My School Days by Monica Austin (nee Pengelly)

I began my schooling at Bletchley Road Infants School and, as it was wartime, had to carry my gas mask which was in a cardboard box around my neck. I lived about 300 yards from the school and went home to dinner each day. My mother always had a hot dinner for me but, for a few weeks after I started school, I went through a faddy period and would only eat junket. Once I had settled down at school, I was eating normal meals.

One very warm day, I begged my mother, “please, can I wear my sundress?” This was a pastel cotton sleeveless dress with a small square neckline and, clad in this, I went happily skipping back to school. My usual teacher, Miss Gascoigne, who was a very kind lady, was away that afternoon and our class was taken by the headmistress, Miss Workman, known affectionately, or otherwise, as Miss Workbasket. Her beady eyes looked the class over and they rested on me. “Monica, please come out here.” Bright red with embarrassment and with legs like jelly, I moved towards her desk. I didn’t have far to go as I sat at the front of the class. She peered at me over the top of her glasses and, without hesitation, said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “I don’t think that dress is suitable to wear in school. I want you to go home and change.” With titters from some of the others ringing in my ears, I ran home and told my mother what had happened. Naturally, she was furious and wanted to come back with me and give Miss Workman a piece of her mind but I begged her not to so, reluctantly, she let me change back into the dress I had worn that morning and I went back to school

In the Junior School, when I was in Mrs. Clark’s class, we were involved in puppetry. We helped to make the puppets and put on plays. One day, two men from an American magazine visited the school. One girl was chosen to perform for a short film and some others were photographed sitting at their desks pretending to be writing the script for a puppet play. I was sitting at the front of the picture and I often wondered if it did actually appear in a magazine. I would have loved to have seen it although I was given a copy of the photograph.

I did miss several weeks of schooling when I caught scarlet fever and then septicaemia set in. For a while it was touch and go as I was not responding to M & B tablets but then, when I started a course of injections of the new wonder drug, penicillin, I started to pull through and, after 104 injections, was declared well enough to return home. Headmaster, Mr. Crisp was very kind and twice took me and my mother for a drive to Newport Pagnell in his car before I was well enough to return to school. The whole class had written to me in hospital and one boy had even put “love, John.” which I was teased about.

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