Argument has arisen over current classroom conditions for school pupils in this time of Covid and depths of winter.
The contentious debate between temperate virus-friendly warmth versus draughty health and hygiene and the demand for installation of air-filters in classrooms, is generating more heat than light. Without wishing to indulge in
‘I mind the time’-ery and no desire to condemn our young as centrally-heated softies, it set me thinking of my own schooldays.
As a coul’rife townie, I received my early education in rural hardihood. Four to eight-year-olds were housed in an uninsulated Nissen hut left over from the war; nines to fourteens (school leaving age then) in a stone-built double classroom partitioned in the middle, an open fire at each end. There were outside toilets down the yard and a big beaten-earth playground.
We enjoyed a liberal regime. At lunchtime, we were free to roam anywhere within a referee’s whistle blow. We trespassed enthusiastically upon neighbouring land, looking for squirrels, bluebells, sticklebacks or frogspawn, returning scratched, bruised and soaked, our noses running faster than our feet. In winter, the school milk froze and rose in the bottles like little top hats.
When snow came, education was suspended. The big boys made a slide – long, black and lethal and pelted the girls with snowballs hard as cricket balls. Nobody cried; no parent complained. Returning to the classroom wringing wet and foundered, we were brought up in half-dozens to stand round the big steel fireguard and thaw out. You could see the steam rising malodorously from our clothes. None of it did us a button of harm.
Six winters of convent grammar school brought little increase in temperature, but an east wind off the Foyle via a chemical plant, that would’ve cleaned corn. Classrooms were once the stables of a ‘big house’. Fat claw-footed radiators were never more than lukewarm and the wind whistled audibly through the warped metal frames of the tall windows (an early if unrecognised, form of ‘air filtration’ that cost nothing.)
Training college was no cosier. My first year residency was the Winter of the Big Snow. I lay shivering in my clammily cold dormitory bed watching my breath hanging in the air. As for subsequent shared student digs – ice-cream wouldn’t have melted in our back-return bedroom. Instead of buying coal, we went to the pictures to get warm, watching film stars wafting about in their simmets, then getting into bed with our coats on.
Were we genuinely a hardier breed? I was reared in a draughty house with one coal fire. The wind gusted fitfully under the front door rippling the runner. My earliest memory is being dressed in vest, pants, liberty bodice, hand-knitted jumper, cardigan and socks; ‘pull-ups’ (a primitive form of leggings) Clarks two-bar shoes, mittens and a pixie hood. When fully accoutered, I was rigid as a Russian doll, barely able to move – all these ‘pallions’ necessary to protect me from ‘the cold in your kidneys’. Divested of some, I was warned, “Keep back from that fire or you’ll measle your shins!” Auntie Mollie, a martyr to chilblains, was swaddled like an Egyptian mummy – a square of red flannel sewn into her corsets across the small of her back and two cardigans.
The bathroom was Siberian in temperature. Bath and hair-washing night was a goose-fleshed, teeth chattering nightmare. My little attic bedroom was pre-warmed by an ancient electric fire that radiated as much heat as a candle and was switched off as soon as I got into bed. I woke every winter morning to a numb nose and frostflowers on the windowpanes.
Things warmed a little when we got a television and installed it grandly in the drawing-room, together with a fancy flickering coal-effect electric fire – a small oasis of comfort.
Ironically, the same adolescent blades said to be ‘suffering’ in schools, are stravaging the Saturday streets with not on them what would dust a fiddle.
In a cash-strapped economy, air-filters in schools aren’t likely to be installed anytime soon. Get over yourselves and wear a vest…
