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Over the border into Surrey - Frensham Heights School

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Boiler Suits and Woolly Jumpers - Frensham Heights School   It was a great stroke of family fortune that our mum Betty Richards, was appointed as PE teacher in 1934 at Frensham Heights , near Farnham in Surrey. She was so impressed with this liberal, co-ed and caring school that she resolved to send her own children there. This saved the three girls in the family from attending one of the many small, indifferent single sex boarding schools in Sussex and instead gave us the benefit of an interesting and liberal co-education with lots of emphasis on the creative and performing art s . The downside was that the exam pass rate was appalling. The atmosphere at Frensham was so entirely different from that of my previous school. I started at Frensham in the junior department known as the JD aged ten on a bright, late April day in the summer term 1954.  Mum had barely left the building when I was assigned a guide, Joe Brumwell, fair haired and freckly, who was the younger brother of one of my
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The Gateway School, Felpham - 1948 - 1954

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Starting School Early School Days and Grateful Thanks to Chicken Licken  An energetic and capable pair of women, Miss Millicent Glencross and her life partner, Miss Spence, ran the Gateway School. I started there at in 1948 aged 4½ and travelled with my brother on the 50a bus, which ran along the Sussex coast to Pagham, west of Bognor Regis. For years I was fascinated by the bus’s ultimate destination ‘á Becket’s Ave though had no idea who Becket was with that funny á and what was Ave ? Did it rhyme with Save or with Have ? The Gateway was a traditional, tightly organised prep school where mastery of the basic skills was paramount. The teachers , were kind and caring, the school routine was unvarying. The classes were named after characteristics for us to emulate; the Reception class was called Happiness then we went on to Kindness, Goodness, Unselfishness, Courage, Truth, Loyalty and Perseverance. I can recall the formica-topped table and the tiny chairs and can see the first sum w
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Christmas at Middleton-on-Sea in the 1940s and 50s

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Christmas in the early 1950s - when less was more Typical display of Christmas goods at Woolworth in the 1950s Once on a clear, sharp night in early December, our mum Betty Richards made a telephone call in the draughty hall while we eavesdropped, “What did you say?” she asked   “He’s flying past tonight?   Thank you for telling me. I’ll be sure to let the children know. Goodbye” She called us and announced,             “I’ve just heard that Father Christmas is flying past tonight on his way back to the North Pole and he needs to know what presents you’d like.”   Innocent, and flushed with joy we raced upstairs to a back bedroom and clambered on top of a built-in unit to fling open the casement windows which still had nursery bars across them. Bitingly cold air rushed in. Above Southdean Drive, the band of the Milky Way arched across the sky and the piercingly bright stars shimmered. Secure in the certain knowledge that he was flying overhead, In turn we calle
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Ailments and Illnesses - I blame The Flannel

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Ailments and Illnesses - I blame The Flannel Childhood illnesses were treated seriously in our family; who knew when death might stalk around the corner or when polio might pinion the four of us into iron lungs. Grandma had lost her elder sister as a child, Dad had uncles who were carried off by common infections before ever reaching manhood. Mum was very lucky to survive her dose of Spanish flu in 1919. Both of our parents were brought up in the pre-antibiotic era and had seen how rapidly a child could succumb to infections with no powerful drugs available to fight them. In the War, Churchill’s pneumonia had been successfully treated by the new sulphonamide antibiotics prepared by May & Baker. This was simply known as M&B and I remember how these tablets were spoken of with near reverence. We’d been vaccinated against smallpox and diphtheria though not whooping coffee and in the late 1950s we’d had the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis yet plenty o
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