“The school was a bigish gabled house beside the river Exe, close to the road bridge in Exford. Had good-sized lawn, mini-forest of tall Leylandis to one side and on its far side was bounded by a low wall beyond which a grass field sloped gently to the river.

I went to it aged 6 or maybe just 7.

 

Before going, I was taken to see it – on School Concert day. A line of pupils stretched across the school’s large main room from a piano played by Naomi Bernberg, the headmistress, and sang things like, and in particular, “Hearts of oak are our ships, hearts of oak have our men, there’ll always be an England, steady boys steady (or was it ‘ready’?)”. The biggest and loudest singer and nearest to the piano was – I later learned – Naomi’s eldest son, Benedict. He at once became my hero, and it made me long to sing and play songs.

The year was, almost certainly, 1942: mid War.

 

The school had about, I guess, 20 to 25 pupils. All were Jewish (as of course was Naomi) except Jane, me and David Hudson whose parents had, like ours, thought this a better bet than the ‘village school’. David Hudson told me he and I were “gentiles”, implying a difference. I’d never heard that word before. Nor, for that matter, had I ever heard of Jews before, but don’t remember spending any mental time researching the matter. How those children – and Naomi who was clearly a mother-figure as well as headmistress – came to be there, and where from, I wasn’t curious and never knew. The guess of anyone with War history knowledge is as good as mine. All, except we gentiles who lived at home, lived in the house.

 

The school day began with Naomi playing the piano while all pupils walked round the big table in the middle of the main room a few times with books balanced on our heads. It was, I gathered in due course, considered good for “deportment”. From time to time at the end of that ceremony (why then? but memory tells me it was) we were issued with ‘pocket money’ – three pennies, I think – and then immediately invited to give some of it to help “plant a tree in Palestine” (I knew where that was because I liked maps) by buying a stamp to stick in a book.

 

In that main room Naomi did lots of reading to us, including from a Walter Scott book in which Guy Manwaring was the hero, and The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, and the story of the willow pattern on plates; also extracts from The Iliad, and a marionette theatre and puppet figures were created from cardboard for a performance of the part of the Iliad where Achilles and Hector fight and Hector is (very distressingly) killed and dragged.

 

We were taught how to grow broad beans on blotting paper in ex-jam jars, and from budded twigs we collected were taught and named different tree species. We rehearsed and performed a play about Joseph – from him and his coat of many colours being chucked in a pit by his brothers to his triumphs in Egypt. (I was a non-speaking brother). As a result it is one of the only Old Testament stories I know. We also did a Chinese-story play, and went by van (horsebox probably) in the dark to perform it in the village hall of nearby Winsford as well as in school. I had a line in that one: “Aren’t you ever going to chop off my head?” impatiently!

 

The only other teacher I remember (were there others? I’ve no idea) we were told to call ‘Madame’. She was big, blowsy, blonde, and sought to teach French (and may have been). I didn’t like her or French. But she or someone now forgotten did manage to teach me to read and write, strictly phonetically and by doing joined up aaaaaas or bbbbbb etc etc multiple times across pages; a bit of basic maths too. All that happened in the other school room, which had desks instead of big table. But no great proportion of school time was, in my memory, spent in class.

 

Piano lessons were available, a teacher from outside coming in; and I was looking forward to having some but gave up disillusioned when it wasn’t tunes like “Hearts of Oak”.

 

There were no – that I can remember – any children’s books or anything else intended specifically for children anywhere about.

 

In breaks, ‘He’ was played on the lawn and amid the (unpleasantly smelly) Leylandi trees. ‘He’ ran about and everyone else tried to catch/touch him or her, and whoever did first became ‘He’ instead. Jane was a speedy and frequent He.

 

Some afternoons we would walk down to the river and dig clay from its banks and bring it back to roll into sausages to make pots; or go with sacks to the fields where  foxgloves grew to gather their leaves “for the wounded soldiers” (digitalis)