Memories of and in a foreign country

By Joe Fox

I vividly recall my first day at Chillingham Road Infants School. Hitler had invaded Poland and I got the strap, not in any way because I was involved with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but because I cried to go home all day.

It is the junior school I have any memories of, long sunny summers, playing in the yard with my classmates and the singsongs in the airaid shelters with our gas masks at the ready.

I watched them burn off the garden railings in the avenues to get steel to build tanks and ships. In later life someone told me they never ever used it. My most prominent memory is the long school hall with Miss Child’s desk that we marched past in time to the piano on our way into class. She stood there inspecting us, a bit like a poor mans trooping of the colour I imagine. The floor of the hall was parquet, but it had not been sanded off due to the war. They made us dance on it in our stocking feet; I can still feel those great Mahogany specks sticking into my feet. I’ve never danced since.

In 2014 I visited the school for the first time after leaving in 1945, inside it has all changed. It was white plastic windows, modern furniture and new walls. Miss Childs and her desk had gone along with my parquet floor and its spelks, it was covered in white Lino tiles, it wasn’t my Chilly Road School. As I walked around taking this in a couple of thoughts came to mind “the Past is a foreign country, things are different there,” and as an old shipmate of mine said as we contemplated revisiting the old haunts of our dear Cadet days, “Joe, some memories are best left where they are, as memories.” Visiting the school was one of them that should have been left as a memory.

Goodbye Miss Childs, Goodbye parquet floor, Goodbye Chilly Road.