When I started school, at the age of five, I was taken care of by girls who were about six or seven years old.  They seemed very grown up and it was comforting to feel so well looked after by them.  All the children carried gas masks to school in a cardboard box about half the size of a shoebox with string attached to it for fastening round our necks.  I cannot recall learning to read or write but it must have taken up a large part of my time.  I remember the teacher handing out what appeared to be chocolate animals.  My mouth watered as she neared me, but all she had to give us was brown coloured cut outs of animals around which we had to draw their outline.  The school had one big room divided by a moveable partition, with a fireplace in each part, two cloakrooms and outside toilets.  The windows were very high so that we could not look out of them and be distracted.

Every day we were each given a bottle of milk, which contained about a third of a pint.  In the winter, the teacher put all the milk round the fire in a semi-circle so that we had a warm drink but occasionally placed the milk too near the fire and the bottles were too hot to hold.
My favourite times were when we went on "nature walks" and were shown the wild flowers and told their wonderful names like Shepherd's Purse, Scarlet Pimpernel, Pineapple Mayweed, Red and White Campion, Bird's Eye, Rosebay Willowherb and many others.  In the autumn, we went out to collect rose hips, which were used for making Vitamin "C."

In March, there was always a lot of excitement in the rookeries as the rooks made a lot of noise preparing their nests for a new generation.  This, almost tangible excitement, seemed to affect us, and made us glad to say goodbye to the long dark winter and look forward to a new spring.  So many things told us that spring was just around the corner like "Sticky Buds" which were the new shoots of the horse-chestnut tree, which we broke off, put in vases and watched the leaves unfurl.  We always tasted the fresh green growth of hawthorn, which we called "bread and cheese." We picked the first violets and their lovely fragrance filled our houses.  The whole countryside comes alive in spring and you can almost feel the energy of a billion plants bursting into new growth.

We really believed that if March came in like a lion, it would go out like a lamb, and vice versa, and it always seemed to obey that rule.  We also thought that if the rooks built their nests high in the treetops, we could expect a good summer, and if there were a lot of berries in the autumn, we could expect a harsh winter.

We were all given a patch of garden and packets of seeds in order to help Britain become self sufficient in food, but I don't think we were very successful.  The soil had been lovingly turned over by generations of children until there was no goodness in it at all.  After playtime one day, the teacher noticed that a girl called June was missing and asked us where she was.  After a long silence, a girl told her that the boys had lynched her and left her hanging from a tree.  The teacher turned pale, rushed out and found June, hanging by her waist and kicking and screaming to be let down.

I think we invented five-a-side football, as there were never more than about ten boys between the age of five and eleven available to play football.  It was easy to look good when you were eleven.  Everything was rationed and I think we were given two ounces of sweets on a Saturday, which we could eat all at once or spread throughout the week.  Sweets became so unimportant to us that I had no interest in them, and still have not to this day, although I do enjoy chocolate.  Perhaps it was a good thing we did not eat sweets as no one bothered to clean their teeth.  Dental hygiene was non-existent throughout Britain and it was the opinion of almost everyone that all dentists were completely cruel, untrained butchers, so they did not help.

My brother was two years younger than I was but he seemed much smaller because he had a short neck and possibly because of it, caught all the sore throats, and coughs and colds going around.  My parents described him as stubborn and finicky because he refused to eat all kinds of food that he did not like, and refused to wear clothes that caused him to itch, or simply did not please him.  I ate and wore whatever I was given.  He caught almost every illness that was going whereas I seemed immune.

I always felt that he was cantankerous and awkward just for the sake of being so.  We would both spread the same amount of jam on a slice of bread but I then doubled the bread over so that the jam was twice as thick.  He did not, but complained bitterly that I had twice as much jam as he had.  He accused me of cheating.  He complained to our parents, who despaired of him, and I never managed to convince him that we both had exactly the same amount of jam. He seemed to deliberately want to make life unpleasant for me.  We both slept in the same bed and to get my revenge I told him ghost stories, which frightened him, and when he put his head under the bedclothes in fear, I broke wind.  I thought he deserved it.

Once we walked together to Elsham, to visit our grandparents when just before we reached Elsham he decided that he had to go to the lavatory.  I told him to go behind the hedge, which any country person would normally do, but he said that he was going to walk home all the way to Melton Ross. When I pointed out to him that we were just outside Elsham so it would be much quicker to carry on, he ignored me and walked all the way back to Melton Ross. There was more than one occasion when I thought that he was seriously weird, although he followed me to the grammar school, so there must have been a brain there somewhere.

His ways did not last very long and from the age of about five onwards, he eventually became just like everyone else, so it must have been part of his growing up.  I think we were pretty run of the mill, but my granddaughter recently said to her mother, "Our family makes the Osbornes look normal." [Continued]