would then be
on their own until other girls aged thirteen or fourteen would join them and
safely escort them to school. The girls were very protective at all times
regarding the infant. The infants’
small classroom was the nearest to the village road. It was almost unbelievable
to state that when an infant wanted to use the toilet he or she had to come out
of the large door facing the roadway then walk or run all along the outside of
the school to the toilets back by the playground, then back again whether it
was raining, snowing or bitterly cold. At 12 noon each day, because there were
no school dinners, everyone had to go back home again. Infants, aged five and
six, had to go back to Mackney, Sotwell and the High Road then back again for school
at 1.30pm. If it was a rainy day, half the school would not return in the
afternoon. The school had no electric light, no telephone and no mains
water. At the age of fourteen,
girls cycled to a school at Didcot for two years. The boys attended a Wallingford school. All these seemingly hardships were, at
the time, accepted as normal. I wonder what today’s children would think of
them?