I remember my first day of school. My Mum or maybe it was my Dad walked me reluctantly into the classroom of Weobley Primary School, a tiny school in a tiny village in West Herefordshire. Back then Weobley felt like the big city. I lived in Norton Canon which was too small to be classed as a village so was given the romantic title of ‘hamlet.’ Even though the population was (still is) less than 200, my place of birth boasted a post office, a petrol station, a church and even a little shop. Only the church remains.
I was obsessed with the Norton Canon shop because they sold sweets. Proper sweets with sugar in them, not the healthy gummies that came from the health food shop that my parents convinced me were the same.
The sweets were kept behind the counter in huge glass jars. Gobstoppers and pear drops and lemon sherbets and toffees and jelly beans and gummy bears. A sparkling rainbow of pleasure. I would gaze up in adoration like I was praying at an altar.
On the rare occasion I was allowed to indulge, the shopkeeper who’s face I remember and who’s name I forget was kind and patient as I stood there transfixed, faced with the monumental decision of choosing one kind of sweet. I wanted them all. I’ve always wanted them all. I still remember the musty smell of the little shop, the narrow aisles and and the huge oak door with peeling paint that would creak on opening. I remember the shelves of magazines and the forbidden top shelf with white covers saying 18+. My eyes would always find the top shelf. Fascinated and disgusted at the same time.
Weobley was advanced. It had a Co-Op and cobbled streets and historic black and white houses from Tudor times with huge over-hangs and traditional pubs where the regulars sat at the bar with their own ale mugs and dogs laid by the fire. It won ‘most picturesque village’ in 2007 and today tourists will visit and marvel at the quaintness of it all. All of this was lost on me as a child. I thought Weobley was the most boring place in the world, mostly because it contained ‘school’.
On that first day I cried a lot. I clung onto Mum or maybe Dad and screamed as is often the way when children are suddenly thrust out of the comfortable, familiar daily routine of home into a place with wooden desks, uniforms and a set of rules and social expectations altogether alien.
I remember my first teacher as kind and soft and smelling of White Musk. Sometimes she’d wrap me up in pillowy hugs and I could lose myself in the folds of her flowery blouse. I remember she left quite soon after I started and her replacement wasn’t as warm, or soft or pleasant smelling. I would write letters to my first teacher asking her to come back but no one ever told me her address so they got shoved into a drawer in my bedroom. Unsent.
On the first day we sat in the classroom on hard wooden chairs. I can’t remember what we learnt. I do remember staring out of the window where freedom lay.
Memories stream in.
Punnets of cress sitting on the school windowsill that we grew from seed.
An experiment with a real human tooth decaying in a glass of Coca Cola.
A plastic baby that we had to take home and keep ‘alive’ by feeding it and changing its nappy.
Glass milk bottles with straws in the top that tasted weirdly sweet and made me feel sick.
When I started Primary School I already knew how to read. I dont know how I knew, I suppose my parents must have taught me. Reading came to me as naturally as breathing. I inhaled book after book spending hours and days immersed in the mysterious worlds drummed into life by the minds and fingers of C.S Lewis and Tolkien.
I was the opposite to everyone else in my class. I dreaded the sound of the lunch bell. I didn’t want to go outside and play. I was fine in the classroom where there were set rules of engagement. I could concentrate on my work and meticulously colour in the lines, or trace out the alphabet in fountain pen strokes but when it came to ‘playing’ , unsupervised, I was out of my depth. I had no idea how to interact. The other children could sense my discomfort and mostly ignored me. When they weren’t ignoring me they were teasing me about all the things that were wrong with me. I smelled strange. I was too quiet. My parents were too old. Our lime green Toyota was too old fashioned. I was too well behaved. My skin was too dark. You dont wash they said. Your skin is too brown.
At lunch I’d beg the teacher to stay inside reading. I remember them looking at me like I had two heads. It was always a no. They didn’t want to share their precious break with some snotty nosed loner kid. So I’d sit on a little bench in the concrete playground sucking my thumb and devouring the Chronicles of Narnia. Books were my escape. I’d get lost in the stories. I’d imagine myself as Lucy, finding this hidden world through the wardrobe. No one believed her at first but eventually they found out the truth.
When I was a bit older my brother and I started catching the bus to school. Mum would drive us to the bus stop, a tiny shelter on the verge of the road, on her way to work. The bus would trundle along the narrow streets with the high hedges and dump us unceremoniously at the school gates. I got used to the school rhythm. There was a rigid hierarchy on the bus. The oldest and coolest kids sat on the back row and smoked and kissed and shouted and sometimes threw things down the bus. I remember a tampon landing on my head once. As a year 7 I was relegated to the front seat, closest to the driver who wore a permanent scowl and who could blame him. Many years later when I met a girl called Rani I finally joined the ranks of the back seat and shared my own cigarettes but that’s a different story.
I forged some tenuous friendships and became temporarily obsessed with horses. Every Saturday morning Mum would drive me out to the stables on the edge of another town called Leominster (which held the dubious title of heroin capital of England for a time). My riding teacher was a formidable woman called Alison. Even my parents were a bit scared of her. She shouted at everyone, from her students to the farm boys who worked for her.
I was terrified of her. I also really really wanted to ride. I started buying horsey magazines filled with glossy looking girls on glossy looking horses. Pony tails human and otherwise, shone in the sun against a backdrop of grass too green to be real. Perfect clean cream jodhpurs and polished boots. I wanted so desperately to be glossy and shiny. I wanted the perfect hair and the graceful movement and the velvet riding hat but it wasn’t to be. As much as I wanted to ride the beautiful Arab horses I was never good enough. Alison assigned me a ‘beginner horse’, Queenie, who was old, cantankerous and half blind. She’d regularly send me flying by stopping abruptly and resolutely in front of any jump I attempted.
Of course I fell in love with her regardless. Alison tried to convince my parents to buy her and keep her in our field at home, but luckily my parents are much more sensible than me and despite a lot of cajoling on my part said a firm and swift no and that was the end of that.
Saturday mornings consisted of first attempting to catch Queenie who didn’t want to be caught. I’d walk through the field with the halter behind my back and a handful of molasses covered treats. She wasn’t that easily fooled and would usually eat the treats then run away, sometimes kicking me on the way. After half an hour of this she’d either get bored and acquiesce or Alison would come stomping across the fields shouting ‘Clare Lovelace, what are you doing, I’ve never known anyone be as slow at catching horses as you!’. She’d quickly and expertly round Queenie up and march her to the stables.
The next fun adventure was to put the bridal and saddle on. I would stick my thumb in her green, foamy mouth to open her jaw and slide the mouthpiece in. I’d stand to the side so she couldn’t bite me, but not too close to her hind legs. Then I’d heave the saddle from the leather smelling tack room and lift it on to her back. The most scary bit was doing up the girth strap. It needed to be tight so the saddle didn’t slip and understandably, Queenie didn’t love being squeezed on her generous belly. She’d turn around and nip at my fingers. Then eventually I’d climb up on her vast seeming back and prepare for my lesson. A few of us little ones would walk, then trot, then canter round a sawdust covered arena whilst Alison stood in the middle with a huge whip shouting at us. ‘Clare, you have a soporific effect on a horse!’ She’d shout. She’d often tell me that if I rode the horse badly I’d be responsible for the horse developing bad habits and it would have to be sent to the knackers yard and turned into dog food. This seems like a pretty extreme thing to tell a nine year old but at the time I took it in my stride. Even though the entire experience was exhausting, difficult, unrewarding and often humiliating, for some reason I’d want to stay, hours past my lesson ended and shovel horse poo out of the stables, for free, for the love of it, and even more surprisingly I’d want to return Saturday after Saturday, on a precious weekend day when I could be doing literally anything else.
Alison taught me about resilience. She thickened up my ultra sensitive emotional skin enough to deal with the next challenge of high school. She prepared me for a world beyond the quiet comfort of Norton Canon. I have no idea where she is now or if she’s still on this earthly plane, but Alison wherever you are, thank you. I’ll always remember that time you gave me Arnica for a bruise and my parents rolled their eyes but I took the Arnica anyway and I like to think it helped. Thank you for your tough love. I haven’t ridden a horse since or thought about you in years but here you are, making an appearance on this screen. May we always remember our teachers, the obvious and the forgotten.