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Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
Late in the year of 1939 there were so many 'Londoners' now living in the two villages of East and West Hanney, that the local village school was not large enough to accommodate both them and the village kids. So the village hall known to everyone as 'The Hut' was commandeered and got used mainly as the infant's school, at least during the daytime.
The 'Hut' itself was a long, somewhat sad looking building. A timber frame was clad in gray weatherboards and it had a gabled corrugated iron roof. The whole building was up off the ground sitting on wooden stumps, or piers. A very drafty wooden floor completed its structure. The draft at times was sufficiently powerful enough to lift the skirts of unsuspecting ladies as they passed by.
There was a stage up one end and a sort of kitchen/cloakroom down the other end. They called this section 'the buffet'. In the buffet numerous cups of very weak tea were made, when the hut was used as a dance hall or for 'Whist drives'. The same buffet area also passed itself off as the library on Wednesday nights.
Next to the stage just off to one side, was a large cast iron 'pot bellied' stove. Coke was burnt in this fireplace during the winter. There was an open-hearth fireplace that burnt coal, instead of coke. It was a place where kettles of water were heated to brew the tea.
When the building was used as a school, the dance floor area was divided crossways by a very long but somewhat flimsy curtain. These drapes hung about a foot off the floor. During school hours this curtain was in constant disarray from kids moving it back and forth. I think every kid that passed it just had to touch it.
I grew to love this school. It was only in this one-roomed place of learning that I was ever really warm in the wintertime. Us smaller kids were taught to play various musical instruments, just simple ones. I liked bashing the cymbals together, but I can't say I was very keen on tapping the triangle, which so often I found myself landed with. We use to sound off with thunderous musical noises to the tunes like 'The teddy-bears picnic' 'Ten green bottles' or 'Knick Knack, Paddywack, Give A Dog A Bone'.
Other times we would act out school plays. They might be nativity plays, one taught to us from out of a book or some play a teacher made up.
It was around that same time that I learnt the children's nursery rhyme 'Pease Pudding', along no doubt with numerous other inane nursery rhymes, but I learnt it as 'Please pudding hot...please pudding cold...'. It was many years later that I realised the word was Pease not Please.'
I played a lot of games at school. 'What's the time Mr Wolf?' and communal skipping were great pastimes of both boys and girls. Spinning tops was a game much favoured and you could whip the top or whip your friend, who was giving you a hard time.
Another game was where the children stood in a circle with their hands behind their backs. One kid walked around outside the circle, holding a small parcel. The children sang 'A tiscit, a tascit, I`ve lost my little basket! Someone may have picked it up and put it in their pocket!' When the singers got to that particular part, the child carrying the parcel put the parcel into another child's hands, both kids would run in opposite directions. The winner was the person who got back into the vacated spot in the circle.
Most kids collected something. There were those who had much thumbed wads of cigarette cards depicting famous cricketers or footballers. Other cards had pictures of butterflies, flowers or perhaps fish in very bright colours.
Some kids had a collection of birds eggs, usually sitting in cotton wool or match boxes, or even cigarette packets. There were very few boys who didn't have pockets full of all manner of things, ranging from a special conker, or a trusty peashooter, to a pen knife and if you were really lucky you might even have a Jack knife!
At school I learnt to make useless things out of raffia like potholders, plate mats and book markers. I tried, without success, to make fluffy balls, the balls that girls were so apt in making but all I ever ended up with was numerous short pieces of wool!
One time a girl did made me a small doll out of some dark blue knitting wool. I kept that tiny doll in a 'Vesta' matchbox. I use to put it on the windowsill at home in the sun, so it would keep warm. About that same time an older girl gave me a tin dwarf. This small toy had one leg missing. Being young at the time as I was always sucking it. It had a sickly, sweet taste, so I was probably poisoning myself with a lead paint!
I learnt how to read and write, to do sums, to pray to Jesus who would make everything alright, if you prayed hard enough. I was taught to use a pen. The pen was dipped in ink that was in little china pots that sat in a hole in the middle of the desk. The ink made great big black blotches on your paper and clothes too if you weren't careful.
If you dug the nib into the desktop, which I was often did, it crossed and would never write properly afterwards. If the ink remained wet, which it usually did, you laid blotting paper on top of your wet writing and when you removed the blotter every thing on your paper was badly smudged, so the teacher couldn't read what you had written at all!
We were all taught how to use our 'H's, learning by heart 'Harry! Hang your hat, on the hook in the hall'. I learnt how to knit and how to sew using big, thick wooden needles.
We would all sit around a large table and make rugs from other peoples discarded clothes. The clothes had been cut into strips and these strips were in turn impaled upon a hessian corn sack. Eventually after countless hours of impaling (hooking) the sack was covered in a many coloured pattern. Later you could tell other kids stories about the clothes that you now walked on. Grans was always making rugs this way.
We poured over the world atlas trying to remember all the countries that were then coloured pink. At the same time we poured scorn on the 'Jerries' and made fun of the 'Ities' (Italians) and didn't have a clue who the 'Nips' were!
In the early autumn mornings, we would go for long rambling walks with a teacher. On real cold winter mornings we all sat around the big glowing coke stove. Its heat made your face all red and shiny. We all drank our small one third pint bottles of milk which was free to the Londoners, others had to pay tuppence halfpenny a week.
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