School 1950s

A Memory of Old Basing.

Those of us who grew up in the very rural villages around Old Basing in 1950's, had to travel to school in Old Basing, by school buses.The school on Milkingpen Lane was the only school for miles. In the late 1950's the school still did not have flush toilets.This did present some serious health issues and some of us became very ill with scarlet fever. The school was very badly provided for, with few facilities.
The school did not have any school kitchens, so each day the whole school would walk through the village, via the village churchyard, to the village hall for school dinners and then back to school for afternoon classes.The system worked just fine, until the day the wooden village hall burned down. This was as a result of sparks from a train on the nearby steam railway, alighting straw on the thatched roof of a cottage next door to the village hall. Soon a school kitchen was built and school dinners used to take place in the classrooms everyday.
From my first day of school at Old Basing, I loved school but was terrified of the school dinners, as one of the teachers showed us all her "tongue scissors" and told us how she cut out children's tongues and then put them into Monday's stew for school dinner. The best school dinner was sausages. We never had sausages at home, as my mother thought them to be "common". On my first day at school we had sausages for lunch! I announced this to my mother as I jumped off the school bus... she was not amused.
With villages being so remote and having no local facilities, not only did Old Basing School have The Mobile School Dental Service visit the school, but also the school barber on a regular basis.
When the winter snows fell the buses could not get through the drifting snow in the lanes to Old Basing, so all buses were cancelled and children had to walk several miles to school or just not turn up! We lived in the very small village of Chineham and when it snowed the bus could not get out of Basingstoke, to collect chidren from nearby villages, so we had to walk through Chineham Woods to get to school. There were some very severe winters with a great deal of snow!
The school organised all sorts of events, Sports Day was probably the most exciting day. The vicarage, across the lane from the school, held all kinds of fetes. We all learned country dancing, or perfomed plays in the vicarage garden. It all seems rather "lashings of ginger beer" and "Enid Blyton" to reflect on now, yet so dated in a short space of time.

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