I did have very happy days at school, I’m not saying they were the happiest of my life, but I had fun, I made friends, I received an excellent education. I started at Milton Road Infants School in Cambridge when I was four, and I went into Miss North’s class; she was a fearsome lean brown lady, with a croaky voice and utterly terrifying for the youngest children in the school! My next teacher was Miss Howse who had grey hair but I think was actually fairly young; she had a soft cooing voice and was a great teacher. All the children lived in the same area, all around the school and so I was with the same group with most of them from the age of four until eleven when we went to different schools.
I often think about my classmates; I don’t suppose they ever think about me! When I was about five, I had a friend called Oliver who was half Chinese; he left school probably before we went into the Juniors when we were six, but I remember going to his house for tea. We used to play with a younger boy called Toby who wore leather shorts… I wonder if his family were German? There was a beautiful little girl in my class called Angela Dreyfus; we had pictures on our coat pegs and on the blankets we had for our afternoon nap. I had a camel, and so wished I had the strawberry, but Angela had it so I didn’t mind. She looked how I imagined Snow White, with a heart-shaped face and dark hair. I was also friendly with Barto Whiley, but he left school after a couple of years; I remember him having curly brown hair and glasses. There was a French boy called Pierre, who I had to line up with and hold hands to go into school in pairs. He loved playing in the sandpit but never brushed the sand from his hands, and I didn’t like the feel of it at all!
Lois Elsden 