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Lorna, Vivienne and Michael went off to school everyday leaving me behind, until one day I was old enough to attend pre school. The school was St Thomas’s , near the top of Heartshill in Newcastle , a great big school, with a pre school and junior school, then a few steps and fence surrounding the senior school. All totally dominated by the huge catholic church which looked down over the playgrounds. I attended school full time at the age of four, we all trooped out of the house and down the road to catch the bus, it was a long way, down through Fenton, into Stoke and out the other side on the way to Newcastle. The school was a Catholic through and through and religion dominated every aspect of it, there were a lot of nuns as teachers and there was (compared with today) a very strict regime. I don’t have any really unhappy memories about the school, I ran away a couple of times, then Lorna, Vivienne and Michael would be turfed out of class to find me!. Lorna left hurriedly in her last year when she found out that a nun had caned Vivienne quite harshly and confronted the nun, snatching the cane from her hand and chasing her out of the class!.
I remember things like free milk in half pint bottles, in the winter it would be frozen solid and the leather strap hanging from the waist belt of the mother superior and the rosary with the large crucifix hanging around her neck and standing outside her office waiting to go in for punishment!.
Each Monday before anything else, we would have the religious register, if you hadn’t gone to confession and taken holy communion on Sunday, you were frowned upon and lectured by the nuns about God not being happy with you. It never dawned on us to tell a lie, to fib and say that we had done it when we hadn’t! We thought God would not be very happy with kids who did that. I also remember the way they explained our souls to us, it went something similar to this: ‘Picture your soul as a pure white cotton bobbin, with just one black mark on it, a sin!, the sin given to everyone by Adam and Eve. This sin can never be removed, but it is up to you not to get any more black marks, every lie, every theft, every hateful thing you say or do, every time you break one of the commandments, bad thoughts…(the list was endless)……, all these will mark your soul. If you attend confession and repent, these marks can be removed, but hell and damnation awaited those who.......’ Frightening stuff for a little kid to take in, especially coming from a six foot nun with more whiskers than my dad!. It was confusing and scary, they even told us it was a sin to go into any non-catholic church! Can you believe that!
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