Primary School

 

Steam and Soda:

​

The glasshouse was full of steam and smelt of soda on Monday afternoons. Although the sun was shining brightly on this spring day there was still a nip in the air and we all wore Mackintosh coats to school, as much to keep us warm as to keep us dry.

​

Mondays were always different; it was washing day. My mother had a large boiler in the kitchen, beneath the draining board and this was filled with several washing up bowls of water before the gas ring underneath was lit. It took ages to heat up but eventually came to the boil. In those days my mother used Reckitts blue bags. These were small spherical cotton bags containing a blue chemical that improved the whiteness of cotton shirts. Blue bags were also used to sooth stings, but I cannot remember whether they worked for wasps as well as for bees' stings.

​

The washing would have been divided into coloured, woollen and cottons. There was a grave danger of shrinking woollen garments if the washing water was too hot and colours ran much more easily in those days as there were no chemical barriers or absorbent papers to put in the wash to reduce this risk.

By the time I arrived home in the afternoon the glasshouse would be full of steam with the damp atmosphere further increased by the mopping up and washing of floors which was always done as the washing came to an end. The mangle was kept in the glasshouse. When Tanner built our house, each house in the road had a permanent lean-to across the width of the 1934 house. This caught the sun, gave light to the dining room window and connected directly to the kitchen. It accumulated all those things that wouldn't fit into the kitchen, so in addition to the mangle there was a huge galvanised and ribbed, barrel shaped laundry drum where clothes could be dumped ready for next Monday' wash. There was an old wardrobe at the end, once dark oak but now painted white and apple green.

​

Grammar School:

​

The Eleven Plus rather harshly separated our happy primary school class into those who passed the scholarship and those who didn't.  I was among the lucky ones who managed this. From September 1947 I attended the oldest grammar school in Wales. I was permanently towards the bottom of the third stream each year, but I eventually did some "O" levels and "A" levels and managed to be OK in English, Maths, Music and a few other subjects.  I did not go to university as National Service called.  You can read more about this under RAF.

​

Music:

 

Having had piano lessons for a few years I achieved the required minimum to pass the A level exam. This requires a very modest Associated Board Grade 6 piano to demonstrate some performing skills. After that the secret is to play a hymn in church every Sunday for many years; this keeps the dexterity alive but does nothing to raise the standard.

 

I seemed to take quite naturally to studying the harmony, counterpoint and composition part of the 'O' and 'A' levels courses so I soon found I could extemporise sufficiently to fool all of the people some of the time and vice versa.

 

 

Absolute pitch:

 

For all my adult life I've been able to pitch a note vocally and find it is correct when checked. That has been very useful and helped enormously when trying to accompany a body of voices who have started to sing the Welsh National Anthem or even Happy Birthday in the wrong key. For this I've been on autopilot for donkey's years. Sadly from the age of 78 it has been waning and doesn't always work. It really is rather upsetting, but no one knows my discomfiture.

 

There are advantages of losing this facility. Many digital organs allow you to raise or lower the pitch of a tune by turning a knob. Sometime I go to an organ where the person who last played had altered the pitch. If I attempt to play in G major and my ear hears F major, my fingers used to become knotted as I tried to accompany correctly. Now I can play comfortably no matter the relationship between the finger position of a chord and the sound that reaches my ears. Every cloud has a silver lining.

​

Cycling to school:

 

If you went down Rumney hill and crossed the river bridge, you were then on The Common. This was open land, wet and soggy and in places covered with ash and puddles. It was a 'no-mans-land' between the rural folk and townspeople. This was so until I was a teenager, then factory units sprang up and a commercial zone developed, which nowadays has changed to the usual sprawl of large retail outlets.

 

Whilst the infants and junior school was near home in Rumney, when we took the 'scholarship' exams around the age of 10 – 11, only the senior school was in Rumney and the grammar schools were all in Cardiff.  I went to Howard Gardens School, the oldest grammar school in Wales, which was a three mile bike ride across the common for the first mile, then along the tram route for the next couple if miles.

​

Cardiff tram tracks were laid into a wooden road surface. These were stuck together with bitumen and must have been quite old, because when we were teenagers, riding your bike on a wet day was hazardous because the wood was very slippery. Then when rain was really heavy many blocks would float up and be washed around, leaving the roads as if covered with house bricks. The actual tram rails were extremely slippery and you soon learnt to cross them with your front wheel as near to right angles as was possible. You only had to fall off once to learn how dangerous the surface, and the prospect of lying in the path of an oncoming tram was off-putting too.

​

Nevertheless a lot of people cycled to school. The cycle shed in those days were the former air aid shelters.  These were long dark brick buildings from the war years. They could accommodate dozens of bikes, but getting yours out from the pile, in the gloom, was far from easy.

​

Other pupils came by bus, as I did sometimes.  An extra bus was put on in the rush hour that started from the junction of Church Road and Wentloog Road at 8:25 and was full of very noisy and often belligerent schoolchildren. Returning home was much worse, because there were no extra buses. There were two route home, the 31 bus went up the hill and the 31b went along New Road and around some pretty tight right angle corners in Brachdy Lane and Brachdy Road which in those days was a through bus route, before Quarry Dale was metalled.