1940-41
From my earliest years my parents, especially Dad, tried to teach me what they called ‘proper English’ and they always corrected me when I used slang words I'd picked up from school friends. In spite of their efforts and without knowing it, I spoke in a curious mixture of the Lancashire and Yorkshire dialects. The other infants found it rather amusing, the teachers sometimes found it frustrating and occasionally there were unfortunate results.
One cold and dark winter morning we arrived at school during a torrential rain storm. The harassed teachers helped us hang our sodden clothes on the pegs in the cloakroom. In the main assembly hall there was a wonderful roaring fire in the open grate. A latticed metal screen, designed to prevent clumsy children from falling into the fire, stood on the hearth. There were clouds of steam everywhere.
“Tony, go and put these socks on the fire, please,” said one of the stressed teachers as she handed me a pair of soggy socks she’d just pulled off another pupil.
So I did as I was told! Fascinated, I watched the wool bubbling and shrivelling as the flames consumed the socks. Having seen what I’d just done, but too late to stop me, the teacher in vain tried to rescue the socks from the fire with a poker but her well-intentioned actions merely hastened the socks’ final disintegration. It was an idiosyncrasy of the Yorkshire dialect that “put the socks on the fire” actually meant draping them on the fire-screen in front of the fire to dry out, not the literal meaning I had assumed. I remember bursting into tears of humiliation.
“If you wanted me to put the socks on the fire guard, why did you tell me to put them on the fire?” I asked with some asperity and received a slap on the face for my trouble. That teacher would doubtless have ended up in court these days for assaulting me. As it was, the unfortunate lady presumably had the difficult job of explaining to the child’s parents what had happened to his socks. All clothing in those wartime years was ‘on the ration’ so the boy probably went sockless for weeks after the incident until the parents had saved up sufficient rationing points for a new pair. My parents were duly informed of my stupidity.
“How was I supposed to know what she meant?” I asked sulkily. How indeed?
As I neared the end of my time at the Little School, I became a rather precocious child. I was quick on the uptake at reading, writing, and ‘sums’ but rather intolerant of those who couldn’t keep up. It’s surprising how vividly precise details of a few trivial incidents from those very early school days stick in my mind. One day when we were ‘composing’ short sentences and writing them down in our books, I wanted to use the word ‘nice’ and for some reason I’d suddenly forgotten how to spell it.
“Please Miss,’ I asked, waving a hand above my head. “How do you spell ‘nice’?”
“Don’t ask me, Tony. You must look it up in the dictionary,” replied the teacher, pointing to the large children’s dictionary on her desk.
“But Miss,’ I protested, ‘How can I look it up when I don’t know how to spell it?”
Miss had not been prepared for that so she told me how to spell it!
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