Your story – Heather Scott

What are your memories of primary school?

The primary school that I went to was in the village of Pendoylan where I lived, it was called Pendoylan Church of Wales Primary School. There were only about forty children in the school and only two classes, one from the ages of 4 to 7 fo the infants with the teacher Miss Price and the other for ages 8 to 11 with the teacher Mrs Knight.

As each class had several different year groups in it each year group was seated together but they were not large groups, my year was a group of six which was about average, but the whole class would be doing the same subject at the same time, they’d all be doing maths together or english together, just at different levels. In my year group we had 3 girls and 3 boys,besides myself the other girls were Janet Harry and Christine Thomas, the boys were Paul Causey, Michael Farrelly and Courtney Jenkins as there were only six of us we tended to be all friends together. Christine came to the girls high school in Cowbridge when we moved schools but we didn’t continue to be friends there we both went on to make separate friends and lost touch completely when we left school. The boys I would see on the school bus but otherwise lost touch with them. Janet was the only one that I kept in touch with, we would send Christmas cards regularly up until a couple of years ago when i also lost touch with her.

As the school was in the village and only took a few minutes to walk to those of us that lived in the village walked to school together as a group, the older ones looking after the younger ones. I remember one day when we were going home from school, we had to walk past the church and there were slow worms living in the church wall, Clifford Synon, a friend of Sue’s, picked up one of these slow worms and threw it at Sue, she was terrified of snakes and ended up in hysterics screaming,of course eveyone thought it was hilarious except Sue that is.

During the playtimes and lunch time you had to go outside, whatever the weather, during the bad weather we only had to go into a covered shelter that was open to the front to go into. There was heating in the school but it didn’t go on until the first week of October and went off at the end of March whatever the weather.

Each pupil had a small bottle of milk every day and the milkman would deliver the crates of milk first thing in the morning they would then sit outside until we were given them at break time, in the winter they would be full of ice and in the summer they would be luke warm, we had to drink them. It put me off drinking plain milk for years.