St Marys School And Church Hall

A Memory of East End.

I was born and grew up in East Barnet and went to St, Mary's C of E Junior and Mixed Infants School in Churchill Road.  It was a small school with only four classes and the boys left at seven and mostly went to Littlegrove.  The headmistress was Miss Banham, who we  all feared, though she must have been a very good teacher as she had the top two years in one classroom, and managed to get 18 out of 21 pupils through the scholarship (later 11-plus). There was no dining-room so those who had school dinners had to walk along Churchill Road to the Church Hall.  The dinners were pretty ghastly, with gristly meat, lumpy mashed potatoes and lumpy custard. The back of the school backed on to the playground which made a good big wall for ball games.  We did a lot of skipping and hop-scotch.In the late 40s, the BBC Schools programme began something called Music and Movement, and we went along to the Methodist Church Hall at the other end of the village to dance about in our bare feet, pretending to be trees blowing the wind, or tigers stalking in the jungle.  We used the Methodist Hall because it had a lovely smooth parquet floor, whereas St. Mary's Hall was floorboards.  My mother still wasn't terribly happy about me running around with bare feet.  In my last year at St. Mary's, we started swimming lessons, for which we had to traipse up to the top of Churchll Road to Church Farm, where there was an open-air unheated pool, which at 9.30 a.m. was absolutely freezing,  Needless to say, I never learned to swim there, only being interested in keeping warm and getting out as quicly as possible.  Barbara Owen

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