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Book details
Title: Education Glorious Salvation
Genre: Autobiography
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1904976-06-6
Price: £6.99
Synopsis
Education Glorious Salvation is an account of the author’s schooldays at
Bottesford Primary School during the war years of 1939 to 1945.
He attempts to contrast the naivety and innocence of primary pupils with their mischief and impishness in the hope that the narrative also conveys the salvation that education provided for him and many of his school colleagues.
John Taylor’s narration is absolutely apolitical but he, like many, many others, regrets the demise of the grammar/secondary education system in this country. Although he was a grammar school boy himself, he still acknowledges the value of his wife’s super secondary education which enabled her, in her nursing career, to achieve just as much as he did.
Extract
I became a pupil at the village primary school on the same September day that my oldest sister, Constance, started at secondary school. At the age of eleven she had won a Lincolnshire Junior Scholarship which gave her a much sought-after place at Scunthorpe Grammar School.
Her success gave the whole family a boost. I remember how my father had worked extra hours that summer servicing the boilers of the threshing traction engine of Ralph Pearson and Sons of Yaddlethorpe. He did that just to earn enough extra money to buy Constance’s grammar school uniform.
Unfortunately for me, it meant that my older brother, Joseph, had the task of taking me to school on my very first day. It was washday and my mother had far too much to do at home to find the time to walk the two miles to and from the school. So my brother had been instructed to take me straight to Miss Marshall in the infant class and give her the large envelope my mother had prepared.
He failed miserably. Once out of sight of home, he stuffed the envelope inside his shirt. Carrying such an object in a way that others might see did not match his ultra macho image.
The school had three entrances - girls, boys and mixed infants - and there was no way, at the age of ten, he was going to be seen going through the gate for the mixed infants. Instead he took me through the boys’ gate where he was immediately accosted by the headmaster, Mr Bristow, who ordered him to take me through the appropriate gateway. Instead of doing this, he shouted over the girls’ wall to my sister, Margaret, for help and, when she came out of the playground, he passed me over to her.
Margaret was just seven but she dare not disobey her big brother. She took hold of my hand and we went through the mixed infant gateway into the school then along a gloomy corridor to Miss Marshall’s room.
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