Paper would have been too expensive in those days. It wasn't something you'd dish out to kids to write all over and then throw away. Instead, we had black slates in little wooden frames and we'd write on them during lessons, sitting on our little wooden benches, and after the lesson we'd wipe the slates down ready to use again. I suppose that's where English got the expression "wipe the slate clean" for starting again or starting fresh. It was a pretty 'sustainable' or 'ecological' practice when you think about it. No paper wasted. No electricity used, as gets used for all the computers and networks that are in schools today.
On this particular day, one summer, I obviously wasn't concentrating very much on what the teacher, Mrs Roscoe, was teaching us because I started fiddling around with my short piece of chalk and after a moment decided to push it up my nose. It went up easily but almost immediately I became slightly alarmed to realise I couldn't get it down again. I signalled to a little friend what I'd done, tried to extract the thing, and gradually got more alarmed that I had my piece of chalk stuck up my nose. The other kids were all busily copying something down that Mrs Roscoe had written on the blackboard. After a while I realised I'd have to tell her what I'd done and put my hand up and confessed. "I've pushed a piece of chalk up my nose and I can't get it down."
She brought me to the front of the class and had a look and then told the other pupils they were to carry on writing on their slates while she took me to the headmaster. I thought I was going to get the cane for being naughty. In those days, the Headmaster or Headmistress of a school was like god. You automatically had respect for them and would never question their authority. If ever you were taken to see the Head it usually meant you were in trouble and you'd be fairly worried. I was only small, too, and the Headmster, Mr Turner, was a tall thin man who loomed very large in my eyes. I suppose I was a bit scared of him.
When the teacher explained what I'd done he had a look at me and then took me by the hand and led me out of his office, down the corridor and out of the school.
I had no idea what was happening and felt a bit scared. I must be in a lot of trouble because I'd never been taken anywhere by the Headmaster before. In fact, he led me to his house and called his wife to have a look at me. Mrs Turner was quite a kindly woman because she smiled and took me into their garden. She was carrying a tartan travel rug - I'd never seen a travel rug before - and she laid me down on it. Then she told me to look up at the lovely blue sky. I obediently stared at the sky - it was lovely, cloudless and clear blue - and she produced a pair of tweezers and hoicked the chalk from its place.
Still surprised not to have been told off and punished, I was even more amazed when she took me back into the house, into the kitchen, and produced an orange which she handed to me with a smile. In those days an orange was a very exotic fruit. I normally had one a year, at Christmas and not on any other occasion. Kids these days have lovely red and white Christmas stockings stuffed with presents but back then a Christmas stocking, for me, as for most kids, was one of my dad's socks, washed and dried, and with an apple, an orange and a penny in it. Then, that was all that was available to ordinary families and enough to get the children excited on Christmas morning.
Anyway, I was then escorted back to school and returned to class, clutching my orange and feeling like a little heroine. It was a wonder frankly, that the other kids, seeing me return with an orange as a prize, didn't all start pushing chalk up their noses to get oranges too.
The other random incident that occurs to me is that one day after school I was playing in the churchyard by our house in Wesham (in Lancashire.) I say churchyard but obviously it was a graveyard too as churches all had graveyards at that time. You tended to get christened in your local church, married in your local church, baptise your own kids there and then end up buried there.
I was playing around anyway and noticed two women tending a grave. I would have been, again, about 6, so it was 1935 or 1936. I didn't take much notice but after a while they called me over and asked if I lived round there. Yes, I said, just nearby. They pointed to the grave they were tending and said they lived in Blackburn and it was a long way to come to Wesham graveyard and asked, if they gave me threepence, would I tend the grave for them? I looked at the grave and up at the marble angel on top of the headstone. She probably wasn't huge but I was small and she looked huge to me. She was grey though she must originally have been white and she was half-covered in moss and a bit grubby. So was the headstone. The grave was a bit overgrown and the women were clearing it and had fresh flowers to put on it. I must have looked a bit doubtful about the task because they assured me it was just a question of keeping the weeds off the grave and tidying it up once in a while.
Eyeing the threepence, I agreed and promised to look after the grave. I can't even remember whose grave it was or what name was on it. The two women went off quite happily, obviously relieved to feel they could abandon the grave without having it on their conscience. I pocketed the money, gave the marble angel another look and then dashed home to show my mother the threepenny coin. She swiftly took it off me and put it in my money box. I was crestfallen because I never saw money come out of my money box - I only ever saw it go in. If ever I got a penny for some reason, it tended to go into the box and I think, looking back, that the money must have been used for things I needed for school or maybe helped pay for food or birthday or Christmas presents.
My mother told me quite solemnly that I had made a promise to look after the grave and had accepted payment and I would have to be as good as my word. I was slightly regretting having pocketed the threepence by this point but I understood that tending the grave was now my responsibility.
Over the next few weeks my mother would ask from time to time: "Have you tended the grave this week?"
Admitting I'd sort of forgotten about it, I'd plod over to the graveyard with a heavy heart and a little garden fork and trowel, kneel down beside the grave, and clear the weeds away. That went on for weeks but eventually I think even my honourable mother must have started to think that paying threepence to have a grave tended in perpetuity was a bit unrealistic. She eased up on reminding me about my duties and gradually I forgot about the grave and the marble angel.
In those days of course, relatives and husbands and wives were in the habit of tending graves carefully for many years. Weeds would be cleared, fresh flowers would be brought. In Scotland and the Meditteranean countries they still do that very often. In Italy - and in France, where one of my daughters lives - relatives keep photographs of their loved ones sheltered from the rain and renew flowers on elaborate tombs. On All Saints Day, the 1st of November, they buy flowers and make special trips to honour and remember the dead. English communities don't tend to do that much any more. Old-style English communities broke up largely in the post-war years and these days everyone moves a lot. You wouldn't necessarily live anywhere near a relative's grave now even if they'd been buried instead of cremation, which is much more the fashion.
Maybe those two women were some of the first in that process of moving away - leaving your village, leaving the place of your birth, going to the nearest town or city - Blackburn or Blackpool in this case - or, as people increasingly did, going 'down south'.
Thirteen years later, as a young woman who'd got through the war, survived the rationing and a few incendiary bombs, I would do the same myself. When I moved away though, it wouldn't be to Blackpool or London, it would be to Washington DC in America. Quite a move for a teenager from rural Lancashire in those days. I was to meet, marry and have my children with a man nearly twenty years older than me, a (totally lapsed catholic) man in the Royal Air Force who would take this girl who'd stuck chalk up her nose and played in the graveyard at Wesham church, and marry her in the great cathedral in Washington. He'd introduce me, for a time, to a post-war life of fun, cocktail parties, cigarettes (always cigarettes) and British airforce and embassy culture. It would be quite a change from the life I'd known.
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