A 1950s English lesson

English was my favourite subject at school. Every Thursday a whole afternoon was devoted to it. We always began with silent reading while the teacher heard that week’s readers. I used to lose myself in Enid Blyton books, the ones about the famous five and the secret seven, where children explored and solved mysteries, a million miles away from my life. 

I loved composition writing, or story writing as they call it these days. Even now I can remember writing about a haunted clock and scaring myself so much that the hairs prickled up on my arms as I was writing it. 

Sometimes our teacher read poetry to us, about daffodils or boys on burning decks. My favourite poem was about a donkey called Nicholas Nye. It made me cry every time I thought about poor Nicholas Nye. I used to think about him a lot. I was a bit of a softie… I still am a bit of a softie when it comes to animals. 

I even enjoyed grammar, all those doing words and naming words. I still have a fascination for such word lists and love the podcast called Word Matters presented by a team from the US Merriam-Webster dictionary. They only produced about a hundred podcasts and I often re-play them. 

Handwriting in those books with special blue and red guidelines was tedious especially as we had to use old fashioned pens. These were just a wooden handle and a metal nib. The teacher would fill up a pot in the ink well on each desk with runny blue ink that always ended up all over my fingers and sometimes on my clothes too.

The best bit of the afternoon was the story just before home time. I remember our teacher reading all the Dr Doolittle books and all the Worsel Gummidge books, a chapter a week. This was before they were ever made into films or seen on TV so we could let our imaginations run wild. 

I may be wrong but I suspect English isn’t taught in such a holistic way these days. The UK National Curriculum changed many things and not necessarily for the better.