Five schools

1) Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Y Bari Barry Welsh Primary School
Barry, near Cardiff, early 1950s:  Not a large Welsh speaking population, but some parents wanted a Welsh-speaking primary school established.. They started a Nursery School. A local business man used his van to ferry children in to a central chapel vestry.

As some children reached five years old (and older?) the county was approached, showing there
was a demand, a clientele, customers.
The county started a little Welsh school using a building in Cadoxton, a further suburb.
We lived in Colcot, far on the other side and had to travel in a bus serving the industrial area.
A few years later as the school was surviving, a derelict chapel building more centrally was renovated. Still a small school  – we all had to be friends! Nowadays I think there are three Welsh-medium Primary Schools in the town.

2) Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Wrecsam Wrexham Welsh Primary School
When I was 8 (1957) we had to move to North Wales, Wrexham.The Welsh school there had been in existence much longer and was larger.
I had no idea what such a change would be like. I think I just thought it would be fun, a new experience.
I found the children there in cliques, and some unpleasaantness, and the dialect was somewhat different. I got a cold and somehow stretched it to three weeks. Then my parents insisted I had to go back. At playtime that first day back I asked three quiet girls if could join them. Two of them later changed school, but the third is still a close friend. Though I moved a number of times we visited, holidayed and went to college together. I remember on that day visiting my father’s office, for a lift home presumably, and realised afterwards how nervously he asked how I’d got on, and with apparent reilef at my simple answer that I’d found friends. I think they must have been troubled about my unsettledness, and I think he probably had prayed about it.

3) Grove Park Girls’ Grammar School
Moved up at 11. A girls’ grammar school with a strong figurehead of a headmistress.
She would walk into school with her bag and if you met her you were expected to offer to carry it. One day, having missed the last of three buses I could catch to school, I was prepared to run up the hill and the mile or so to school. I saw the headmistress approaching and shot out of the gate. I didn’t mind too much he idea of carrying her bag, but would never have got to school then on time. I think my mother and the Head exchanged a twinkle smile as she passed by a few minutes later!

4) Barry County Girls’ Grammar School Then when I was just 13 we moved back to Barry as my father now had to work in the Cardiff head office of his civil service department. Though we had lived there previously and had family there, my sister and I  found the new school difficult. There was no room in school dinners as we lived too close, and often therefore went back in the lunch hour. Packed lunches was not very common. The girl I had known best before was in the Secondary Modern School. I found I had to repeat much work I’d already covered in the previous school, and became careless and bored. My father had a reasonable job, but responsibilities and he didn’t give us masses of pocked money. But the girls there seemed to be testing their teenage images and freedoms and they seemed to have lots of money ‘when the banana boats came into the port’ (this was still days of piece-work for dock workers I think)

5) Bishopshalt School, Hillingdon, Uxbridge
After a year and a half, Dad was moved again, to the London office this time. They had no idea where to settle in that large area, but he did know Ruislip a bit where his brother lived just by the Common, and found that at the same time, his brother had been moved back to Wales! So they bought his house. (A bit of confusion for redirection of mail as both families had the same surname, and both had an elderly mother in law called Mrs Jenkins in residence!)

There was a secondary school very close, but it was ‘full’. So I was sent to a school 5 miles away. Later the bus connecting stopped coming the last mile or so, involving a walk from one of the three little shopping areas nearby. However I found friends I could relate to in this school, and the work more stretching. (In fact I arrived to find the class I should join were preparing to take a few GCEs in six months, mocks quite soon, and had to speed learn I think three new French tenses, compound interest in maths, and précis writing in English. I think having speed-learned the tenses and compound interest, I quickly forgot them too! But the précis writing intrigued me and I think developed my interest in writing concise verse. I also had to take up Geography, Art, and do Domestic Science for the first time for a while. They had no provision for studying all three sciences to GCE level, an annoyance as I was getting interested in the chemical side of Biology. I couldn’t join the class in their German, which I had never studied, so was allowed to study Biology further on my own while that was taught. Incidentally as I was struggling to understand the Christian faith at the time, the churches I had attended being very vague, but not wanting to just reject it as my sister was doing, I was interested at how unconvincing the book I had been given was on the subject of evolutionary theory.
It was also the first secondary school I had been to with boys! At first the boys in our class seemed short, quiet and not very interested in competition in studies. In about six months all those factors changed quickly!

In the sixth form we had general RE with a young dynamic fun, Economics teacher. He wrote on the blackboard ‘Christian   Atheist   Agnostic   Don’t know’  and asked if we’d put up our hand for which we thought ourselves. I slunk my hand up for ‘Christian’ and was ashamed, but realised the only confidence I had was that there is a Creator God. I told the teacher that it was much easier to understand about God in general than to understand who Jesus was/is and what he did and why. The teacher then proceeded to try to unpack that over the coming weeks and months, and gradually I began to understand and it was transforming. Actually a number of the sixth form went to hear speakers, or attend churches with clear teaching, and meet for study the Bible and there ware some startling changes.

A very happy sixth form, and end to school days, but as my parents then were moving back to Wales (near Cardiff, but not Barry this time!), and I was off to college in Wales, with no email as yet, nor Facebook etc, apart from my friend from Wrexham, continued contact was minimal with those co-students. Had a bit of conversation with a couple through the ‘Friends Reunited website’ when it existed, and was able to renew contact with that teacher after many years.

The photo is from school 1) age about 5. My mother’s reaction to the photo was ‘Couldn’t someone have put a comb through her hair?!’ I think the photogrpher caught a nice smile, and a large safety-pin holding the strap of my bag together!

[IP: ‘schooldays’]