Zena's entry:
To my inexperienced young senses familiar with the homely smell of baking cakes and the warmth of my mother’s embrace, my first day at school was a sensational adventure.
The sharp smell of new paint filled the echoey corridors, and my shine-worn desk, its lid engrained with scratches, released a musty store of tickly dust as I opened it. We cut up squares of brightly-coloured paper with little round-ended scissors, a tricky challenge, and thick crayons melted in my hot hands, coating them with wax. The rattle of glass on metal preceded the arrival of a crate of little milk bottles.
Later, in the shuffling muffled hall, we sat cross-legged on the wooden floor. My inquisitive fingers traced the herring-bone pattern, its sunlit scratches lined with something black and soft: polish.
We walked to the playground past stacks of little chairs in alcoves and out into the sunshine, our shouts escaping gloriously to the high sky. A girl approached me, her ponytail shimmering as she talked and her cardigan buttoned up wrongly. She smelt of chocolate.
In the canteen a cacophony of cutlery on plates played as I slid along a smooth bench to my place, and the smell of cabbage mingled with the acridity of steamy windows. Afterwards the toilet block leeched wee smells, and the cold water on my hands released a clinic smell from the crisp paper towel.
Before home-time, crowded together on the floor at Miss Wilkinson’s feet, we had a story. We smelt of wee, wax and stale food on grubby cardigans, and we were tired now, scruffy, hair awry, ankle-socks dirty. Then we were out in the fresh air again, and there was my sister in her pushchair and the familiar, warm, clean smell of Mum as she put her arms round me.
Chris's entry:
I have six memories of that 1950s September day.
The colour of Mummy’s wool coat from C&A. A rich shade of plum which I can still see if I close my eyes. And the smell of it and its itchy roughness and would I remember it at all if I wasn't a little jangle of nerves and excitement and my breakfast somewhere between my tummy and my throat?
The wind off the Mersey, scented with smoke and oil, the perfume of the endless line of ships waiting waiting their turn to enter the Liverpool Docks. An ever-present wind that pushed and scattered the small tribe of mites like me all bursting to get there (where? Mummy said “School” and “you have to go and that's all there is to it”. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know anything); others, crying to go back Home to the safe warm of a coal fire.
That sound. We didn't know what it was, we just knew its mournful far-away hooting as unseen ferries liners tugs dredgers crept through the omnipresent fog on the River. To us it was simply “The Bootle Boo” and even the solid brick walls of the schoolhouse couldn't keep it out.
The smell of the oily wax crayons, powerful and overwhelming as soon as you opened their wooden box. They could bottle that smell and it would get you drunk. It intoxicated us kids who never knew anything like it before and never would again.
My first achievement: a map of England, strips of pastel plasticine (another smell, another memory) on a thin plywood board, dirty with scores of previous maps and untutored imagination and unskilled tiny hands. “Well done, Nicholas!”
Back home, Mummy’s fateful words, “You have to go again tomorrow.”
Clare's entry:
“EVERY day?” I asked, as Mum propelled me gently towards the school door.
“Yes Polly, just like your sister has, for the last five years,” she grinned.
“Now, have a lovely day, see you tonight.”
I stood, staring around me. There was a strange smell, kind of like paint, but not paint. It had something to do with the acres of wooden flooring, maybe polish, or varnish. And everything echoed – voices, laughter, bells.
“Here`s your peg, Polly. For your shoebag, coat and satchel,” explained Miss Norris, my teacher.
Inside the classroom there was a crate full of little bottles of milk with silver tops, a packet of straws balanced on top, and a huge blackboard. Rows of desks stretched to the back of the room, and I scuttled to the one Miss Norris assigned to me.
I ran my finger slowly over the many initials, roughly carved on the lid. “RH woz Here!” “I luv MW.” As I raised the lid, a strange musty smell wafted out, like stale sandwiches. I stowed away my new pencil case as one by one, we acknowledged our names for the register. Gazing at the twins, Pamela and Sue, I wondered how I would ever know which was which.
Then another smell, and an ominous trickling sound. Looking around, I saw a red-haired girl with now, an equally red face, sitting above an ever increasing puddle.
“Eric, mop and bucket please,” Miss Norris called to the Janitor, for the first of many little accidents that term.
Later we sculpted tiny baskets from strips of shiny coloured paper.
The final bell. Dashing down the steps to show Mum my treasure, an older boy stuck his arm out, and caught my little basket, ripping it to pieces.
Real life had begun.
Sally's entry:
My first day at school was not what you’d call a success. I turned up, gas mask box banging against my leg, with Mr and Mrs Lennox, the elderly couple who’d picked me out of our desultory line at the train station the day before.
I know we were meant to be brave, but it’s hard when you‘re sent away at seven years old to go off to who knows where. All I knew was I missed my mam and da.
Anyway, Mr and Mrs Lennox were kind enough, even though they dunked me in a tin bath filled with scalding water in the kitchen and checked me over for lice before they‘d touch me. They left me at the doorway of the daunting brick building I was supposed to call my school. A cross-looking man came and hustled me off to a cavernous, draughty classroom.
It was there I realised my world was gone. I opened my mouth obediently to join in the rote learning, and the other children fell about laughing. They’d only heard flattened vowels and dropped aitches like those in comedy shows on the wireless. I hadn’t realised what it meant, until then, to be a Cockney. I’d always told people proudly I came from London Town, but from that day on I kept it a secret.
I got by that first day by mouthing the times tables we droned, and privately began practising until I had the accent off pat. Within a term, you couldn’t have told the difference. The only trouble was, when my mam and da came to collect me - the bombing hadn’t started after all, so lots of vaccies went back - they didn’t recognise me when I yelled to them out of the crowd. It near broke my heart.
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