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When Arthur Cleverly started school he lived in Dyehouse Lane and walked to Southbroom School across two fields, through a wood and along a path next to the cemetery and over the canal bridge. He usually walked alone because no one else lived down his lane and his brothers were much younger than he was.
Arthur continues...
I enjoyed school until one day the headmaster said something to me that changed my whole attitude to it, and also to learning for a long time.
We didn't have many books in our house when I was a child but here was one that I read and really enjoyed. I could read, by the way, before I went to school, my mother taught me. The book was Girl of the Limberlost by Jean Stratton Porter.
It was, I suppose, a romantic novel but it contained some descriptions of giant American moths which caught my imagination as a young child. Something that increased this interest was a story my grandfather told of Mr Tull who kept a shoe shop in The Brittox and had bred giant Himalayan moon moths in an old chapel in his garden, the biggest he had ever seen.
Through my grandfather's interest I became mad about moths, wildflowers and birds, which I knew a lot about as a child, and thought I wanted to do something in that line one day.
When Mr Wesley, the headmaster, came to us that day he asked us what we would like to do when we left school, I said I wanted to be a naturalist. I don't suppose for one moment that he intended the effect his response had on me.
In those days, there were still some people who thought it was wrong to educate children to have ideas above their station and he thought, perhaps, that by this he was doing me a service when he absolutely scorned my reply to the whole class.
He said I had ridiculous ideas, that naturalists were clever people who wrote books and it was silly to think that I could ever do that. It flattened me and I abandoned all interest in nature study and lost my confidence to write anything for a long time. 
Southbroom Senior School, now Devizes School, from the playing field c. 1927.
 | From:
Devizes Voices compiled by David Buxton
Tempus Publishing
ISBN 0 7524 0661 2
£9.99
For a complete list of local history books published by Tempus Publishing visit: www.tempus-publishing.com |
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