By the summer of 1929 one of my mother’s sisters had gained a BSc degree and completed her teacher training. University graduates at that time were experiencing difficulty in finding work, and by August on the following year she was still unemployed.

However, a local post of infants teacher came up and she accepted it, not realising that her first class of new starts would include her nephew - me!!!

 This is the school, on this picture looking much the same as it did then.

Of course I was well warned that I was to call her Miss Hardie, and not Aunt Cissie. I can assure you I was the best behaved pupil, not only in her class, but through all my time in that school, because I knew that any misdemeanour on my part would eventually be reported to my mother.
We soon learned to sit up straight with folded arms, and - most important of all - to keep quiet.

Behaviour in that school was generally pretty good. Of course there was always the strap as a deterrent, and it was used frequently for children caught talking, not paying attention or producing unsatisfactory work.

On one occasion, when I would be about 10 years old, there was an important event which hadn’t happened before. The headmaster visited our class. Now, I’ve no idea what he spoke to us about for, like the rest of the class, I was sitting shaking in fear of this great man.

When he finished talking, he turned to the pupils in the back row and asked the first one, “How long is the River Clyde?”
There was silence! We were horrified when he produced his strap and belted the boy.
He directed the same question to the next pupil, and again, when no answer was forthcoming, he used his strap.
And so he continued along the row, gradually getting nearer to where I sat, trying to appear invisible.
No one knew the answer and the punishments continued till it was my turn.

But - wonder of wonders! He didn’t ask me. Instead he told us the answer, and chided us for not having paid attention to his little talk.

And that’s the story of how I nearly got the strap at primary school!

And how long is the River Clyde? About 106 miles.

I suppose it was around that time when we began having PE from a visiting teacher.

Up until then, the boys of 2 classes were taken by the janitor for football on the hard concrete surface of the playground. (I suppose the girls were knitting or sewing during our game.)
Can you imagine 30/40 boys running around playing football? Most of the time, I didn’t know which side I was on.
My mother used to recall the day I came home from school and proudly announced that I had managed to get a kick at the ball!!!

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As children, my sister and I always enjoyed our weekly visit to our maternal grandparents’ house. There was always plenty to do there, and very often one or two aunts would be willing to play with us.

Going to the other grandparents’ house was a different matter however. There we sat, unseen and unheard, till, probably at my father’s suggestion, (he was very proud of our accomplishments), we were asked to play a piece on the piano. That done, we would revert to our role as silent guests.

Now, I knew that there were two brilliant things in that house which would have entertained two children for hours, and I’ve no doubt that, if I had had the courage to ask for them, they would have been forthcoming.

The first resembled a pair of binoculars, but, when you inserted one of a series of coloured cards into a slot on the side, and looked through the lenses, a wonderful real-life scene appeared. Magic! And the second was a glove puppet with a monkey head. Wonderful!

What happened to those desirable objects, I don’t know. It’s true that I did acquire a precious item from that house, a book which I cherished for many years. It was a Chatterbox Annual which had probably been given to one of my uncles when he was a boy.

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