1919 Nurse Powell visited the school and examined the scholars’ heads. By her instructions Forms 140Aa were forwarded to the parents of Ada Jewkes, Tom Willingdon, Ivy Cribbins and Eric Smith, all of whom were nitty.
Some parents accepted an invitation to come and see their children work, it being hoped that by doing this they will take a more active interest in their education.
1920 Mr. Worlidge visited the school and taught the children country dancing.
The scholars were photographed in groups and individually.
Mrs. Legg sent a letter complaining of the rough treatment of her Michael by the other scholars, both in school and in the village. All the evidence so far points in a contrary direction, to the effect that the other children—especially girls—are seldom free from molestation by Michael Legg.
(February) The scarlet fever has broken out and the school was fumigated with Alformant Lamps.
From the Religious Instructor’s Report: “The answers given showed that the children have grasped the meaning of the Acts of the Apostles.”
The four Thompson children have again (fifth time) arrived in a verminous condition and the prosecution form has been made out. Mrs. Thompson returned her children to school 40 minutes after receiving the form—and their heads were perfectly clean. Attendance is 99.4.
Kitchener Emery and Belgium Lambert have received corporal punishment for insubordination.
1928 Diphtheria has broken out in the village.
A picture “Youth” for hanging on the wall has been received from the East Suffolk Education Committee.
The Inspector called and watched Drawing, Needlework, Singing and Country Dancing.
Two children have died from diphtheria, and Dr. Stocks has taken swabs from all the scholars. The school has been closed. The water-supply has been tested and it has been suggested that the children bring their own cups in future, instead of using the one enamel mug by the tap.
On Armistice Day the scholars “listened-in” to the Cenotaph Service by the kindness of Mr. Bulmer, who lent them his portable wireless set.
Mary Ruth Bridge has been appointed Pupil-Teacher at a salary of £10 the first year, £12 the second year and £20 the third year. She is 15 years of age.
55 children on the Register.
1930 Empire Day celebrated with saluting the flag and singing patriotic hymns, and lessons on citizenship.
7 children have been excluded from school because of impetigo.
1931 From the Physical Training Report: “The work throughout the school is very satisfactory. The children are alert and give apt response to commands, and have a keen team spirit. Netball is played by both girls and boys, though sometimes rather mechanically . . .”
1933 His Lordship has arranged that the older boys should be driven to Woodbridge in his car to see the film Oliver Twist. The other school managers are also kindly sending cars.
A gallon of milk—the generous gift of his Lordship—is from and including today (September 18th) to be distributed among the infant and junior children during the morning interval.
1938 The boys took Art Scholarship Test. Best papers forwarded to County Hall, Ipswich. A hand-sewing machine has been purchased. P.T. equipment has arrived.
From the Diocesan Report: “The teachers are devoted to their work and are doing splendid work for the Church.”
Instructions on the handling of gas-masks given, each child bringing his or her mask, although the parents of John Prescott would not allow him to bring his in case it got spoilt.
A percussion band (instruments for 20 children) has been purchased.
The Sanitary Inspector called to examine pit where pails are emptied.
1939 (September) Ten evacuees admitted, along with Certificated evacuee teacher. A.R.P. preparations.
1940 David and Ian Bolt, and George Hansey have gone off to work on Mr. Mumble’s farm. Mr. Mumble said he had obtained permission for this from the Education Committee. The matter has been reported to Ipswich.
1941 The Committee have given permission for ten senior boys to pick up potatoes in school hours. The school has been closed for the salvage drive, blackberrying, war-time cookery demonstrations and meetings. Twelve skipping ropes were received from Ipswich and the urinals were pitched and lime-washed. The Diocesan Inspector found the singing “impressive and beautiful.”
Mrs. Sullivan · aged fifty-five · headmistress
Bland, kind, untroubled face, gentle manner only just masking steeliness of purpose, Mrs. Sullivan couldn’t look more like the village schoolmistress if “Miss Read” had invented her. Marriage and grown-up sons have given her certain advantages in the matter of poise over many a dedicated spinster in her profession. Children are instantly at ease with her. She doesn’t need their fear or plead for their affection. The relationship seems casual at first but is later observed to be based upon a series of checks and balances operated by both pupils and herself. The school has existed for almost a century under massive patronage. Aristocrats, gentry and clergy have steered the management boards set up to educate the farm-workers’ children. Thoughtfulness and imagination have not been absent but on the whole they have not exceeded the conditions of “enlightenment” laid down by successive generations. Mrs. Sullivan is no revolutionary. Her predecessors were orthodox in their as-humane-as-possible application of a rigid and deadly syllabus, and she is orthodox in her belief of love, free method and no punishments. She knew the old days so the new days have a great brightness for her.
* * *
I think it is a good thing to have come here from away. None of the village people know me and I feel free. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one must have a vocation for teaching. I am married and I have sons but I go on teaching because of my vocation.
People have some odd ideas about village children. I don’t say “town child” or “village child,” I say child full-stop. As a matter of fact I had never taught in a village school before I came here, so if there had been all this difference I would most certainly have noticed it. I don’t think that children in an area like this are at all deprived. It is true that they aren’t influenced by what they call admass. You don’t hear them talking about television and that sort of thing. They’re not a bit interested. In a town school it is all Z-Cars and things like that. You hear the children singing the advertisements as though they were proper songs. Because there are so few of them they have their difficulties, of course. There aren’t enough boys to have an eleven-a-side football match, for instance, yet they manage to play good football all the same. They never seem to worry about what they haven’t got; they have a way of managing. With football, they count the success of the game by how many kicks they manage to get—not goals. Perhaps they know the goals will come when they are big boys.
They like order. They are very free from emotional troubles. I think the smallness of the school helps. There is no bullying. The children are very keen on their head boy Terence. I had to be careful to introduce him first—the class would have thought it very wrong if I had started with somebody else. Terence is in absolute charge of the playground and takes his responsibility very seriously. The children stay very well and ninety per cent of them never have a thing the matter with them. They are all so clean and fresh, good teeth, pretty hair, no nasty rashes and things—what a change, if they did but know it!
I don’t teach with the exams in view. I just base my progress on what a child should know when he leaves the primary school. They are only examined in arithmetic, English and intelligence. I don’t think that the 11-plus is at all unfair. I am old-fashioned in this way. I should hate to simply have to recommend a child for the grammar school. I should feel terrible. Think of being with about sixteen children in this room for three years and then saying, “You go to the grammar school and you don’t.” But if their brains sort them out, that is a very different matter. I have to do some recommending, of course, and I may as well admit that I know all along who is going to get th
rough and who isn’t. But now and then I do get some surprises. If they don’t get through they go to Framlingham Secondary Modern, where they can still stay on until they are sixteen if they have a mind to. It doesn’t make all that much difference; they can still get their C.S.E. And you get children who simply wouldn’t be happy at a grammar school. It isn’t the children who worry about all this, it is the parents. Very anxious, they are.
They’re a wonderful set of parents. You can tell that from all the money they have raised for the school. The Parents-Teachers Association have just raised £180 for a swimming pool. The East Suffolk Education authority said we need only raise £120 and that they would give us the rest. The money was raised through a summer fête and with coffee evenings and a Christmas draw. The parents bought a television set for the school. They meet every month and are anxious to provide anything we need.
You could, if you weren’t careful, become attached to the children in a school like this. Sentimental. But you don’t if you’re wise. They must do what they are here to do. Learn enough by eleven so that they are able to go on learning when they leave. It is all experience, really.
Daphne Ellington · aged thirty-two · assistant teacher at Akenfield Primary School
I’ve lived in the country for a lot of my life but I’ve never felt that I belonged. I feel I want to spend only part of my life in a village, and particularly this village. It is so strange. Although I have lived in a number of country places and taught in three different village schools, I have never experienced such an atmosphere—in the school itself, I mean—as exists here. I don’t know how to explain it, and I’m not really complaining of it. I have to talk about it simply because it is so curious. It is the power which the children have to resist everybody and everything outside the village.
At first I thought that the 11-plus selection had quite a lot to do with insularity. That the village children excluded newcomers like the children of American servicemen and of Ipswich business people who have bought houses in Akenfield because these pupils tend to get all the grammar school places. I mean, when you get seven successes and then you find that they are all imported pupils, it makes you think! But I’ve come to the conclusion that this strangeness I am trying to describe has nothing to do with this. The village children aren’t jealous—on the contrary, they are convinced that they have something which none of the newcomers can ever have, some kind of mysterious life which is so perfect that it is a waste of time to search for anything else. I used to wonder at their slowness at absorbing things but now I am beginning to realize that they know from an early age that they don’t need to take in what I am teaching them. They are dreadfully polite. They think that if they are polite it excuses everything. They will do anything you tell them but never that little extra original thing. They have solid faces which say, “We will do what teacher wants us to do all day long, and then we’ll do what we want to do!”
I have known instances of “outside” children being beaten up or ridiculed but usually they are simply left on the perimeter of all the playground groups and when school is over, nobody walks home with them. There is just one game from which nobody is ever turned away. This is “Peep-behind-the-curtain.” A child stands facing the wall while all the others creep up on him. Every now and then he turns round quickly and whoever he catches moving has to leave the game. It is the only game which everybody is allowed to play. The last person left among those creeping up takes the place of the child facing the wall. It is a game which is played with great intensity. The “outside” child can win this game but it won’t make any difference to his status. He will just have to go on watching when other games are played or, if he tries to join in, he will be ignored.
The school building is seventy-five years old and it was built on land given to Akenfield by a Victorian duke. It used to hold over ninety children but we don’t have enough space with only forty-five. There are photographs of the old classes, with boys and girls packed together in tiers. They had to be absolutely still and absolutely silent, and absolutely obedient. Before the First World War, the farmers used to descend on a class now and then and demand the sons of their labourers to help them in the fields, and the teachers would let them go. Most of the parents and farmers thought that education simply interrupted work, and it is a bit like this still. The children are very involved with their parents’ work and with adult gossip. Quite little boys will know the technical names of tractor attachments and what is going on in the fields at a particular time of the year and the girls talk together like grown women. Neither seem to want their childhood.
They are never imaginative because, again, they don’t need to be. They find it impossible to want anything which they can’t actually see in the village or which isn’t theirs already. Adolescence makes them a bit restless, of course, but by then they are in such control of themselves that they rarely do anything unusual or exciting. They are very balanced but really it is only because they are so heavy! They never have any desire to explore an unknown area. They resist any pressure to make them inquisitive about things which lie beyond the scope of the village and should there be a boy or girl with initiative and a bright intelligence, he or she is soon frustrated. With most of them it is, “We know quite enough for what we have to do, thank you very much.”
The mothers are only interested if their children can perform something, recite a poem by heart, strum a piece on the piano. They are proud then. They don’t appreciate the need to ask why a thing is done. They say that they don’t like their children to ask questions all the time; they think it is rude. There is something treasonable about a child who does well. A market gardener I know, who is now about twenty, is a lonely person because he went to the grammar school and the village women say, “Didn’t get him far, did it? All that schooling and he’s still on the land!” Perhaps they know that there is nothing like education for breaking up an ordinary country family. Or perhaps theirs is a different wisdom.
The Cook’s Tale
The dialect of the area has a gentle sing-song intonation which is allied with a pithy toughness. The following story, told before radio and other language-changing agencies arrived, gives some indication of the vigorous Suffolk speech and shows many old English words which are still in common use in the village. It also displays the somewhat laconic wit of the people. The story itself is Suffolk’s claim—one of many—to the Rumpelstiltskin legend. It was told by a servant at the Big House many years ago.
TOM TIT TOT
Well, once upon a time there were a woman, and she baked five pies. And when they come out of the oven they was that overbaked, the crust were too hard to eat. So she says to her darter:
“Maw’r,” says she, “put you them there pies on the shelf an’ leave them a little, an’ they’ll come agin.”—She meant, you know, the crust ’ud get soft.
But the gal, she says to herself, “Well, if they’ll come agin, I’ll ate ’em now.” And she set to work and ate ’em all, first and last.
Well, come supper time the woman she said: “Goo you and git one o’ them there pies. I dare say they’ve come agin now.”
The gal she went an’ she looked, an’ there warn’t nothin’ but the dishes. So back she come, an’ says she, “Goo, they ain’t come agin.”
“Not none o’ them?” says the mother.
“Not none o’ them,” says she.
“Well, come agin, or not come agin,” says the woman, “I’ll ha’ one for supper.”
“But you can’t if they ain’t come,” says the gal.
“But I can,” says she. “Goo you and bring the best of ’em.”
“Best or worst,” says the gal, “I’ve ate ’em all, an’ you can’t ha’ one till that’s come agin.”
Well, the woman she were wholly bate, an’ she took her spinnin’ to the door to spin, and as she spun she sang:
“My darter ha’ ate five, five pies to-day.
My darter ha’ ate five, five pies to-day.”
&
nbsp; The King, he were a’ comin’ down the street an’ he hard her sing, but what she sang he couldn’t hear, so he stopped and said,
“What were that you was a singin’ of, maw’r?”
The woman, she were ashamed to let him hare what her darter had been a doin’, so she sang, ’stids o’ that:
“My darter ha’ spun five, five skeins to-day.
My darter ha’ spun five, five skeins to-day.”
“S’ars o’ mine!” says the King, “I never heerd tell o’ anyone as could do that.”
Then he said: “Look you here, I want a wife and I’ll marry your darter. But look you here,” says he, “ ’leven months out o’ the year she shall have all the vittles she likes to eat, and all the gownds she likes to git, an’ all the cump’ny she likes to hev; but the last month o’ the year she’ll ha’ to spin five skeins ev’ry day, an’ if she doon’t, I shall kill her.”
“All right,” says the woman, for she thowt what a grand marriage there was. And as for them five skeins, when te come tew, there’d be plenty o’ ways o’ gettin’ out of it, and likeliest, he’d ha’ forgot about it.
Well, so they was married. An’ for ’leven months the gal had all the vittles she liked to ate, and all the gownds she liked to git, and all the cump’ny she liked to hev. But when the time was over she began to think about them there skeins an’ to wonder if he had ’em in mind. But not one word did he say about ’em, an’ she whoolly thowt he’d forgot ’em.
Howsivir, the last day o’ the last month, he takes her to a room she’d niver set eyes on afore. There worn’t nothin’ in it but a spinnin’ wheel an’ a stool. An’, say he, “Now me dear, hare you’ll be shut in tomorrow with some vittles and some flax, and if you hain’t spun five skeins by the night, yar hid’ll goo off.”
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