MEMORIES - Ex-pupil Alan Moore's memories of his days at St John's
   
Alan Moore - 1943 - 1950
Unfortunately my own memories of St John's are less sharp than I would have wished, some being hazy to the point of non-recall and others being just hazy. Some are fragmented, such as my first day. I clearly remember my mother leaving me at the gates in a state of total distress - hers not mine - and spending some time sat outside the front door of the school with five or six like-minded other first-day children howling my eyes out. The sun was shining and we made a little wailing row (read that last word either way) on a long, low bench. That's where the memory ends. I must have eventually been enticed into the building but what happened inside I don't know.
.....Eventually we were let out - to play I afterwards found out - but I went home. Mum brought me back and it was explained that I was supposed to stay in the playground and return to lessons until dinnertime. After dinner there was more play and more lessons. I was appalled. This meant I had to stay at that place ALL DAY! And I wanted my tricycle.
.....Anyway, I understood the procedure. The next day I went back to school. I didn't cry this time but went into lessons. We were let out to morning play and I went home. After that I had a chaperone, a girl who held my hand all playtime so I didn't do a runner. I've no idea who she was but she probably hated the arrangement as much as I did. How long were joined at the hands during playtimes I don't remember, but I must have eventually conformed to the system and gained my freedom - at playtimes at least.
.....Not that going home at the right time was always a good experience. The Walker twins were giving me a bit of a going over just outside the gates one day when I caught sight of my father arriving to collect me. I reckoned that when he got hold of those two my troubles were over. Boy, was I wrong! It turned out that his idea of a good object lesson was for me to get out of trouble on my own. It worked well. I got beaten up but found out that relying on others was not always a good idea, something that's come in handy from time to time.
.....Many memories do stand out quite clearly. One of these concerned Mr Mole, a teacher at St John's Boys Department who I had never liked and who had died. My recollection is of the whole Boys' School crocodiling down the slope, across the road and up to a memorial service for him in St John's Church, only for me to be pulled out of the throng at the front entrance.
...."You can't go in, Moore."
...."Why not, Sir?"
...."You can't go into church without a jacket. Go back to school."
.....The teacher went into the church (I don't remember who he was) and I was left standing outside the closed doors in shirtsleeves and sunshine. I returned to school and sat in the classroom on my own. I had a lot to think about. Those thoughts and the final conclusions I reached have influenced me for the rest of my life.
.....Few contemporaries I have spoken to on odd occasions remembered the death of Mr Mole but the Boys School logs confirmed his death at that time. A similar situation occurred with Mr Weeds. I've told several people we were taken for gardening by Mr Weeds and met such disbelief that I was beginning to have doubts myself, but I have since confirmed that I was right about that too.
.....One thing I view with mixed feelings was joining a gang in my first month in the infants. I don't think I knew what a gang was when I was asked," Do you want to join my gang?" I answered in the affirmative and I was in - as easy as that. The good thing about it was that after school we - that's me and the rest of the gang - ran all over the place, finding new places and new things to get up to. Sometimes it got dark before I went home, and that was in the summer. The bad thing was that it was divisive, I mixed with a certain clique and not with the others. Mind you, getting beaten up by the Walker twins turned out well. They weren't in my gang - they were in anyone's gang, they were a gang on their own - but they seemed to take to me and were quite benevolent. When I lost all my cigarette cards they'd get me more. (Cigarette cards came in sets and boys played a win or lose game with them - I mostly lost) They gave me a whole set of sailing ship cards once. Probably they took them off other kids.
..... I was in a play once. My entrance was marked by my tripping on the top step up to the stage in the school hall and sprawling full length and flat on my face in front of everyone, and there seemed to be millions of people in the audience. My performance was similarly marked by referring to the object that sat stage centre for the whole play, and was supposed to be magic stone, as a stove. The script I'd learnt was hand written and the N looked like a V.
.....Corporal punishment was administered almost always, in my recollection, only by the Headteacher. Mr Bennett had a cane on the wall in his office; my memory is crystal clear on that, as is the memory of many other boys on that subject. I've been in his office a few times when it wasn't on the wall but in his hand. Once that point in an interview with the Head had been reached the smaller of the people present knew it was going to be used and it was going to hurt - a lot. Regardless of the offence, the only worthwhile strategy employ was that of saving face during the administration of the punishment. This was achieved by firmly holding out each hand in turn for the requisite number of strokes, usually three, while fixing the Head firmly and unblinkingly in the eye and showing no emotion. This was actually quite difficult because his eye was on your outstretched hand. Miss Willett's desk was in Mr Bennett's office; she was his secretary; sometimes you could fix her in the eye instead of him. I used to think it unnerved her slightly but no doubt was kidding myself.
.....When all six strokes had been administered the Head would dismiss the subject of his corrective efforts. I don't know what other boys did but I would walk steadily to the door, open it, step outside, close the door firmly, carefully check that no-one else was around and then, thrusting throbbing fingers under opposite armpits, hop about muttering expletives until either someone came along and interrupted me or the pain subsided sufficiently for normal progress to be made back to class. There, entrance would be made and seat taken as though the trip to the head 's office had been simply to receive congratulations on how well my studies were progressing.
.....Not all children could accept such punishment, some being reduced to pre-cane tears in anticipation of the pain to come. Corporal punishment, as we all know, is now not carried out in schools. I've been asked several times if it did me any harm. The answer is no. Did it do me any good? I certainly didn't go home and tell my parents about it because more displeasure - all directed at me - would have been incurred, and therein lies the difference between then and now.
.....Mind you, getting the cane was sometimes a matter of chance, a phenomenon of school life whereby there were those who got the cane and were not particularly surprised to do so (and who incurred repeat doses) and those who did not and would have been most outraged if they did. There was no gulf between these two groups, merely a matter of pure chance, luck or fate that somehow guided one set of feet on a path of righteousness, and the other set on the one to the Head's office door.
......What else do I remember? The beams in the lower building hall (now the gym) all were exposed then and when the teacher was out of the room pens could be thrown up to stick in them. The beams had hundreds of pens in them. The handle fell out of some leaving just the nibs there. It was a caning offence and the imaginative part was explaining to the teacher on his return why you had nothing to write with now yet you had before he went out - quite a challenge. I suppose someone got them all down eventually, otherwise they're still on the other side of the false ceiling.
....If I've made myself sound like a holy terror then I've misled the reader, for I was just another boy. I liked a lot of the lessons and tried to do my best most of the time. I hadn't liked Mr Mole much but liked all other the teachers. The authority of the Boys and Infants Headteachers, Mr Bennett and Miss Faulkner, kept them slightly above and beyond getting to know them well enough to make a decision on like or dislike.
.....I knew my place at school. The big people told the little people what to do and they did it. But there were differences in instruction that meant something. "Open your books at page......; " "Copy this down"; "Stop talking at the back"; these were orders. "Alan, get the reading books out and put one on every desk"; "Alan, see if you can open that window a little more for me"; these were almost requests for assistance. And, "Alan, we've collected a whole sackful of silver bottle tops now; on your way home on your bicycle drop them in at the East Surrey Hospital" was an order that filled me with pride that it was I who was chosen for such an important task. Of course, I knew I was the one who lived the nearest to the hospital, and when I got there the fact that I was greeted with. "More bottle tops? Doesn't the school know we don't want them any more?" took the shine off it a little (Although silver foil and bottle tops were collected in later years towards guide dogs for the blind) but it couldn't spoil all the pleasure of being of such sterling service to such an important person as a Teacher.
.....In winter boys tobogganed down the hill from the Top Common to the school. I did that, only instead of a toboggan I had a plank of wood. It worked well. It went fast enough to be exhilarating; was controllable to the point of being death defying (which means there was no control whatsoever), and made you want to lug it all the way back to the top to do it again. The down side was that the square-cut leading edge sprayed up so much snow in your face you couldn't see a thing, but that apart it was great fun.
.....Then they put the steps in at the point where the slope met Kings Avenue and ruined everything. Up to that time you and the plank hit the road, shot over to the other side, hurtled down the air raid shelter bank and came to a graceful halt up against the laundry wall. Afterwards you hit the steps, smashed into the road surface and you and the plank went in different directions with no grace at all. If ever there was an unnecessary improvement it was those steps. Progress ain't all it's cracked up to be.
.....Old pictures of the common show it quite bare of vegetation. When I was at St John's there was much more growth, such as the gorse, the seeds pods of which cracked open like gunfire on very hot summer days. I lived in Upper Bridge Road and as I got older I walked back and forth over the common to school, taking this path and that and getting to know it like the back of my hand. That was when Mr Gould was the common keeper and looked after it inbetween chasing kids like me off it. Nowadays the Common Conservators are no more and it is reverting to the wild. I was up there ten years ago and got lost looking for that spring-fed pond where we used to go tadpoling, and into which someone threw my toy gun - come to think of it, it could have been one of the Walker twins. It had a great willow tree at its southern end and was surrounded only by grass and bracken. Now it's in a wood, has a forbidding wooden fence around it and is about as attractive as a dirty puddle.
.....So far I've not mentioned the war. On October 8th a bomb fell in the front garden of Apsley, a house in Upper Bridge Road, when I was aged almost two and asleep in a house next door-but-one. I was covered in plaster but otherwise unaffected and three years later became one of St John's Infants . Apsley House had to be demolished.
.....In those days there were very few non-white people about and I saw my first coloured person at the top of Mill Street. I was crossing the road on my way to school and his head was sticking out of the turret of a tank at the head of a column of tanks going towards Reigate. I have always supposed he was an American serviceman. He smiled at me and I probably just stared at him as children do. He and his column went to Reigate and I went to St John's, and that was that.
.....I also remember hearing gunfire from the sky and seeing vapour trails when dogfights (air battles) were going on.
. .....I remember laying in bed and hearing bombers go over at night. There were so many that the roar of their engines used to go in and out of synchronisation and produce that rhythmic beat that you hear in old war films about the thousand bomber raids. I also remember that we got an Anderson shelter and I had to sleep in the basement
.....And I remember the doodlebug (flying bomb). I was walking towards St John's School and had just reached the peak of the Top Common before you go down to the school when it came over. It was directly overhead when the engine cut out. I had heard that when this happened the doodlebug went into a spiralling dive and exploded directly below where its fuel had run out. Obviously this was the end of me. I thought of running but it occurred to me that where a spiral ended was rather hard to predict, so I was still rooted to the spot when I realised that it wasn't spiralling at all but going into a gentle but perfectly straight dive. It exploded a couple of miles away somewhere near Merstham (it wasn't the one that damaged Merstham School). I watched it all the way - still rooted to the spot.
....Lots of St John's children were evacuated to Wales during WW2, some of the teachers going with them. I don't remember anything about that, and I certainly wasn't involved.
...I wish I remembered more. The fact that I don't is a shame, not least because when you're older remembrance of schooldays is a nostalgia in which indulgence is a pleasurable pursuit.
AJM October 2001

 

Boy School teachers who were at St John's in the 1940s. Standing from left to right are Mr Ross, Mr Weeds, Mr Booth, Mr Nicholas, Mr Jones. Seated from L-R are Miss Worcester, the Head Teacher Mr Bennet and his secretary Miss Willett.