CHAPTER ONE – MEMORIES OF VILLAGE SCHOOLDAYS
When I was a little girl I went to Codsall School from my home in Codsall Wood. I started there in March 1918. The Great War was still on then and for our midday meal we had to go down to the Parish Institute Room where the ladies of the village served us with a hot dinner. When I first started school, food rationing was still in force, although it wasn't as well organised as it was during the 2nd World War.The ladies managed as well as they could. I remember it always seemed to be haricot beans and vegetable stew, or if it wasn't that it was lentil cutlets.This went on until 1919, but certainly not later.
We also went down to the Parish Room on Tuesdays after the war, because on this day, if you had your threepence, you could go and eat the food prepared in the morning by the girls doing cooking. On other days I used to take a lunch and we would sit around the fire at school. When the Parish Rooms were being renovated we still had our threepences off our mothers and we went down to the shop and bought a pennyworth of broken biscuits and a pennyworth of crisps, (without telling them at home of course.)
Many children walked to the school from a long way away.They came from the Hatton's, Oaken, Codsall Wood, Dam Mill and Bilbrook, and as far away as Kingswood. The children stayed at the little school at Kingswood until they were seven and then they walked to Codsall. (I think Mrs Shaw was the teacher at Kingswood then). The school was in the building near to Codsall Church. The Infants were in the room which is on your left as you stand facing the school. There were two classes in there with just a curtain to separate them. It didn't even go right up to the ceiling. Then in the main body of the building there was Standard I, in a self-contained room. Standards II, III and IV were in the next part of the school. They were separated by partitions which could be pushed aside to make one big room. At the opposite end from the Infants was the 'New Building'. It was possibly put on just before the War. In that room was the top class which they used to call the 'Study' class, for the pupils who were going to sit the scholarship to go on to the Grammar or to the Girls High School in Wolverhampton.
Miss Violet Jones was the teacher of the Admission Class and her sister Mrs Cockerill was the teacher in the next class of Infants. Standard I was taken by Miss Lane. She was very brisk and lively and was a strict disciplinarian. In her classroom there was an old harmonium. She would stand up to play it and look at us from over the top of the instrument. She was quite a petite lady, but was obviously afraid of thunderstorms because whenever there was a thunderstorm she went into the tall map cupboard in the corner of the room.
We used to take flowers to school and put them into jars on the window-sill. Standard II was taught by Miss Blackwell. She was another petite, fiery lady. The teacher of Standard III was Mrs Mason and Miss Sherwood had the girls of the IVth and Vth class. Miss Sherwood was a perfect lady, always immaculately turned out. Standard IV and V The school changed to gas lighting when I was there. That was quite an event. When I first went there we had paraffin lamps. A Standard V boy distributed and collected the registers in the morning and afternoon, and wrote the total attendances for the day on a small notice-board outside the Headmaster's little room. (This was a structure rather like a greenhouse built in a wide part of the corridor. It was overcrowded if two people were in it).
The attendance was usually a little more than 200. It's interesting to read in Mrs Cockerill's Memories that the same system was in operation when she was a monitor, at 12 years old, in about 1893. We were 'summoned by bells'. The school bell was in a little turret above Standard 11's classroom, where the bell-rope hung. Before morning and afternoon school the bell was rung twice, a short ring - the 'Warner' (if you were a distance from school you started to run!) and then the |
