Over the border into Surrey - Frensham Heights School

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 arts. 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 sister’s friends. He wore the charcoal grey woolly, collared school jumper with a baggy pair of light grey corduroy trousers.  He gave me the full tour; we started in the entrance hall by the dark, heavy front door – out of bounds to us apart from on first and the last day of term.  A smell of cork floor, furniture polish overlaid with a drift of steaming cabbage greeted us as we entered the small library off the entrance hall.  Libraries in the 1950s were plain affairs – cloth bound books in muted colours – no bright displays of outward-facing colourful picture books but I immediately liked the look of the cushioned window seat where several children were perched, absorbed in their books.  My guide took me into our classroom which had its desks pushed to the wall to allow room for a battered old ping pong table which was already in use with an excited quartet of children racing round the table whacking the ball in turn.  One wall of the classroom was covered in charts.  One depicted the geological eras Pre-Cambrian, Triassic, Juraassic – a foreign language to me then, and the other was a progress chart for swimmers with children’s names written on cut out drawings of mer-people showing how many widths or lengths the child achieved. Butterflies of excitement instantly fluttered in my stomach as I wondered how far I’d be able to swim.

We then went out onto a paved terrace with weeds poking up through the gaps in the flagstones.  There were steps down onto a big front lawn, roughly mown with a small amphitheatre on the far side. Children were racing everywhere playing some kind of tag in pairs and trios, their excitement palpable.

Then up a small back staircase we went to look at the dormitories, loos and bathrooms.  I was shocked to find that I’d be what was known as a 6.00 o’clock bedder with lights out at 6.30. My guide Joe then left me and joined his friends playing chase and I wandered around not sure what to do.  Hopeless in any sort of lull, I thought of my big sisters Ann and Sally who were distant, glamorous girls way up in the senior school – my first term coincided with Ann’s last term. I was teetering on the verge of homesick tears, when she and a friend came and found me wandering around in the woods. They swiftly guided me back to join the children who were now playing British Bulldog and my tears evaporated for a  while. 

On that first night in the little dormitory with the sun still shining through the open weave curtains, my roommates were all asleep, I couldn’t get a foothold into my book. The busy day had been full of new experiences yet tears spilled over and the heaving sobs of homesickness began. No one heard, no one came but gradually over the years I learnt to fall asleep despite those deep involuntary gasps that follow a bout of crying.

The JD’s curriculum was distinctly liberal and expanded. Much as I’d enjoyed The Gateway, we’d spent hours, weeks, months busily underlining subjects (in red) and predicates (in green) and making huge efforts to correct the backward slant in handwriting which was thought to be indicative of a severe character defect. The advent of spring had been a repetitive affair. Dusty twigs appeared on a Nature Table from nowhere and seemed to be called catkins. I’d no idea where they’d come from, how they related to a cat or what role they played in the advent of spring. In the JD however, we were sent off to get into sturdy navy boiler suits and ribbed, collared grey sweaters to go out on a Nature Walk with a terrific teacher called Sam Counsell. We were encouraged to pick things up, examine everything we found, recoil at the insides of a dead fox, and watch him poke about a piece of dung checking what the animal might have had for breakfast.

History lessons no longer involved copying passages from text books where all historical characters were depicted, as I later came to realise, like limp pre-Raphaelite aesthetes. History in the JD stretched back to infinite infinite length.  There were geological eras with wonderfully resonant names. A radio was turned on and someone called Uncle Jim went back in time with two Famous Five type of children, and in hushed voices they described the journey, creeping through a scary swamp and describing dinosaurs to each other. These dinosaurs eventually noticed them and a chase would begin but Uncle Jim and the heroic pair would escape back to the safety of modern times.

At Frensham we were taken up to the Natural History Museum to gaze at those monstrous prehistoric skeletons. We also went to the British Museum in a coach and visited the Ancient Egyptian gallery and I shall never forget the first sight of Ginger; that ancient, crouching, baked man from the pre-mummification era. Since that time I have taken many hundreds of children to the British Museum and each time have been given back a tiny moment of my childhood as I watch their horror and awe at seeing Ginger.

The head of the JD was a lanky, longhaired New Zealand philosopher called Mr. Cooper. As our class teacher he hustled us through the necessary basic skills session each morning before reading breathtakingly gripping stories of high deeds and derring-do set in the Outback or in deepest Africa.  He introduced us to poetry and used one of the most innovative, rhythmic and mesmerising early 20th century poems called The Congo by Vachel Lindsay.[1]

At a recent Frensham reunion in a pub with a bunch of bespectacled, slightly deaf, balding and forgetful septuagenarians, we spontaneously started reciting The Congo, banging our spoons to percussive effect much to the amazement of the waiters.  Mr Cooper also taught us DH Lawrence’s The Snake and Robert Browning’s How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.  Heady stuff for ten- year- olds.

Each afternoon we’d be put into mixed age groups for Activities such as country dancing, bookbinding , lino cutting or music and after that there’d be aeons of free time in which we could roam throughout the large grounds and the woods without an adult in sight. 

    There was a group of bright, inquisitive older children whose intense enthusiasm in their current craze would sweep us all up.  Names from over 60 years ago spring up: Tim Proctor, Martin Patrick, Neil Farmer.  We’d be caught up by whatever was their current passion. That first term there was a craze for coelacanths – a fish thought to have become extinct but which had turned up in a net the year before but then came the next obsession; there was to be a solar eclipse at the end of June in my first term and those boys were seething with excitement at the prospect.  Charts were drawn up, models made, statistics displayed, viewing points organised.  We were at fever pitch by 30^th June. Mr. Cooper gave us severe warnings about not looking at the sun with the naked eye, so we’d run off to one of the school’s crumbling greenhouses to collect pieces of broken glass whose surface we’d smoke with a lighted match to produce a primitive filter.  No one was cut by the glass and no one’s retina was permanently damaged by using what we now know is an inadequate way to protect the eyes.  When the hour of the eclipse came we rushed out of the classroom, took up our positions and marvelled as we peered through our smoky glass, felt a slight chill, watched twilight descend and heard a chorus from some disorientated birds while the sun darkened precisely at the  predicted moment and all we could see of it was a white, shimmering outline. 

            The school dining room had been converted from a large, north facing garage.  It was cold and draughty, but it also had several drains whose metal grilles could be prized up and where uneaten portions of rubbery stews with over-boiled cabbage could be secreted.  Despite the fact that rationing had just ended, school food in that era was horrible. We usually had dried up streaky bacon rashers drowned in tinned tomatoes for breakfast but to this day I can recall the gastronomic glory of a having big bowl of proper Bircher muesli made with grated apples and lots of plump raisins.  It only appeared once but I can still taste it to this day. 

Summer Term 1954, The A Class in the JD> Back row L to R Pammy Clarke, Janet Orlik, Carol Cornelius, Barbara Mollett, Jane Dowie,  Middle Row, David Butterfield, Patrick Banks, Anne Jedlin, Roger Speak (Squeak) , Geraldine Castle, Clare Thomas, Front Row, Martin (Cubby) Patrick, Tim Proctor, Joe Brumwell, David Knowler and Neil Farmer.

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[1] Today the poem is banished as it dredges up frightening and pervasive racial stereotypes.