Infant School

My youngest granddaughter starts junior school in September and my daughter was saying how sad it was to see her leave the infants. I suppose watching your kids’ progression through school is a reminder of how quickly they are growing up. Our conversation made me think of my infant school and how I can barely remember being there. In fact, there are only three specific events that I can actually remember from infant school, and absolutely nothing else.

The first, I seem to think, happened quite soon after I very first started. During the morning we had a short break, when we were allowed to eat a sweet. We had to provide our own sweets and weren’t allowed to eat them in class at any other time. One particular day, the girl at the next desk to mine had placed her sweet on her desk and then wandered off for some reason. Back then my self control must have been even poorer than it is now because I remember grabbing the sweet and eating it. I also remember vigorously denying doing it when, on returning to her desk and putting two and two together, the girl ran off and returned with the teacher. I know the teacher didn’t accept my protests of innocence and I know I got into trouble, but I can’t remember the actual consequences. I’m pretty sure some kind of punishment was the outcome.

Event two also involved punishment of a kind, and it was a punishment that would have perfectly fitted my crime had I committed one. Again, at some time during the morning, every member of the class was given a small bottle of milk and a straw, and for a few minutes we all sat quietly drinking our milk. On this particular morning I finished drinking my milk and returned the bottle to the crate from whence it came, just like I did every other morning. But, unlike every other morning, shortly after putting my bottle back in the crate I was confronted by the teacher, who was accompanied by one of the girls. I don’t think it was the girl from the sweet incident but it would explain what happened if it was. It turned out the girl had gone and told the teacher that I had put my bottle back in the crate without finishing all the milk, which, apparently, must have been considered a very serious matter. I was severely told off for wastefulness and told to retrieve my discarded bottle from the crate and finish drinking the milk. On going through the bottles in the crate it transpired that at least half of them contained a small amount of milk. To be fair to the teacher, she did leave it to me to decide which had been my bottle, but in reality, I didn’t have any more idea of which one had been mine than she did. I remember retching as I sucked the -by now- room temperature milk through a straw that had almost certainly been previously sucked through by someone other than me. I still wonder to this day why all the other not quite empty bottles were of no apparent concern to the teacher.

When I was seven I broke my wrist and had to have a plaster cast on my arm. Apart from seeing it as an inconvenience I must also have seen its potential as a weapon because I remember clobbering a classmate on the side of the head with it. She ran, crying, back into school to tell the teacher, and I ran, scarpering, out of the school yard. Inevitably, when I went into school the next day I reaped what I had sown the day before, but I can’t remember the exact nature of the harvest.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed that a common element to all three unfortunate events was the presence of a girl. Just sayin.