I was in Miss Whitehead's class, the top class. I was always in the top class because I started there when it opened and as the pupils got older they just moved up a year. There didn't seem to be as much mobility as now so the population was fairly static and new school entrants relied on the birth rate in the area. We used to have warm cocoa drinks in the winter and I was the cocoa monitor, given the task of putting the cocoa powder into the cups before the morning drinks. Miss Ellis, the headmistress had a dog called 'Jinks' who lived in her office curled up on a mat under a desk.. The fields surrounding the school were composed of a large rough area, which had the remains of anti aircraft gun emplacements on. These filled up with water and we could go and look for frog spawn there. There was a further large field, which was mown and had a "dell" in it which we used to play games on. I remember Clive Sanbrook who was in my class and a friend of mine. I remember we had a waste paper collection, presumably for school funds and one of our storerooms was full of this.. The bottom fell out of the waste paper market and we were left with mountains of the stuff. Don't remember what eventually happened to it. The parents made a lot of "shops", which were situated along the corridor and we could go and be shopkeepers and customers. At the top of Clay Lane there were a small row of shops and one of the girls in my class lived there with her parents, I think her name was Sylvia Smith. I think they kept a newsagents and sweetshop. Sugar was rationed so sweets were a premium buy. Opposite the shops was an area of prefabs, which were built whilst I was at school there, I remember the crane used to erect the walls.
The school was a single storey wooden building in, I think, the shape of an L. At one end, the "top" class was situated and the other end was the "babies" class looked after by Miss Livesey. We had clean and new indoor toilets with hot water in the basins, a great improvement on the outside toilets at Acocks Green primary, which I was at for the first year of my school life. To the shame of Birmingham education Comittee it is still there if you look at Streetview.
We went on school trips, I remember going to London, Windsor and Liverpool. On the London trip we went into the tower of London and saw the crown jewels. The Windsor trip involved a boat journey on the Thames on a steam launch with a lower and upper deck. In Liverpool we saw the Liver building and had a ride on the overhead railway which ran round the docks area, I always remember one man there showed us a huge drum of liquid latex, which when rubbed between your finges went solid and rubbery, you can do the same with Copydex.