I Was Expelled From St. Anne's!

A Memory of Sanderstead.

St. Anne's took boys until age ten or so, and in the mid 1940s I was one of those. My mother had been a teacher at the local school where we lived but was not impressed with the school and considered the headmaster a bad character, so she sent me to St. Anne's. Then toward the end of my second year, the teacher told my mother that she thought I was advanced enough to prepare for my first communion, to which my mother replied, "But we're not Catholic." The teacher said, "But his father is." "No," said my mother, and that was that: somehow or other they had not checked on our religious affiliations when they admitted me, and I went to another school the following year. I remember the names Mother Mary John (which is how I found this site) and (I think) also Mother Mary Paula.

I was somewhat sad to see a block of flats where the school had stood.