As I read this, I look for Storrington School on the internet. The first entry I find is an obituary of Charlotte Kratz, one of the most influential British nurses in the 20th century, the first nurse to graduate as a doctor of philosophy. She was a German Jewish refugee, born in Dortmund in 1922, the only child of Norbert and Johanna Kratz. She was sent to Storrington School in Westcliff-on-Sea. The Headmistress offered to stand security for her parents so that they could escape the German persecution of the Jews and join their daughter in England. Due to bureaucratic bungling their papers were not completed before the outbreak of the Second World War and Charlotte never saw her father and mother again. They were sent to a concentration camp.
The second entry I find includes the following by Warwick Charlesworth, of Australia: "I lived at 61 Imperial Avenue, Westcliff-on-Sea which was at one time Storrington School. I would dearly like to find out more about the school and find if possible any old photos..... I realise that this was many many years ago but some second or third hand information may have been passed down. Once, while playing in the garden, I dug up an old school broach with the school name on it but alas have no idea what became of it. The house when we first moved to it, about 1959, was in a very bad state of repair having I think been used during the war for one of the services. I was always led to believe that there had been a searchlight battery in the tennis courts behind but this may be totally wrong. I do remember my father burying vast amounts of army beds and general rubbish in a very large hole he dug in the garden." [Issue 32 - January 2011, 'Leighway,' The newsletter of the Leigh Society - An eye to the future with an ear to the past in the heart of Leigh.] Warwick responded to my email as below at the end of this piece.
 |
Anna, Storrington School, aged about 14
|
The account continues: "Our Headmistress was Miss Farrington Walker, a quiet academic woman who was an easy, clever teacher who made her subject, biology, interesting and memorable. She had an air of authority and was very much respected by all of us. In the dining room she sat at a table on the platform and would ring a brass bell when we got too noisy. Her partner Miss Tooby looked after the domestic side of the school, though she also taught physics. They were an oddly assorted pair really, and we wove our own stories about how they came to be running the school together. We decided that Miss Walker's fiance had been killed in the war, and that Miss Tooby had been her pupil....
"We had a liberal if not academic education - no one took higher qualifications or aspired to university, but lessons were interesting and we were encouraged to discuss anything, and to read widely. We were taken to London to visit Museums, the Mint, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament with our MP, and to concerts at the Queen's Hall [in Langham Place, home of the proms until destroyed by an incendiary bomb in 1941].
"We boarders thought of ourselves as the cream of the school. We were well looked after but we had to be hardy, because we were not cosseted. There was no such thing as central heating in our dormitories [which] were built on the top of the building which had weak foundations so that the[y] were constructed of light material, and the inner walls were all hard asbestos..... We had our own eiderdowns and a toy on the bed if we liked, so the room didn't look altogether regimented. In the very cold weather the water in the jugs froze at night......
"A senior dormitory had metal rails with curtains which could enclose each space containing bed, locker and washstand-cum-chest-of-drawers. We had a mirror on each chest and could decorate our space a bit, though nothing was ever stuck on the walls. The best spaces were under the windows amd I remember those days with much happiness. We used to sit on our beds and talk and laugh and tell each other stories until (and often after) lights out. Friendships were forged then but most didn't survive the war when we were all flung apart.....
"We went for walks twice a day in crocodile. A favourite was down Chalkwell Avenue to the front. The Thames was very busy in those days. When the tide was out and the mud flats were exposed with a deep channel beyond, it looked as if you could walk over them to the Kent coast. There was a path called the Hard running out across the mud and we used to break ranks and walk down it collecting winkles, and watching the shipping. It's a wonder we didn't die of food poisoning, because we used to take them home with us and put them in our toothmugs, and put hot water on them and eat them in the dormitory with a pin.....
"The Thames barges were a wonderful sight sailing down the deep channel, their huge sails beautiful dark shades of brown, red and beige. The tea clippers too came in occasionally when they raced from China.....
"We used to walk to Leigh sometimes where the cockle sheds lined the banks of the river. The empty shells would scrunch beneath our tread and the smell of the sea was strong in the air mixed with the smell of cockles.
"My memories of school are mostly social. I remember lessons.... but the overall memory is of a beehive throbbing with activity, and filled with the voices of the past. I am saddened now that I have no connection left with the nine years of such an important part of me....."
The third section of my mother's social history picks up in 1934, when her father, for health reasons, returned to the UK and started farming near Robertsbridge in Sussex.
 |
Peans Farm, 1934
|
At the age of eleven, my mother remembers: "we were all full of joy at being all together and having a home and a mother and father.....
 |
The McMullin family, Peans Farm, c 1935l - r: Anna, Robert, Marjorie, Peter, Eve, Robert
|
"[Robertsbridge] was a pretty town in those days with a high street bordered by old attractive houses. Trains to London stopped at the station and there was a branch line which ran to Tenterden. I used it in the war when we lived near Sedlescombe [after my grandfather had died]. You could ask the driver to stop anywhere along the line to get off and then sit back and enjoy the journey through unspoilt countryside..... People got off at farms and oast houses, and I stopped off at a road junction which was less than a quarter of a mile from my home.....
"We had a car - an old Morris Cowley, but going to our boarding schools was always done by train.
"Our luggage was packed into large brown trunks with wooden strapping to keep them firm, and a brass plate with a lock in it on the front. It was sent by PLA - passenger luggage in advance, which meant you bought your ticket at the same time as arranging the transport of your luggage. The trunk was collected and delivered the other end by Carter Patterson's van, and no one had any worries about its safe delivery.
"Travelling to school by train was always an adventure. I always spent the first part of the journey in tears because I hated saying good-bye to Robert, who would stand on the platform, also in tears, waving until I was out of sight. When I was very young my guardian would choose a kind-looking elderly woman to take care of me. Or sometimes I was put in charge of the guard. He travelled in the guard's van at the back of the train, and looked after parcels, luggage and bicycles and would keep a look out for children travelling on their own.
"When I got to London I was supposed to be met by an uncle who would take me out to lunch and put me on the train to school where I joined all my friends. My uncle was very absent-minded and often didn't turn up so we were taken by a station porter to the stationmaster's office where we sat waiting. He would enquire about our uncle and possibly ring up and remind him of his charges.
"When my parents settled at Pean's Farm I aged 11 would take my 9 year old sister with me and we did without guardians and go-betweens. We would arrive at Victoria Station and get ourselves something to eat and drink and then go to the News Theatre. This was the cinema at the station where they showed newsreels and cartoon films.
"I was street-wise as you would say today, and knew some of the dangers from men that might assail us. We always sat on our own and if a man sat near us we would move at once to other seats. Then we would go by underground to Fenchurch Street and walk through the city to the mainline station for Southend where we waited for the school party. There were moments of anxiety until we met up with the others, but it was not something that was at all traumatic, and my mother would have been surprised if we had made any fuss.....
 |
Marjorie Cecil McMullin, 1948
|
And then, after some thoughts on how things have changed and how no one would dream of sending an 11 year old on such a journey alone these days, the narrative comes to an end with the following paragraph:
"Writing down my memories gives me a clearer view of some of the things that made up life for me, It may not seem so strange to my children but who can tell what it may seem to my grandchildren or even their children if ever they read what I have written?"
It is now almost 75 years since my mother left her boarding school, though in all probability life in the WAAF during the war was not so very different.
As W B Yeats wrote, in 'Among School Children,'
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things,
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of the king of kings.....
Education has forever had its place in human society, though its application has varied.... In forms of literature we have seen children abused from Jane Eyre to Harry Potter, from David Copperfield to Jennings and Derbyshire, or Billy Bunter. Teachers too have played their part in the story, from Ursula, in D H Lawrence's 'The Rainbow:' "Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls who stood filling the ranks of the desks. She felt utterly non-existent....."
"She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her. she did not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how horrible she found it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday night came, and she felt the Monday morning at hand, she was strung up tight with dreadful anticipation, because the strain and the torture was near again...."
To Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens's 'Hard Times:' "'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind, 'Your definition of a horse.'
'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus, and much more, Bitzer.
'Now, girl number twenty,. said Mr Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'"
That of course is a digression. We have no idea now how Miss E Farrington Walker or Miss Tooby, or the mistress who slept in "a wooden cubicle at the door end," of the junior dormitory at Storrington School, felt in their position of care, though somehow I suspect they may have felt pride, and joy, in the community they managed?
When I think of school, I think of fish. And a boarding school is where the fish sleep together..... The most telling thing, for me, in my mother's accounts is the clause: "the overall memory is of a beehive throbbing with activity....." She's just celebrated her ninetieth birthday, and although she is a little lonely, and her beloved husband Peter and brother Robert have gone, her schooling prepared her for a social life, not an academic one. Although it's not for me to judge, it is apparent from all the cards in her sitting room that socially her life has not been unsuccessful, and though it is difficult to understand what effect the dislocation of a four year old from her home and mother might have, and further how being shipped thousands of miles to a cold climate might have affected her, it does seem as if the institutions she found herself in did well in not increasing the trauma.
 |
A social scene from boarding today
|
School inspectors in the 21st century would not be happy with frozen water in bedrooms, nor asbestos walls. There would be frowns (from Mr Gove at least) about the lack of aspiration in the pupils: the idea of a social/liberal education does not cut the mustard these days, I'm afraid. Trips to London are all very well, but where is the risk assessment for those solo trips to the News Theatres and the failure of 'uncles' to meet charges on mainline stations? And picking winkles on tidal mudflats and then cooking them in hot water and eating them with pins in the dormitory? Unsatisfactory to say the least!
But the National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools, January 2013 edition, have this to say, for example: "Standard 6.2 The school premises, accommodation and facilities provided therein are maintained to a standard such that, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of pupils are ensured." And from the evidence above this was the case in both India and Southend.
 |
Boarders in the 21st Century.....
|
Times change. Building regulations change. My mother referred to termly fire drills: "One end of a webbing belt was thrown out of the window and the other end was fastened tightly round the waist of a girl and she climbed out of the window and was lowered gently, pushing herself away from the house wall as she went....." but not to fire alarm systems; to the homeliness of laughter with friends, but not to the rigors of roll calls or security systems. Perhaps the world was safer then, before the war?
I sent Warwick Charlesworth a copy of the picture of Storrington School, above, and he kindly replied:
"You have no idea how much pleasure that photo has brought me. Without doubt the same place. We lived in the house furthest away in the picture. The one nearest is now,and has been for as long as I remember, an old people's home.
"I do know the house we lived in was built by Joseph Rothschild, who made millions selling tobacco, as a summer home. Not sure why he would choose Southend for a holiday!
"When we moved into the house it had been very badly treated during the war years as it was the base for an anti aircraft battery set up in the tennis courts behind. Much of the garden area was filled with old beds and every sort of metal junk you can imagine. As a small boy it was heaven but Mum was always worried about my safety. Dad spent a very long time burying tons of the stuff in big holes he dug by hand. No idea why he didn't get it carted away but my Dad never did things the easy way. I do remember him rushing in one day and saying he had found an old well under all the rubbish. Old maps show the stream running under where it was situated and may have been the original Chalk well."
To me the passage of time is a curiously emotional thing. It's not just nostalgia for the past, or the sense of loss, but the two accounts here of a particular place do highlight our experience of impermanence.
I visited Southend not many years ago, on a school inspection (not Storrington School, of course, as this had moved to Devon at the outbreak of war - my mother with it for her last term - and the school never returned) but I was struck by the desolation of Southend. Although the residential parts of Westcliff or Leigh-on-sea still have a faded elegance, the views of the river, bereft of colourful sailing vessels, to the exhaust flames of Thames Haven, beyond Canvey Island, or of distant Kingsnorth across the estuary, are dispiriting. The Southend Hotels, once thriving on the tripper trade out of East London, are now mainly shells or hostels, and it was starlings coming in to roost in the dingy little trees along the otherwise bare esplanade that made the most sense of this urban environment.
 |
The two houses at the junction of Imperial Avenue and Seymour Road, Westcliff-on-Sea, as they are today. The one on the right is St Martin's Residential Care Home
|
W B Yeats again ('Among School Children,' stanza 7)
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise —
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise.....
.jpg)
