Free university education? Not in the early 21st century - and not in the early 20th century either.

 Last week I watched the student protests and the attack on Millbank Tower in London. Most of the students seemed to be protesting peacefully but of course there'll always be some who get out of control. I felt sorry for some of the coppers getting hit and cut, and the student who chucked a fire extinguisher off the tower certainly wasn't doing anything progressive. Experience suggests that most of the students smashing windows and breaking things will turn into ordinary middle-aged people with kids and mortgages even though they don't imagine at the moment that they will.

I haven't followed the latest ins and outs of education policy but I know the coalition government is planning to raise university fees and students are demonstrating for free higher education. My daughters both benefited from free university education and I was delighted they had an opportunity that few teenagers got in my day.

They went to university in the 70s though - in those days Britain didn't have a trillion pound budget deficit.

Back in the 30s, when I started school in Lancashire, the opportunity of free university education was still a long way off.

I started school at 5 years old, in 1934, at Joseph's infant school in Wesham. It was a Roman Catholic school, obviously. Most schools were religious and funded by the various religions. My best friend, Betty, went to the local Church of England school. At Joseph's, we sat on long benches to be taught by the only teacher, Mrs Roscoe, who was my mother's cousin. She was a middle-aged married woman with grey hair who wore shapeless cardigans and skirts. To maintain order and discipline she had a leather strap, 2 inches thick, and you got whacked if you stepped out of line. I remember little boys in the class coming back to the benches with their eyes smarting after she'd strapped their hands in punishment. Poor little things!

Unthinkable in today's schools, the strap did help the teacher keep order back then. None of us objected to it. It was just the way discipline was maintained. You didn't question the teacher or the school and parents accepted teachers' authority too.

When I was about 8 I left Joseph's and went to the Roman Catholic school in Westby. The teacher here, Miss Gillett, was another of my mother's cousins. Miss Gillett was an aging spinster who used a thin cane to keep order. No wonder, because she had about 30 of us kids aged between 8 and 14 and quite a few were farm boys who would have preferred to be anywhere but in a schoolroom.

There were no set lessons and we didn't know what we'd be studying from day to day. Miss Gillett would simply come in each day and say: "Today we'll do arithmetic" or "Today we'll do English." The farm boys regularly got caned for not paying attention or for being a bit cheeky. From time to time - I can't remember exactly why; we probably sniggered at something - all of us had to line up and Miss Gillett caned all of us. I remember getting caned, that little whip hitting my hand.

There were only 2 classrooms in the school. Up to 8 years old, children were taught by Mrs Martin . She wore a motheaten fur coat and thought she was rather wonderful. In our classroom, with children aged 8 to 14 all mixed up, it was sometimes a bit chaotic. I can't remember really learning anything at either school but somewhere along the way, someone - Miss Gillett I suppose - taught me to read.

One term when I was about 10, Miss Gillett kept me separate from the other pupils for a couple of weeks. She took me to a cupboard where there was a set of encyclopedias and told me to sit and read them. I had no idea why, but I dipped in and out of them a bit in between looking out to see what the other children were doing. Day after day I sat and leafed through the various volumes reading snippets of information.

I had some form with encyclopedias as it happened because some time before this a salesman had come to our door at home and persuaded my father to buy 6 (or was it 10?) volumes of a series called Arthur Mees' Children's Encyclopedias. The volumes had elegant dark blue binding and looked very appealing to me. I had it in mind from the start that they were fairly precious because my father had to pay 6 pounds and 10 shillings, which he could only afford to do in installments.

Anyway, at the end of the 2 weeks in the cupboard with these volumes I was taken to the nearby town of Kirkham and told I was to sit an exam. It was a scholarship to the Catholic convent - Layton Hill - in Blackpool.

Miss Gillett told me no-one had ever got a scholarship to the convent from Westby school and I was the only pupil being entered for it. She didn't say why she'd picked me.

I vaguely remember there were questions which required Yes/No answers and some which were problem solving types. After the exam I went home and forgot about it altogether until Miss Gillett told us one day that the scholarship results had been announced in the Lancashire Daily Post, that I'd won a scholarship and would be going to Layton Hill Convent and that all the pupils were getting a one day holiday off school to celebrate.

The other pupils were delighted to get a day's holiday but I was terrified. I wouldn't know anyone at the convent and I'd have to get a bus to Blackpool and back every day.

It seems strange, looking back, that there was a war on and we lived in daily fear of the Nazi bombers - listening every time we heard a plane because even kids could tell the difference between 'our' planes and theirs - and yet we kids were worrying about normal things like going to a new school or cheering because of a day off school. Some things never change.

Through my school years it seemed perfectly normal to have air raid drills where we went into the little shelter and put our gas masks on. We carried gas masks everywhere we went, not just to school, and even the littlest kids knew how to fit them. Only if we were playing near our homes did we leave our gas masks inside. Gas wasn't used in the second world war though as far as I'm aware. The fear of gas, and distribution of gas masks, was really a hangover from the First World War when so many men were gassed in the trenches. I was only caught in one incendiary bomb attack which I'll describe some other time. We were out in the back garden and heard a plane and all looked up, listening as usual for the noise telling us it was 'one of ours.' It wasn't, the noise was a German plane and suddenly there were flames coming up all over the place, all around us.

But as I say, children - like adults - have their own mundane worries even in wartime and when that summer ended and I went off to my new school I was still in a state of terror. With hundreds of girls, Layton Hill seemed huge after my little school at Westby. I now had to wear a school uniform, which I wasn't used to. There were around 30 girls in each class. I could sense that this school was going to be different from the 'education' I'd known before.

But I not only settled in quickly, I loved it. I found I loved learning and everything we were taught seemed fascinating after the rather unstructured and informal education I'd had up till then. After the first year we were all to be streamed into A and Alpha classes. The brighter girls would do Latin; the less academic would do domestic science. I quite liked cookery and wanted to be in that stream but I was placed in the Latin stream.

Had I not won the scholarship to the convent, I would have had to go to the local state school which didn't have a good reputation. My parents could never have afforded to pay for my education. As it was, they had to pay for hockey sticks and boots, tennis racquets and other sports gear and it was all expensive. The scholarship paid my fees and travel to and from school and, I think, my uniform. But both my mother and father seemed to know education was valuable though they weren't educated themselves. My father had left school at 12, which was common in those days, and I guess my mother left around the same age. Dad earned 5 pounds a week at about this time, working for a local market gardener who had a nursery. My cousins mostly worked in the local biscuit factory and my mother had been a weaver in the cotton mill. I would have had to do the same if I'd had to leave school earlier.

At 17, I got my School Certificate. This meant I'd passed exams in Latin, English Grammar, English Literature, French, Art, Science, Religious Knowledge and Maths. If you didn't pass English Grammar you couldn't get your School Certificate, even if you passed all the other exams.

The big question for me now was What next? In those days, most people from poor or modest backgrounds had only a dim idea about universities. I know that I liked the thought of going to a university but didn't know anything about them. I knew my father could never pay for me to go and wasn't sure if there was a new scholarship I could try to get.

As it happened, the problem of finding a scholarship never arose. My parents explained to me that now I had my School Certificate I'd need to leave the convent, find a job, and bring some money into the house. They could no longer afford to feed and clothe me without me contributing something each week.

This was just a matter-of-fact reality and I accepted it without question. I knew we were stretched financially as my father was buying our terraced house in Wesham in some sort of mortgage arrangement. I don't know how it worked. He didn't even have a bank account. But once a month we went to a solicitor's house in Kirkham and handed over an envelope with the payment in it in cash.

I had no idea how I'd find a job or what sort of job I should - or even could - look for but an opportunity presented itself almost straight away. The convent secretary was one of the nuns, Mother Clara. She explained that the convent was admitting more pupils and she would need an assistant to help her. If I would stay on at the school - now as assistant secretary - she would teach me shorthand and typing and I'd get a small wage. I was happy to agree. It was a strange first job. Still a teenager, I was now working at the school where my luckier school friends were still studying in the sixth form. I wasn't allowed in the staff room until my second year in the job. And I was learning to be a school secretary. So I was halfway between staff and pupil really.

I remember showing Mother Clara a letter one day that had been sent from an African country. I forget which one all these years later. It was from the parents of a girl called Rosette Solomon. Out of the blue, they announced that they had dispatched their daughter to England and she would shortly arrive at the convent as a boarder. I can't remember how payment was made but Rosette duly arrived at Layton Hill in Blackpool. She attracted quite a bit of interest from the staff and pupils as she was the first black child many of us had ever seen!

Disabled Children Born in the 1920s - My Baby Brother's Fate

I was born in 1929 and was brought up as an only child. But I wasn't the only child my parents had. A few years before I was born, my mother gave birth to a little boy.

My brother was born at home in Kirkham in Lancashire, just as I would be. But whereas I was healthy, he was not. He was a very sick baby. My father told me years later that he had a hole in his back - a sort of wound that was unhealed. Although I can't be sure, I think he must have had spina bifida.

I don't know what the treatment is these days for a baby with spina bifida. It's not a condition I know much about. But in those days, it was often thought best that a very sick or disabled baby was left to die. Or - who knows - even "helped" to die. I think that is what happened with my brother. My father told me many years later that our doctor said just after the birth that the baby would only live for about a week. Obviously it was terribly upsetting for my parents. Their first child...

My father arranged straight away to have his son christened. We were catholics and in those days we believed without even really thinking about it that an unchristened baby who died would go to limbo and spend eternity there. (What a terrible thing for a religion to tell parents facing the death of a child.) Anyway, my brother was christened. The priest came to the house for the baptism and the sick baby was given the name William.

Each day that week William lay in his cradle and each evening my father administered a medicine to him. He was told by the doctor to fetch the medicine from the chemist each evening. When my father eventually talked about the death of my brother, when I was an adult, he told me that the doctor had never explained what the medicine was or what it was for but my dad noticed that each evening after he had the medicine, William was worse. At the end of the week, he died.

My father told me that it hadn't even occurred to him to question the doctor's orders - in those days the doctor, like the priest, was a bit like God - you didn't question them and you certainly didn't challenge them. It didn't even cross your mind. However, looking back, my father said he'd often - naturally - thought about his sick baby boy and had concluded that, whatever the doctor had ordered, it had probably killed William.

He could never know for sure and I will never know. My mother had died by the time my father talked to me about this. I don't know if he had ever shared his opinion with her. Probably not. She was ill most of her adult life with pernicious anaemia and he probably would have thought she wasn't strong enough to talk about losing the baby.

My dad was of course a man of his time and when he talked about William and his death he talked about it simply and objectively. He just said that he thought the doctor had probably told him to administer a 'medicine' that had killed the baby. He didn't say he thought that was terrible, or for the best, or anything else - just that he thought that was what had happened. I'll never know if he was inwardly angry at the doctor or calmly accepting that a medical judgement had been made or even reassured by the belief that William had been spared a long life of pain and disability.

I suspect, because it was back in the 1920s, that he may simply have thought that's how life was and that was the professional decision taken by the doctor. It makes me shiver though to think that my kind dad may have spent that week trustingly giving 'medicine' to his sick baby son in the hope it would improve his condition, if in fact it was killing him.

Growing Up In Lancashire in the 1930s

I was born in a Lancashire town called Kirkham, a few miles from the Fylde coast.

I thought of Kirkham the other day because I was having lunch in the White Horse pub in Shere (in Surrey where I now live) and got chatting to two old chaps, two brothers. I noticed they had Lancashire twangs to their voices even though, like me, they'd lost most of their accent from decades of living in the south of England. They turned out to have had childhood friends in Kirkham and we reminisced a bit about what the town and surrounding area were like before and during the war.

Kirkham had one main street with a few shops, a cinema, a municipal swimming pool and an ancient Grammar School for boys. My family moved to the neighbouring town of Wesham (pronounced Wessom) before I was old enough to remember the house where I was born. In those days women tended to have their babies at home. My mother also gave birth to a boy some years earlier, my brother, but he had spina bifida and died not long after he was born. It was seen as perfectly normal to give birth at home in the same bed where your babies were conceived. It was years later that it became normal for women to give birth in hospitals. Certainly it was pretty normal by the time I had my first child in 1953. That was in America. My second was born in 1956, in England, also in hospital. I wonder if the old house where I was born is still standing, like me, 81 years later.

Wesham was a much smaller town, with just a handful of shops and a railway station and at the bottom of the town a weaving mill where most people from Wesham worked. The cotton mill, to me as a small child, was a really fearsome place full of noise and the clanking of the weaving looms. No-one could be heard in the din of the mill machinery and the only way the workers could communicate was by sign language - which was called me-mo-ing - or by lip reading. My mother was a weaver in the Wesham mill.

I only ever got to go right inside the mill once. It was probably in 1934, when I was about five. My mother had recently gone back to work there and I don't know who was supposed to be looking after me but I was found crying for my mother outside the mill. I was taken in and reunited with her and that was the end of her return to work! From then on she stayed at home.

My father was a labourer with the Water Board and earnt a bit of extra money helping with tasks like haymaking on local farms.

I had 3 aunties and 1 uncle. Auntie Polly was the eldest, then Auntie Nellie - who was deaf and dumb following an attack of scarlet fever when she was two - my mother Isabella was next and then Auntie Lizzie, who suffered from epilepsy.

Auntie Lizzie worked in a café in St Annes and on Saturday nights would bring round to our house a bag of cakes that were left over, unsold. This was one of the highlights of my week. Sometimes if I was lucky there would be vanilla slices or cream crisps; other times there were only bath buns.

Auntie Lizzie had no children and her husband, my Uncle Jim, worked as a signalman on the railyway. This was a lonely occupation, sitting alone waiting to work the signals for the trains, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown, having first tried to commit suicide by gassing himself. Fortunately, my cousin Joe Lambert, Auntie Polly's son, called round, found him and rescued him and poor Uncle Jim was carted off to the local mental hospital where he remained for many years.

As well as my aunties and uncle and a lot of cousins I also had both my granddads. My mother's father, Granddad Gillett, was pretty fearsome to me. He seemed about ten feet tall and had a grim face with a large hooked nose. He had apparently ruled his children, including my mother, with a rod of iron. None of them got married till they were thirty - he wouldn't let them. They all lived at home and I gather he took a good proportion of their wages off them as he retired early and even went on holiday to Spain with Monsigneur Rockliffe, our parish priest - a thing unheard of at that time in Lancashire society. The Monsigneur obviously squirelled money away somehow - when he died he left enough money to buy everyone in the parish a prayer book. All the books had a dedication to him inside them. I've still got my copy. He disapproved of books that weren't religious. He came round one day and saw that my Aunt Polly had bought a romance. He threw it on the fire!

Granddad Gillett allowed his children out on Saturdays once they were grown up, but they had to be in by 9pm. Granddad would be standing by the door with a cup of cold water from which they all had a drink before going up to bed.

Auntie Lizzie finally broke ranks and got engaged and then Auntie Polly and my mother followed suit. My father and mother courted for seven years before marrying, partly because Granddad was so strict and partly because my father - who used to come into Wesham on Saturday nights to seee my mum - suffered from an inability to get past the Swan Hotel where he used to put up his bike. After seven years my mother issued an ultimatum: we either get married or it's all off! They got married and I never knew my father to go into a pub or take a drink, except perhaps at Christmas or just a glass beer after helping with the haymaking.

Granddad Gillett died when I was 8. We had a sort of lying in state where Granddad was propped up in bed with 6 big candles burning, 3 on either side of him, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered round saying prayers for the dead, with our parish priest in attendance. I was positioned at the bottom of the bed, peering up at my dead granddad. I have never forgotten the experience. I was bought a new grey coat to go to the funeral. In those days everyone went into deepest mourning when a close relative died and mother and the aunts all went to Preston, the nearest town, to buy their black. My mother apparently tried on a dress which looked a bit peculiar round the collar but the sales assistant assured her "it's the latest cowl collar, madam." It wasn't. Mother had put the dress on back to front. In spite of granddad's recent death apparently all my aunts fell about laughing.

It was a nice day for the funeral, sunny but cold, and everyone cried by the graveside. Afterwards the whole family went to the Swan Hotel - I think it was the only pub in Wesham - and had a funeral breakfast. Salad and boiled ham at that time was a great luxury.

Another memory, apart from seeing my grandfather dead in bed, is the way my aunts and their husbands, having been weeping at the graveside, were now all laughing and joking and making merry. I was shocked by this. I've been to enough funerals now, at my age, to know this is often the way, but then, with the logic of an 8 year old, I felt it was not right!

The tradition of wearing black when you were in mourning for a close relative persisted up until the late 1940s. When my mother died in 1949 I was 19 years old. We were told she died of pernicious anaemia. Young people then, unlike today, didn't wear black clothes. My father wanted me in black from head to foot and I was appalled. One of my aunts prevailed upon him at least to let me wear a white blouse with a black suit, which I did.

I was by myself with my mother when she died. It was a beautiful June morning and my father had gone to fetch the doctor. We had a little car by that time but no telephone. My mother, who had not had good health for years, became ill in the night and father wakened me at about 5.30am to sit with her while he drove to fetch the doctor from Wesham. She died whilst he was gone. I had read about people having a 'death rattle' and it was true with my mother.

Like granddad, my mother stayed at home in her coffin until the funeral.

At first, I was nevous about this and was necessarily in the house alone with her whilst my father went about making arrangements for the funeral . But then I got used to it and would go in and see her and give her a kiss and talk to her a bit.

I'm jumping ahead of myself here though and will go back to our life in Wesham when I was a small child.

Our house was an end-of-terrace but on the 'top road', not down near the cotton mill, which was reckoned to be a bit more elite! The front door opened right onto the pavement, with a little hall called a vestibule before you opened the door into the living room. We had just one living room, a fairly big kitchen with a walk-in pantry, and 3 bedrooms. There was no fridge back then. The pantry was just cold. There were shelves where my mother kept butter, milk, cream and meat. They were all covered to protect them from flies. She made cakes and plum and damson preserves for the winter. We had no bathroom or indoor toilet. The toilet was up at the end of our small garden but was at least a water closet and not one of the old type privies which were all they had on my aunties' and uncles' farms out in the countryside.

We had chamber pots under the beds for night time use. My mother and father had a splendid one, black with pink roses all over it, which had been a wedding present.

For baths, every Saturday night a tin bath with a high back, which hung on a nail outside the back door, was brought in and set before the fire. I was then bathed by my mother and put into a clean nightie, with my clean clothes laid out ready for Sunday. I wore a vest which always had a St Christopher's medal pinned to it with a little gold safety pin. Why my mother thought this was necessary, as St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers and I never went anywhere, I don't know. After the vest I wore a garment called a liberty bodice, a sort of sleeveless jacket with buttons up the front. I wore navy blue fleecey knickers and long brown woollen stockings, kept up with garters made by my mother from pieces of elastic.

I suppose all these garments were necessary because we had no heating except for the coal fire in the living room. The coal man used to come round with his horse and cart, and coal on the back and my father would buy sacks of coal. Also, we had no electric light, just gas light. The lights had mantles made of gauze and you pulled a small cord to get the gas to flow. Then we lit the mantles with lighted tapers. Outside our house was a street light and that was also gas. A little man used to come along in winter with a long pole and a taper on the end to light it.