A childhood experience

I couldn't believe my eyes. They were throwing children out of the third floor window! And I was next but one in the queue. Not a queue for bread or meat or bananas, but for being thrown out of a window.

I was eight years old, it was 1949 and my first evening at Hillgrove Preparatory Boarding School in Bangor. I'd never experienced anything like this before. With mounting horror I saw one little boy go to his fate meekly enough, pushed out by two burly teenage girl prefects. But the boy in front of me, about my own age and new here like me, screamed, 'No, no! I don't want to go!'

They fastened some sort of belt round him and tried to heave him out, but he clung to the sill, still screaming. One of the girls thumped his fingers, using her fists like hammers. With a cry of pain, out and down he went. Then it was my turn.

They pulled me up onto the sill. Through the window I could see all the other pupils congregating below, including those who'd been pushed out. They didn't look hurt. The headmaster, in black gown and mortar board, was barking orders through a megaphone.

'Come on, Anita. Buck up, child! Get a move on!' came roaring out of that thing in a posh English voice. I hated his drawing attention to me like that. All the faces below were staring up at me. The two big girls had put the straps round me and were shoving me over the sill. Terrified, I clung on like the previous boy, but was too shy to scream.

They prised my fingers off the sill, one by one. I had no option but to climb out. To my relief the straps round my chest held me firmly. I wasn't going to fall, after all. I hung over the abyss, my feet clamped on the wall.

'Walk down!' cried the girls. 'Walk down the wall!'

I'd never heard of abseiling. How could I walk down a sheer brick wall? I stayed where I was. Nobody could reach me here. Good. What was a fire practice, anyway? They'd never had one at my previous school. Now the Headmaster was bellowing through that megaphone again.

'Anita, just put one foot after the other and walk down slowly and steadily. Slowly and steadily. Come on now, we're all waiting. There are others waiting their turn.' Bet they're not in a hurry, I thought. I relaxed a little and the voices above and below me seemed to die down and go far away. I looked around, beginning to enjoy my high vantage point. The school grounds had tall trees, bushes, little paths that disappeared into promising wildernesses. This could be a good place to play, if they left me alone to explore.

I leaned back and began to walk down the wall. It was easy – I was just beginning to enjoy it when I reached the ground and someone took off my harness.

I turned to the Headmaster. 'Sir, can I have another go?'

He glared at me in disbelief while everyone laughed.

ends (500 words)

Lord Adonis' Project

I read in today's Independent that the pilot project backed by Schools Minister Lord Adonis to give disadvantaged children free places at boarding schools has succeeded, after 3 years, in improving their academic progress to a standard higher than average for their age, according to a report published today. So campaigners now want the scheme expanded.

The number of emotionally deprived children taking part in the scheme at present – 97 - must be an extremely small proportion of the disadvantaged children in the UK. How were they chosen, I wonder?

My own childhood experience makes me sceptical. After spending a year and a term at boarding school at age 8/9 I returned to my old state school in Pwllheli to find myself way behind the others in my class, although I'd been among the highest performers when I left. Maths in particular was a problem; I'd forgotten much of what I'd previously learned, and failed to keep up with the new knowledge acquired by my classmates. I was given extra homework to help me catch up, which I succeeding in doing during the next 2 terms.

The boarding school I'd attended – Hillgrove Preparatory at Bangor in the 1940s – had no connection with the day school at present on that site, and as far as I know (and I'm sure my mother didn't when she sent me there) was unrecognised. Do unrecognised private schools still exist today? Perhaps someone could enlighten me on this. Registration was compulsory then, recognition was not. Registration required the school to be government-inspected for health and safety standards only, academic standards being presumably left to the judgement of parents and head teachers. Parents teaching their own children at home, however, were subject to compulsory academic checks by the local education authority, as they are today. An odd anomaly. Registration ruled out Dotheboys Hall imitations but did nothing to ensure the pupils learnt anything.

I assume the boarding schools chosen for the above project were all good ones. Some were boarding state schools, which are generally good. Private schools vary in quality just as state schools do, perhaps more so, as some are inevitably in it just to make a profit. I think it's very sad when parents with little knowledge or experience of such matters but having money to burn decide to send their children to a substandard private school wrongly assuming this will benefit the child. My mother, being a teacher herself, should have known better.

Perhaps the campaigners for this project have a hidden agenda – to support the private boarding school system by under-the-counter government subsidy.

After the war was over...

At Theatr Dwyfor last night a member of the audience came on stage just before the performance was due to begin, and asked the rest of us to observe a one minute silence with him in memory of the late actor and playwright Wil Sam.

At once I was transported back to the school classroom at Troedyrallt School. It was there that we held our very first one minute silence, because the war was over. The teacher told us this was a wonderful thing because now no more people would have to die. I remember feeling somewhat bewildered as well as glad. I'd been born during the war and it had not occurred to me that it would ever end. I was four.

A few days later Great Aunt Kate came in from shopping on Saturday morning to announce that a neighbour had just died.

'But she can't have died!' I cried. 'The war's over and nobody's going to die any more.'

And it had to be explained to me that people would still die of natural causes. The world would get too overcrowded otherwise, the grown-ups said. My mother said that after the 1st WW people danced in the streets to celebrate its end, but nowadays people had more consideration for those for whom the end came too late because they had already lost a loved one. Somehow, that rather took the shine off the end of the war for me.

Rationing still continued. We still needed those precious coupons before we could spend our pennies on sweets. A con-man played a nasty trick on the manager of Pwllheli Woolworths, selling him a great load of off-coupon sweets from somewhere. They were off-coupon because they contained no sugar, only saccharine; after only a few days they began to rot and had to be thrown out.

When I was five my mother came out of mourning. I can see her now, standing at the full-length wardrobe mirror in her new pale-grey suit, with grey court shoes, a lilac chiffon scarf, grey leather gloves, and a little grey pork-pie hat with a lilac feather in a lilac ribbon on it, perched at a jaunty angle on her black curls. Like all young women then she was made up with Pond's face powder held in place with Pond's vanishing cream, and bright red lipstick. But to me she looked much more beautiful than anyone else.

I think people suspected her of buying extra clothes coupons because she always dressed so smartly. But she was clever with her sewing machine, and quite often exchanged her old clothes for coupons too. Many people at that time were too poor to spend all their coupons so it made sense for them to trade their unused ones for good second hand clothes. One day a shabby looking woman trailing a boy a little younger than myself came to the door. She told me in a whisper that she had some clothes coupons to sell to my mother. But my mother told the woman no, she never bought coupons. She said the woman could have some clothes instead. The woman shook her head. She didn't need clothes, she needed money to pay the rent. Then my mother offered her some of my old clothes which were like new but too small for me. The woman said she had no girls, only this little boy, so they would be no use to her. Her husband spent his money on drink, she said. It had been all right when he was away in the war, she'd had the house-keeping money through the post from the army, but now she couldn't get it off him. The rent was due the next morning and she didn't know what to do. My mother said sorry, but she couldn't help.

Later I asked her why. She explained that she could go to prison for buying coupons, and she didn't know the woman at all. Maybe the police had set her up. But I still think the woman was genuine.

Uncle Charles & the Bothersome Boyfriend

When I was 17 Charles Pretoria died of a stroke. My mother said it was my fault, I'd killed him. At the time I thought she was just being melodramatic, but now I know that he was gay I suspect she may have been right.



I had no idea of this at the time and neither did my mother. Charles' brother Bob was a bachelor too and he was definitely hetero. It's surprising how many men of the 2 WW generations remained single, given they had so many left over women to choose from. True, Charles shared a flat with a male friend in Llandudno where he headed the English department at John Bright's School, generally coming home to Pwllheli at weekends. But unlike his other cousins at Ala Road there was never a breath of scandal attached to him. In those days homosexuality was illegal and could have lost him his job and reputation.



My mother unwisely enlisted his help to try and persuade me to give up my boyfriend, whom she considered unsuitable. Naturally I felt indignant and told him it was none of his business. It wasn't as though he was a close family friend. We seldom saw him. I also said that he, of all people, was in no position to advise others on their love life. Meaning only that, being middle-aged and unmarried, he had either failed to attract a woman or had been unduly picky. Of course I'd intended to annoy him, but his extreme reaction alarmed me.



His face turned purple, his eyes bulged, he gasped for breath before launching into a spluttering tirade on my appalling lack of manners, of respect for my elders and betters etc. My mother told me to leave the room and I gladly did. She said later she'd had to calm him down with a glass of brandy, he was so upset. A week later he had a stroke and died. Would I have said what I did if I'd known? Perhaps. In those days I shared the common prejudice.



The reason for my mother's disapproval of my boyfriend, whom I later married, was the contretemps between her and his father a couple of years earlier. My father-in-law Dai Davies was a guard on the railway, a great union man and a self-educated left-winger of the old school. That is to say, he upheld the rights of the working man, but thought the working woman should go back to her kitchen. Working mums, of whom there were very few in those days, were his especial bete noir.

My mother used to get up at 6.30 to catch the 7.15 a.m. 'Workers' Train' to Porthmadog, as the next one wouldn't get her there in time. The other passengers were all 'working men', ie labourers. One day she told off one of them (a newcomer) for swearing in her presence, the first time it had occurred after ten years of travel. This chap complained to the guard, saying that women should not be on that train. As a result Mr. Davies wrote to my mother forbidding her to travel on the 7.15 as she was not a worker. She indignantly replied that she was indeed a worker, and tried to take the matter up with his superiors. Having failed to get the decision overturned, she then bought a car and learned to drive. The new Austin 10 looked very smart.

This was good, enabling us to get around for all sorts of jolly jaunts on weekends and holidays. But the affair rankled with my mother. When she found out who my boyfriend was, she was furious. After our eventual marriage, when I was 20, an uneasy truce prevailed for the next 19 years. But my father-in-law and I always got on very well, despite disagreeing on a great many issues. Our arguments were always good fun and I cried at his death, although by then I'd been divorced for some time.

A very non-PC tale - sorry, everyone!

Charles Pretoria, my mother's cousin, was named after his house, like many Welsh people. His brother was Bob Pretoria, but really they were both Joneses. Presumably the house name commemorated the Boer War.

The mystery of why he turned up at the Strand one Saturday afternoon in 1947 with 5 young airmen who had known my father was solved quite recently when another of my mother's cousins told me he'd been gay. He said at the time that he'd happened to be passing, saw them at the door and 'took the opportunity to make the acquaintance of these brave young fellows who've been fighting for their country'.

Afternoon tea in the drawing-room being insisted upon, I , then aged six, was sent to Railway Stores at next-door-but-one to buy an extra loaf and two packets of the ubiquitous, chocolate-covered round marshmallow and biscuit delicacies, the only shop cake available then. Auntie Kate had half left of the one sponge cake a week she could make from our sugar ration, and this was cut up into very small pieces. Even salmon sandwiches were rustled up with a tin saved out of a parcel from Australia.

Everyone puffed away at their cigarettes while Auntie Kate trotted back and forth to the kitchen like a waitress. There was much cheerful badinage, in English of course. Charles, taking on the position of gracious host, handed round the chocolate marshmallows saying in his affected Oxford accent, 'Do help yourselves to an Abyssinian bosom, boys.' The reference to the Haile Selassie visit was of course quite lost on me, but I appreciated the mirthful attention the remark earned him. So, a little later, when I had been ignored for at least ten minutes by the company, I passed round the plate again with the same exhortation, delivered in my squeaky imitation of Charles' plummy tones.

Everyone roared with laughter, a most satisfying outcome for me. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when Auntie Kate entertained the minister of Salem Chapel to tea a few weeks later, I didn't realise that the refined Welsh conversation, subdued atmosphere and the absence of my mother's cigarettes made it a somewhat different kind of occasion. Yes, we had chocolate marshmallows again to boost the Victoria sponge, and yes, I repeated that remark again. Oddly, though, nobody heard me this time. So I had to repeat it very loudly. With the result that my mother removed me from the room none too gently and smacked my bottom. Grown-ups! I was never going to understand them.

Ghosts at the Strand

The land beneath Pwllheli's railway station was reclaimed from the sea in 1907 when building on the new harbour began. The latter turned out to be somewhat of a white elephant as it wasn't deep enough for the new steamships already plying Cardigan Bay and the Menai Straits. Also it soon began to silt up and the tide withdrew the water from it for several hours a day, as it still does.At the time it seemed a splendid achievement, promising prosperity for the little town, where several other building projects were taking place, many initiated by the Cardiff businessman Solomon Andrews who had bought the old Plas Glyn y Weddw Dower House in Llanbedrog and made it his home. Across the road from the station a short terrace of shops with 3-storey, 6 bedroom houses above a pillared, glass-topped verandah, were completed in 1909. To one of these my mother's newly married parents moved with her paternal grandfather, Robert Isaac Jones, and her father's single brothers and sister: Robert, Stanley and Lydia-Kate. The house was named 'The Strand'.

Here Robert Isaac relocated his joinery and cabinet-making business from Gaol Street (where his china-shop remained), his three sons working in the business with him. At the Strand they had a new big, plate-glass shop window to show off the furniture. The business closed in the thirties. (By then my grandfather Thomas John and my great-uncle Stanley were both dead. Robert Isaac's last son, Robert, was killed in a hit and run accident during the 1940 blackout.) After that the shop was rented out to become Bon Marche, but our family stayed on in the house.

I was born at The Strand and lived there until I married at 20, though I spent little time there after going away to college at 18. By the time of my appearance we were a family of women. My father was still alive, but came home only on occasional leaves. I never remember seeing him out of uniform. In fact I have only one real memory of him: when he rode my little horse. I had this little red toy horse on wheels with a wooden seat on which I could propel myself around the large kitchen floor, and a handle at the back which had helped me learn to walk. To my great astonishment and indignation this stranger in uniform appeared one day and sat on MY horse, his long legs buckled up awkwardly at the sides. It was obvious even to my baby mind that it was too small for him. Then my mother grabbed the handle and pushed him round and round the kitchen which rang with their laughing voices. This was all very strange to me as I hadn't heard laughter very often. Normally the house was serious. Several times a day the radio would be switched on and everyone who happened to be present gathered round it with solemn faces to listen to a man speaking in sombre tones. Sometimes a different, high-pitched man's voice with a sneering drawl would cut in and my mother would gasp, 'Switch it off, switch it off!' and somebody would.

My mother always said that I couldn't possibly remember the day we heard of my father's death because I was only 18 months old. But I remain convinced that my memory of it is real, and not the result of someone telling me about it later. My mother and I were in the dining room with two friends of hers in WAAFS uniform, all chattering. My Great-Aunt Kate came in holding an envelope and everyone went quiet. I was sitting on my mother's knee and I felt her body convulse with great racking sobs beneath me. Feeling frightened, I began to cry. One of her friends picked me up and hugged me to her while the other tried to comfort my mother. After a while someone said, 'Look, Anita's crying too. She must know that her daddy's dead.' The words didn't mean much to me at the time, but I looked across at my mother's face and saw her trying to smile at me through her tears. I felt relieved, that she was noticing me once more.

News travelled fast in Pwllheli. That very same evening a local headmaster came to ask my mother to teach at his school (Penlliniau) as it was difficult to fill the vacancy with so many teachers having joined the armed forces. My mother and her brother had both won orphan scholarships to Bangor University and she had also completed her teacher's training before her marriage. She agreed and began the next day. After a while she left to take up a post at a private boarding school in Abersoch, Craig y Mor, then when I was four obtained another post at Porthmadog Grammar School where she remained until her retirement.

So my Great-Aunt Lydia-Kate, who had brought up my mother and her brother after the death of her sister-in-law from TB when my mother was 5 months old, was left holding a baby for the second time. She had apparently had a sweetheart, not quite a fiance, who was killed in the first world war, so her role as family help-meet was mapped out from then on. She once told me how she didn't want to take on my mother at first, 'because I didn't know anything about babies', although she was happy to take on the eight year old Uncle Robin, of whom she was very fond. My mother's mother's family was willing to take the baby, but not Uncle Robin, who was reputed to be the naughtiest boy in Pwllheli. However, my grandfather was unwilling to separate his two children and so Auntie Kate relented and took them both. At the time she was nursing her father who also had TB, so she had to wash and change all her clothes before seeing to my mother and then go and serve in the china shop. My grandfather died of TB when my mother was six and Uncle Robin fourteen.

Lydia-Kate, ever conscious of our manless state, lived in fear of burglars. To deter them, she kept a great, mahogany-dyed pitch pine hallstand on the ground floor hallway. On this hung the black overcoats and bowler hats of her three dead brothers and her father. How many potential burglars they scared away we will never know, but as a child I found these very frightening and hated having to walk past them. As we didn't live on the ground floor, however, I only had to pass these 4 'ghosts' when going in and out of the house. And of course when I was very young this was always with Auntie Kate or my mother. Later, though, this hallstand was brought upstairs to the first floor landing and placed in a dark corner between the drawing-room and parlour doors. I'm not sure why it was moved there. I vaguely remember some conversation with a facetious visiting relative who asked what if the burglars used a ladder and broke in through a first floor window, thus omitting to be intimidated by the apparent presence of four men in the house, so maybe Auntie Kate took that seriously.

This dark corner had to be passed in order to reach the parlour, which had been turned into a playroom for me, with my bedroom directly above it. I also had to pass it every time I went upstairs to the bathroom. I remember, around the age of six or seven, trying to persuade a visiting aunt (one of Lydia-Kate's many cousins) to accompany me to the toilet as I was 'afraid of the ghosts'. Sometimes I took the cat with me for moral support. On the second floor we had four bedrooms and a bathroom. From there a steeper staircase with lino instead of carpet led up to the attic where there were two further bedrooms. One of these had been turned into a junk room, and the other was only used in the summer when Uncle Robin and family came to stay for a month (he was a teacher in London) and his two sons slept there.

As I got older I found the attic junk room and eaves cupboards a fantastic store of old treasures of all kinds. But when I was still at infant school it was a bit scary. There were two green wooden chests filled with wood-working tools. And in the night I sometimes imagined I could hear the sounds of my dead great-uncles sawing and hammering, making tables and chairs ... and coffins. They always wore black overcoats and black bowler hats.