52 Aisby

A Memory of Corringham.

On my first day at Corringham School, my mother walked me, aged five, down the long lane from Aisby with our faithful old dog Floss and a playmate, Monica Bramford, a year or so older than me. During assembly I started to cry and my mother had to walk me to school for a while after that, leaving a most reluctant scholar at the East Lane corner. I later learned to ride a bike and attended school with Mike and Diane Guerin, an American family stationed at Sturgate and billeted at Netherdene farm cottage at Aisby.
The head schoolmaster, Mr Frost, lived in the schoolhouse and I remember one incident when I got a clip round the ear from him for throwing my skipping rope down untidily in the cloakroom. His ring caught the side of my head and gave me a bit of a shock as it was the one and only time I ever remember getting smacked. I certainly wasn't frightened of him though but I did have a great deal of respect and even affection.
In those days we had Arnold Harrison at the post office cum general store and he would cycle round to deliver our mail and newspapers. He was one of a very few people who did own a car and used that once a year to pick up any neighbours, including we children, from Aisby for the Harvest Festival service held in the chapel on Middle Street. It is now closed and converted into a home. This was a popular event and well attended, as at the end of the service the donated home grown garden produce was auctioned off in a little room at the back.
The village supported two shops at one time as the Wrath family also had a shop further along Middle Street and I remember they installed a freezer to sell ice lollies, a great treat with rationing becoming just a memory.
Reverend Butterworth lived at the vicarage where garden fetes where once held and he also taught us religious lessons in school.
My father, Harold Stainton had a little shop in the back kitchen of our Thonock Estate house at number 52 and in those days, before supermarkets, we stocked a wide range of goods, from home cured bacon, sliced on demand, sugar and dried fruit weighed out in strong blue paper bags and colourful boiled sweets in glass jars in the window. We were open all hours even on Sundays when only pubs were open and so Corringham folk would sometimes walk the opposite way down that seemingly endless lane to Aisby for an afternoon stroll to get sweets or cigarettes.
Electricity didn't arrive at Aisby until the 1950's and the earth closet up the garden survived until a septic tank was installed along with a bathroom in the early 1960's. We went to bed with a candle and in winter a stone hot water bottle to warm our feather bed. We had paraffin lamps to read by and my mother turned out wonderful meals and cakes from a black kitchen range and side oven fed with solid fuel. Her Yorkshire puddings were legendary, made with bantam eggs from the chickens which ran around the garden and roosted in the trees. They were deep yellow soft buttery creations in the middle with a crispy brown risen crust served with gravy made from meat stock and Burdalls Gravy Salts thickened with flour. Food to come home for.
One Christmas stands out in my memory when the Americans, stationed on our Lincolnshire airfields for some years after the war, delighted Corringham schoolchildren with a visit from Father Christmas, complete with the sound of his reindeer bells. We were all treated to a small gift which was gratefully received in those rather frugal years.
The eleven plus was still in place in 1956 to which I did not measure up, alas, and so with most of my classmates I looked forward to being picked up from home by bus and taken to Ropery Road Secondary School in Gainsborough, and then soon afterwards, to the newly built, very modern and exciting Castle Hills Secondary Modern - now sadly demolished after surviving only 50 years to make way for the ultra new Academy. For me though, after the brown and green paint and cream tiled walls of the old Victorian edifice of Ropery Road which seemed like a prison, the glass and steel sixties construction set in playing fields was a liberation and a marvel with its bright and colourful walls and modern art works. But I do remember my last day at Corringham C of E when I had to say goodbye to Mr Heywood who had taken over from Mr Frost as Head and guess what? I cried all the way home!