This morning, I’m sitting in the free car park next to the Rural Life Museum in Allerford, near Minehead, West Somerset, UK. It seemed like a good place to go because my first article today is about museums.
The Rural Life Museum is an intriguing blend of nostalgia and history. Many of the exhibits are not rooted very far in the past. Although I never went to Allerford School, the preserved school room resembles very closely school rooms where I learnt to read and write. The desks that I didn’t dare to doodle on, look the same with their lift up lids and the benches and seats are just as uncomfortable now as they ever were when I sat on one’s like them.
The fully equipped classroom dating back to yesteryear is not the only exhibit at the Rural Life Museum. There is another whole room that is packed with all sorts of other exhibits to do with rural life.
But it is the classroom from times long gone that provided me with my most powerful experience.
Seated quietly at one of the desks, the chalk dust, board rubbers and old wooden desks brought back memories of my youngest days at first school. As a child, I was sensitive, shy and timid. Each day, When I went to school, my greatest fear was that I would transgress a rule and be the target of the corporal punishment that was meted out to others on a regular basis.
It wasn’t necessary to be really bad or naughty to incur the wrath of the headmistress. Once she threatened to rap my knuckles with a pencil because I couldn’t get my sums right. The implication was that I wasn’t concentrating or trying. The consequence was that I copied the answers from the person who sat next to me when I had to take my calculations up to her again for checking. Cheating was preferable to the immense indignity of physical chastisement let alone the pain.
In then end, I successfully managed to escape the horrors of physical punishment whilst at junior school but others were not so fortunate.
For minor indiscretions, a 12 inch ruler was regularly used on the palm of other children’s hands.
One girl, who wouldn’t stop talking, was dragged to the front of the class to have the tops of her legs vigorously smacked. If I, who wasn’t the unfortunate recipient of the punishment remember it so well, I expect it lives on in the poor young girl’s mind with traumatic clarity, even though now she must be middle aged like me.
On one occasion, there was a particularly unpleasant bullying episode of one child, which nobody could condone. Probably, though, it was only one or two children that actually inflicted the attack on this child. Fortunately, I was at the other end of the playground talking to a couple of friends when the usual crowd of children developed around the ‘fight’ to see what was happening. Myself and my two friends were the only ones, in my recollection, that escaped being caned out of all the children in the playground.
They say that your childhood represents the best years of your life and I am sure that children’s lives are much improved these days. At least children in the UK need no longer live in daily fear of being hit by the teachers.
Museums are about education as well as serving to bring back memories to old men. Often, classes of young children visit the old school classroom at the Allerford Rural Life Museum to enable them to taste first hand a little bit of what it was like to go to school in the olden days. They experience the same desks, hard seats and benches that we used to use.
I’m sure it is a valuable experience for them and enables history to become more alive and real. I’m also sure that the way teachers are required to treat little children these days in the UK rightfully prevents the experience from being too realistic.
Bye for now
Rob