David Alston from Shortlands has lived in Bromley all his life. Here he provides some fond reminiscences on his and the area's past in Snapshots of Old Bromley.
The parish school in College Road (known as the National) was where in 1934, at the age of five, I started out, wearing my 6 3/8” cap in the school colours of red and black.
From the first day, I loved that school and the teachers who went with it. Miss Marks was my lovely teacher’s name.
She lived opposite in College Slip, and continued to remember and greet me right up until her passing many years later.
Miss Kilbourne was headmistress and she, too, was a dear.
How wonderful were those days of infancy when we did things we cannot but remember, and sang songs we have never forgotten.
More Snapshots of Old Bromley: A beauty spot worth remembering and golden summer evenings
My exercise books bear testimony to my handwriting (now sadly diminished!), and I am glad I kept them. They were cut into halves and ruled to permit ascenders and descenders or else squares for sums. Coloured stamps showed whether work was good, excellent and so on. At the end of each lesson we would hand in our books for appropriate stamps to be affixed.
The routine things we did – blowing our noses each morning, writing on slates with squeaky slate pencils. Decorative exercises, threading coloured paper through slots on sheets to form patterns; supposedly to produce useable tea mats! In fact more decorative than practical!
Such are memories of infant school, given human face on our annual class photograph (shown here understandably faded after 85 years).
The girls seemingly all wore bright patent leather shoes (one had lovely blue ones, I recall); and the boys grey suits.
Acting was something I have always loved, and when one day the class of five-year-olds was selected to play Three Little Pigs, I was in my infants’ heaven. For I was not simply a pig, but the ;pig who built his house of bricks! They could not blow my house down!
The Miss Marks-aided symbolic protective sliding of a poker at the wolf remains a lasting memory! And I can feel it still.
More Snapshots of Old Bromley: Remembering youth clubs, pony rides and a musical maestro
More peacefully, our customary youthful rendering of Now the Day is Over prior to afternoon departure has stuck with me over the years; its lovely melody somehow blended indelibly with prevalent late afternoon sunshine.
One of the summer delights which would meet with shrieks of horror in this 21st century was the cry of the Walls Ice Cream man, mounted on his box-tricycle at the north school gate. His familiar STOP ME AND BUY ONE meant that for the price of a penny we would become bearers of rectangular water ices. The kindly ice cream man would then cheerfully slice them diagonally and accept a halfpenny instead. Often the young recipient would be permitted to sit astride the tricycle saddle – something which today would invite panic!
On weekdays young David would be walked the half-mile or so to school by two young ladies living close by, and working in the Co-operative Stores in nearby Widmore Road, where Boots is today. They seemed very grown up to us, but were probably about 14 or 15. Funnily enough I do not recall lunchtime sandwiches or ever coming home to dinner, as we would have called it at that time, but I must have eaten something.
When one thinks of it, it was quite a walk to and from school – at least twice a day – for a five-year-old.
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