Village School

The school I will always remember will be my first one, at the top of Beck Lane in Thurgarton. It was directly on the corner with the main road to Nottingham and the lane to the railway station and on to Hoveringham and the Trent, which we use to call Hoveringham Ferry. It was Beck Lane because the small brook ' The Beck' flowed alongside the lane and there was a bridge outside the school and onwards under the main road into the woods on Priory Park. There was a farmy yard and barns not far down from the school and in the Summer they would assemble a steam engine and a thrashing machine 'n binder and harvest the grain.
Slowly the bags were filled and stored in the barn and the bales of hay grew into stacks for the winter months. All the kids would assemble and most of us were given jobs to do in the process. That is when we weren't chasing little mice escaping the machinery and darting all over the yard.
God help us if theHSE was about in those days!
I can't remember the farmers name. Was it Thornton's?

The village school was provided for all, infants, primary and secondary and was divided by huge sliding doors. Infants and Primary one side and the older children up to 15 years in the other. Two teachers and a dinner lady was all that was needed to accommodate the whole village education system.

The school had a large and very tall wall. In fact it was sunk below the level of the road and formed part of the bridge. It had the ubiquitous circle targets painted on the walls for ball games and a May Pole in one corner. I remember it being rigged up and used only once.

The entrance to the school which was predominantly Victorian, perhaps Gothic Revival of the type typified of village schools still being used pre and post war. The doorway was a single wide arched door to an Ante Room where onwards were the rows of coat hooks in the Cloaks Room or turn left into one of the two classrooms. Beyond the Cloaks were the school kitchens. Well at least where they received the hay boxes from the school meals service.
The lad’s toilet was outside in a small walled garden. It was pretty crude with a slate urinal on one wall and a water closet in a 'dunny like' construction in one corner. There was a raised garden but I can't recall what was planted out there or ever seeing anyone maintain it.

I remember waiting to hear the arrival of the milkman delivering our free school milk and someone recently reminded me that there was a choice of orange juice if you booked it beforehand. The milk was handed out before going out for morning break, probably to make sure we drank it 'cause they were keen on getting my generation healthy after the short supplies of the war.

Even though we were a rural village school we had a school radio receiver, which was turned on for the morning school programmes. I think we would have called it a 'wireless' in those days, come to think of it? We also had a gramophone for listening to classical music but that was an older 'wind up' version so we weren’t that well advanced!

In the younger students classroom there was a sliding hatch door where our dinners were served from and eaten at the desks. I reckon this was the time when I came to dislike mashed potatoes because for some reason they seemed to always have some hard and unpleasant lumps.
 But for the fifties the Education Service must have thought they were giving the countryside kids a revolutionary service.