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At Upware, which was about one and a half miles along the lode bank and then tarmac road, there was a small school which was a primary school when I attended it. There was a total of twelve pupils aged between four and eleven by the time I was ready to move to the next school at eleven years old.
Miss Ruby Barton was the one teacher at the school. All pupils sat together in one room, regardless of their age, for most of the day. The BBC used to put out some lessons over the radio and we used to pull a folding partition across so that some children could listen to the radio whilst the others carried on their normal lessons with Miss Barton.
Because of the small number of pupils, there were not any team games or school sports, but we did have radio lessons like "Music and Movement" to give us some degree of fitness. Most of us walked to school and worked on the local farms so we were reasonably fit anyway.
Miss Barton was a remarkably gifted teacher. For some six or seven years not one of her pupils failed the eleven plus exam which decided who went to Soham Grammer School for boys and Ely High School for girls, and who went to Wicken School. Fiddler Avey from Wicken was paid by the local authority to provide transport for the boys to Soham. The girls travelled with us and then caught a bus to Ely.
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