75 years on
My School Song and what it reminds me of – a totally irrelevant Raybould memory

Evacuated to not my school

I was ten when war was declared in September 1939; I’ve covered this in a previous essay, but this follows:

Back to my school

It can’t have been long after, back to the school where I should have been, air-raids, nearby searchlights, barrage balloons, guns, bombs; down-steps dank and dismal school air-raid shelter, flooded home Anderson shelter and all, that I was introduced to the School Song, Forty Years On.

Take three lines

I remember being puzzled at the time about three lines I still remember: “Forty Years On”; “The Twenty-two men”; and “Feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder.”
I was then 11; in 40 years’ time I’d be 51. My dad was 50, hard-working at a nearby factory, 6-and-a-half days a week war-work and frequent all-night firewatch duties back at the factory:
he wasn’t feeble of foot or rheumatic of shoulder.

And what was that about twenty-two men? Half of us singing were girls. The winter game was Rugger – 30 fellers, wasn’t it? Dunno what the girls did.

Later, I realised that it was an old 19th century public school song: Harrow, Winston Churchill’s old school, all boys. My school was a modern, Brummie Council school, co-ed, very 20th century, opened the year I was born.

Keep up the good work

Presumably it was in the same event, end of year, marched, again in crocodile lines, into the school hall, when the pompous Headmaster, flowing black gown illustrating his “BSc London” on the official letter-paper, gave a report on the school’s “Good work and progress.” Work? My mind was again puzzled. My Dad worked: school wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t work, whatever the Head and my form teacher’s report said.