Two Room School

I was three or four when I was packed off to the little two room school.

Two of my aunts got all their education there at the school, run by the elderly Corker sisters, so by the time that I arrived the two ladies must have been well past their prime.

I found myself in a room with the elder of the two Corker sisters. The room had a roaring coal fire hidden away behind a metal guard and was home to Class 1 that was mainly for tiddlers but contained some older children too. They seemed to spend all day, cutting up paper, drawing and painting pictures or building cities out of bundles of firewood that were kept in a large wooden box. The rest of us spent our days painstakingly copying letters or numbers into copy books or reading aloud to Miss C. from books about Farmer Giles and Dobbin his faithful horse.

Tommy Reid spent all day down on floor level building houses out of kindling while his sister Celia was up on the big table reading and writing with us. I don't know how much older Celia was than the rest of us but she definitely was a lot bigger. Her copy book work was a wonder to behold and so was her shiny dark hair and friendly smile.

I liked sitting next to Celia but secretly envied Tommy and his freedom to build daylong timber towns down there on the floor. By three o'clock in the afternoon we were completely walled in by Tommy's timber townships. After we'd stacked up our handwriting copy books and put Farmer Giles and Dobbin away, we had to help dismantle all the houses, shops, castles and stations that Tommy had built so that he could start over next day.

Turned out that Tommy and Celia belonged to the farm down the road and that their father had given up on farming and had taken up building houses out of brick and mortar. I suppose Tommy was being groomed as a builder and Celia was being prepared to do the accounts. Tommy sure could build and Celia, well Celia had shiny dark hair and a very nice smile.

In that respect Celia took after her father who also had a nice smile but had terrible rows with his wife whenever she found him in a local bar with a lady who wasn't part of the family. Mrs Reid would storm in there with a frying pan, wallop him over the head with it and drag him home. Ma said Mr Reid was a drinker, a womaniser and a disgrace to the area but at least he wasn't a gambler! I remember thinking Mrs Reid was pretty shocking too.

I don't know what happened to Tommy. For all I know he may still be building firewood cities somewhere. I suspect that like Celia, he got fed up with the rows and moved as far away as possible.

I wasn't there for more than a couple of months before I was moved to a much bigger school where the children wore school uniforms, where there was central heating instead of a coal fire and where the teachers were pinch face authoritarian lemon suckers who crammed fifty of us into rows of little desks with no spaces between them so that we could only get out of our seats at set times when everybody was sent out to the yard.

I hated it and I know that Tommy would have hated it too. Somehow it lacked the personal touch of the school run by the two old Corker sisters. The Corker house is still there, but the school and the two old ladies are long gone. It doesn't look anything like I remember it but I guess memory plays tricks. Still looks like a friendly place though. Ain't it funny how time slips away.