First Day at School

There was no question about it – I was definitely not looking forward to my first day at Oakdale Junior School in September 1959. That was because of my last day at Stanley Green Infants the previous July.

In order to make the transition as painless as possible – that was the general idea – we were all ushered the short distance between the two schools so that we could spend the afternoon in the care of the teacher who would be looking after us when we returned after the Summer holidays.

Oakdale Junior was one of the largest primary schools in the Borough of Poole, taking about 150 new pupils every year, divided into four classes. These were rigidly streamed with promotions and demotions at the end of each term for those children who exceeded expectations or failed to reach the expected standard. An assessment had already been made at the infants’ school so the streaming came into play right from day one.

That meant that I was placed in Class 4, which was the A stream. The top two streams, in classes 3 and 4, were housed in a separate classroom block across a side road from the main school. It was to this block that my group of pupils was conducted on the afternoon in question.

I could never have imagined the shock that was going to befall me and the other children from Stanley Green. This had been a very progressive school for its time, housed in a building that was only about five years old when I joined the school in 1957. Every classroom was light and airy, with a door leading to a garden area in which lessons were sometimes conducted on fine days in Spring and Summer. Learning through play was a strong element and there were no teachers to whom one could not take an instant liking.

However, the teacher who greeted us in Class 4 at Oakdale Junior was far from likeable. This was Mrs Barnett, who was not only considerably older than most of the teachers at Stanley Green but had also come from a very old-fashioned tradition of teaching in which strict discipline was the top priority. She made it clear at the outset that our job was to attend to her every word and not let our attention flag for an instant. She ordered us to our places – each child at a desk in a row instead of the groups at tables that we had been used to – and told to look directly at her and not even think of talking to anyone else.

Not unnaturally, some of the children wanted to take a look at their new surroundings and pass the odd comment to a neighbour. When Mrs Barnett caught a child doing this she pounced on them, dragged them to the front of the room and whacked them three or four times on the back of the leg with a ruler. This happened several times during the afternoon, either for inattention or failing to answer a question correctly – which was usually because Mrs Barnett assumed that our Stanley Green teachers would already have drilled us in pieces of knowledge that they clearly did not think we were ready to learn.

So that was why I spent a terrible Summer holiday absolutely dreading my first day at Oakdale Junior School. I’m sure that I was not alone in this among the future members of Class 4.

My mother dropped me off at the school on my first morning, but she did not know about the separate classroom block and I was left on the other side of the main school building. I therefore had to ask the crossing warden, who controlled the traffic lights at the busy road junction outside the front of the school, where I had to go. She told me to go through a gate in a high fence, which I duly did, only to find myself in a playground thronging with kids – boys only - from all the years in the school.

A whistle blew and the children were instructed to form up in lines according to the class they now belonged to for the new school year. I joined one of these lines, hoping it was the right one, and followed the instruction to stand to attention then turn left and march off through the cloakroom and into the long corridor off which all the classrooms led. I simply followed the leader and found myself in a classroom that was nothing like the one I remembered from July. We were soon joined by the girls, who had been marched down from the other end of the corridor.

A roll was taken, but my name was not on the register so I could not answer “present” as every other child was able to do. I just sat there, feeling very confused and wondering when Mrs Barnett would show up, because the teacher in front of me was certainly not the harridan I was dreading to meet again.

A few minutes later Mr Knight, the deputy headmaster, came in and asked if there was a John Welford in the room, which there certainly was. He told me that I had placed myself in the C stream and needed to follow him to where I should have been. “Here we go”, I thought. “I wonder what sort of mood Mrs Barnett will be in”.

I was duly taken across the side road and into the correct classroom – Mrs Barnett’s lair.

But Mrs Barnett was not there. Instead, there was a very pleasant young lady called Miss Robinson who welcomed me with a smile and showed me where to sit. She turned out to be an excellent teacher who treated children in a far more civilized way than Mrs Barnett had done and never used any form of corporal punishment on a child, not that she was ever placed in a position where this might have been a possibility.

It turned out that our afternoon with Mrs Barnett had been the final few hours of the latter’s career before her retirement. Why she had decided to end her days as a teacher by whacking as many children as she could is anyone’s guess, but we were all mighty glad that the school had chosen a replacement who was far more deserving to be termed a teacher.

© John Welford