Yeovil's Virtual Museum

memories of yeovil

Reckleford Infants School remembered by Patricia Ann Smith

 

My first school was not far from Vincent Place, where we lived, and was a rather pleasant-looking red brick building surmounted by a proper school bell. It faced Reckleford, a major road within Yeovil leading out in the direction of Sherborne. Eastland Road led past the school on one side, with a rather evil-smelling glove factory looking toward the school from the other side of the road. The school had a large playground surrounded by iron railings in which the boys played their horrid, rough games at one end and we girls our more genteel, pretty little dancey numbers or gathered in gossipy huddles at the other.

The classrooms were reached through air raid shelters left over from the war at either end of the building and which were, by then, redundant. These shelters were brick-built with flat reinforced concrete roofs and were cavernous and completely empty. On our way between the playground and the classrooms, all we children used to shriek and shout at the tops of our voices in the echoing space (even timid little girls like me) and our shoes, often reinforced with metal 'Segs', echoed loudly on the concrete floor.

Inside, the school itself had, to my mind, a distinctive odour of chalk, disinfectant and sick!

The classrooms were arranged with their doors opening out onto a verandah which ran along the back of the building. I was a late beginner, as I had had whooping cough and couldn't start school until I was definitely over it. On my first day (in 1948) the reception teacher, a Miss Miller, got me to help by clearing twigs, leaves and berries off the Nature Table while the rest of the children were at play outside.

At morning break (always called playtime) we were each given a third of a pint of milk in a bottle with a straw and a biscuit. We were each allocated a round cardboard plate identified individually by a picture glued to it, probably cut out from a birthday card or something similar. I remember mine had a hunting scene, the huntsmen in bright red coats, which pleased me as red was, and still is, my favourite colour.

At lunchtime, those who lived near enough to the school were fetched by their mothers and given lunch at home, the rest receiving school dinners on the premises. There was great excitement one day as some fat caught fire in the kitchen adjacent to the school and the Fire Brigade had to be called. We were reluctant to leave the playground to go back to lessons and would have preferred to continue gaping through the railings!

Occasionally, when Mum was busy elsewhere (probably visiting my grandmother in Westfield, as she did often as a dutiful daughter), Dad would fetch me from school and take me back to Redwoods for the rest of the working day. By then he was no longer working in the main gents' outfitters' shop in the Borough, but had moved over to the firm's shoe shop in Silver Street. There he worked with a Miss Windsor, who rejoiced in the Christian name Salome. She was a tall, thin, rather serious lady, Salome being a definite misnomer. She was the sister of a colleague of Dad's in Redwoods' main premises and was called "Our Sloam" by her brother.

The shoe shop had shelves neatly piled high with cardboard boxes containing boots and shoes, mainly Clarks', the Clarks' shoe factory being in Yeovil. There was a raised part of the shop, open to the main area and reached up a short flight of stairs with chairs for customers to sit on when trying on their selections. Down some more stairs behind the main counter was the workshop where Dad used to mend (or "tap" as he called it), boots and shoes brought in by the customers to be repaired. The workshop smelled very strongly of leather and glue and was a dark, dusty and quite scary place.

Once, years before, when I was very small, probably about two years old as my sister hadn't yet been born, Mum and Dad took me to meet Dad's boss, Mr Redwood. He was an imposing old gentleman who always wore a three-piece suit with a watch-chain draped across his waistcoat. He gave me a half-crown. The next time I met him I'm told I embarrassed Mum and Dad terribly by toddling up to him and saying, "Hello, man - you got money?" He apparently huffed a bit, but rummaged in his pocket and produced another coin for me. I have no doubt that that the last time I was taken to see him!

During my last year at Reckleford Infants I was put into Miss Wakeling's class. I dreaded it as Miss Wakeling was tall and stout with horn-rimmed glasses, black hair scraped back into a bun and an air of stern authority. After school assembly on Fridays she used to give her class what I think amounted to elocution lessons. We had to recite tongue-twisters: for example, "Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppercorns" and "Rosie Ran Round the Ring", getting us to roll our Rs. She also taught us the words of hymns and I remember the class chanting all the verses of "Praise my Soul the King of Heaven" in unison, while Miss Wakeling marched around the room, beating time on the floor with handle end of the long wooden blackboard pointer. She also introduced us to history, our having been mainly occupied with reading, writing and simple arithmetic up until then. She really did start at the very beginning, (a very good place to start) with lessons about cavemen, mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers. She was a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson's work (or Robert Louise Stevenson as I believed him to be called) and I can remember lots of the poetry she taught us, even now.

Miss Wakeling also taught us, boys as well as girls, to knit. We were each given a ball of wool and a pair of knitting needles (not necessarily an actual pair, but two needles) and were instructed in casting on and garter stitch. I don't think we ever got as far as casting off so this was something we would have to discover for ourselves at a later date. My ball of wool was orange and, as my knitting grew, I found that it was purple inside with a big knot between the two colours! Once the ball of wool had reduced substantially in size, and it looked as though we were getting the hang of it, we took the work up to Miss Wakeling's desk where she inspected it, ripped it off the needles, wound the wool back into a ball and off we went again!

 

The school bell and clock. The clock had originally been mounted on the front of the Town Hall in High Street.