The Baby Boomer Generation by Paul Feeney

and sensible, so there was no room for fashionable footwear at school. We all wore heavy, black leather shoes or boots that were indestructible and designed to last a lifetime. When holes did start to appear in the leather soles, dad would apply a pair of Phillips’ stick-on soles in the hope that the shoes would last another ten years, during which time one of the younger siblings might also get some use out of them. We had nothing like the designer trainers that have become essential everyday wear since the 1970s. Our only shoes of comfort were the black canvas plimsolls we all had, but these were not designed to take much in the way of kids’ daily rough and tumble and so they were generally only used for school games or PE.
    At infants’ school we were taught to recite the alphabet and we were shown how to do some basic arithmetic using an abacus. We also learnt how to write short words with chalk on a small, hand-held blackboard. Our teachers read stories to us and we sang lots of nursery rhymes and did loads of drawings and paintings. We were taught how to make easy things using a few basic materials and we learned how to co-ordinate our movements through dance and games. We played loads of throwing and catching games with small beanbags, and we learnt how to kick a ball in a straight line. After spending a year or two in the infant school we moved up to primary school and began to mix with the big kids. By the age of 6, we were using pencils to write, rather than the early learning tools of blackboard and chalk, and within a very short time we were being taught how to write with pen and ink. However, we used a crude type of pen not much better than the old feather quill pen; it was made out of a short wooden stick with a metal nib fixed to one end. We each had an inkwell fitted into the top right-hand side of our desks (we were all expected to be right-handed) and we would dip the nib into the inkwell to load it with enough ink to write a couple of words at a time. The nibs were not at all reliable in controlling the flow of ink and the pages in our exercise books would get covered in splodges of ink, as would our hands. It was very messy and a difficult task to master. Some kids never managed to get the hang of it, always getting more ink on themselves than on the page.
    The post-war baby boom meant that there were a lot more families with young children in the 1950s, and families tended to be larger in number than they are today. Accordingly, schools had to accommodate lots of pupils, especially in urban areas, and so it was normal to have a large number of pupils in each classroom (often more than forty to a class and just one class teacher to teach them; there was no such job as classroom assistant in those days). We did loads of creative things like drawing, painting and model making, and we practiced singing a lot. The classrooms usually had large loudspeakers installed high up near the ceiling so that we could listen to some of the ‘Schools Radio’ programmes that were broadcast back then. These included a weekly programme of sing-along songs, mostly sea shanties and the like, and we would all sing along to these using special ‘Schools Radio’ music books that contained all the words of the songs. The radio control switch was usually housed in a cabinet somewhere outside of the classroom in the central part of the school and we were regularly made to jump when it was switched on by mistake, blasting a sudden burst of loud noise into the otherwise quiet classroom.
    The amount of exercise we got was not limited to what we did at playtime in the playground; we also did lots of PE, sport, swimming and cross-country runs, usually having to walk long distances to the school playing fields and the council-run swimming baths. We certainly did lots of non-academic things at primary school but we were left in no doubt that school was a place for learning. While we were taught the basics in