Lunchtime At Whitehall School 1955

A Memory of Uxbridge.

Well nobody actually said "lunch", It was "dinner" then. No families that I knew of ate a cooked evening meal so "dinner" was the main meal of the day. The school had no kitchen or dining facilities and so every day, come rain or snow, we were herded in double file down Cowley Road to the old school house that served as a canteen and that stood on bottom corner of Vine Street. Who you chose as dinner partner for this operation was of vital importance because it was a golden opportunity to chatter about mutual interests. Of course the sexes were divided. Girls at the front and boys bringing up the rear.
The schoolhouse (built 1830) stlll had the bell tower but minus the bell. Inside there was a spacious ground floor and a first floor gallery at one end. The folding partitions that had divided the area into separate classrooms were still intact. There were long refectory tables and benches downstairs and long tables but with chairs in the upstairs gallery for the senior class.
I suppose not many look back with fondness on school dinners, but I did enjoy the leathery roast potatoes and the boiled beef and carrots. Salad day was boring because it was fairly meagre and accompanied by hardboiled eggs swimming in washy cheese sauce. The absolute lowpoint of the week was Friday which was always fish out of deference to the Catholics who were at that time required to abstain from meat on Fridays. Not that I disliked fish, but nine times out of ten it was cold tinned pilchards served up in lumps and containing what seemed like an inexhaustable supply of crunchy bones!
But I did like the puddings..my favourite being Cowley Pudding which was a kind of steamed suety sponge containing raisins and sultanas and covered in crunchy brown sugar. I have since tried in vain to find a recipe for this.
These walks to and from lunch were also an opportunity to observe scenes of daily life. Harmans brewery still used drayhorses and could often be seen plodding their way to the pub opposite the school by the river, (was it called The Green Man?) now demolished. If there were roadworks then there would be a steamroller chugging back and forth. Even today, long after the steam engines have gone, I dont know any other name for these machines! Better still, one might see a traction engine making its way along with its big whirling flywheel and clouds of steam. The passing cars were in themselves a source of interest in these days before the MOT test. Old bangers with steaming radiators from the 1920's and 30's were numerous and by todays standards in an unbelievable state of rust and delapidation. Everything from formerly grand motors designed to be driven by a chauffeur to the baby Austin 6 with wobbly spoked wheels and discoloured silica windscreens flapping in the breeze; not to mention motor cycles with sidecars. There was one couple I remember in particular. Both clad in leather flying helmets and goggles, and in bad weather the wife sat seemingly snug and dry in the sidecar doing her knitting. My best classmate's father had a fabulous sports model (an Alvis) with a collapsible hood, long bonnet and enormous round headlights (very like that used by Cruella Deville in 101 Dalmations).
Then there was one sad thing that was a daily sight, and that was the polio children in leg-irons being wheeled by their mothers to and from the clinic. Untypically, none of us made jokes or pointed as children are won't to do in such situations. The sight of those pale strained faces and those terrible leg-irons caused a hush or complete silence. I think it would be good for us to remember things like this and be thankful they are gone before we get too carried away with "the good old days".