I’m a vegetarian now and I am sure those lunches had something to do with it.
My name is Anne Leathem. I was born in Leybourne Avenue, Forest Hall in 1960.
I went to school at West Moor primary school which was opposite where Lidl is now on the other side of Great Lime Road. The school burnt down at some point and has been rebuilt on the road up towards the lakes, but when I was young there was no Lidl, there were no lakes. I think there were ponds in those fields and there was no Killingworth New Town or shops or anything up there. To go to school, we always walked. We either walked across the field from where the Percy Hedley School is now on West Lane or along Great Lime Road.
Anne (left) and sister in the garden
We walked to West Moor School every day. Whatever the weather we did that. We very very rarely got money for a bus and it’s not that far a walk, probably half a mile, three quarters of a mile, but when you’re little it’s quite a long way. My mum used to take us when I was very small. My sister is just 18 months younger than me so she would be in the pram and I would be toddling along. I can remember Mrs Gascoigne being one of the teachers when I was there. She lived in West Moor. She was quite scary actually, not above throwing a piece of chalk or a board rubber at anybody who misbehaved in class. You certainly learned spellings in her class. The blackboards were on wheels, not the whiteboards that they use now. It was a blackboard and it could be rolled around the classroom and it had to be wiped down evert day with the board rubber.
We used to get small bottles of milk at school at break time and Mrs Gascoigne would keep any of those that were left over in her cupboard and they would go through various stages of curdling and so on. I never knew what those were for until my mum said it was because she used them for making scones. It must have been quite disgusting taking the tops off though I would have thought. The school was a very old school. My grandmother would have gone there and certainly her brothers did because their names were on the Honours Board, which was in the hall of the school. One of my mum’s mum’s brothers was killed in the war. He was in the RAF and his plane, which was a bomber I believe, came down over the North Sea. The other brother got a scholarship into the army and died during basic training. I think he had a heart condition that nobody knew about, but their names were on the Honours Board in the school hall. We went to assembly there, we did PE in there and we also had lunch in there, so it was multi-functional. There was some PE apparatus which used to come out for our lessons in there, with ropes and climbing things and a beam. I think it was all very large when you were a small child.
The playground in the school was just concrete, there was no grassed area really at all. We used to walk to a field underneath the railway line for sports day. We used to play skipping and people had two balls which you threw against the wall, two-baller we called it. And then there were various singing games. I can remember “The Farmer Wants a Wife”, “Ring a Rosies”, “Oranges and Lemons”, “The Big Ship Sails Down the Alley Alley O” and “In and Out of the Dusty Bluebells”. We used to play those in the playground and also at birthday parties and things like that when we were very young. We’d play games like that.
There was a coal or a coke heap, I’m not sure which it was. It was around the side of the school the boys tended to play in and that was presumably for the boilers. School lunches I really didn’t like. There was always, more or less, meat involved and I can remember absolutely refusing to eat liver and steak and kidney. I’m a vegetarian now and I am sure those lunches had something to do with it. The puddings were things like sponge puddings with custard and awful tapioca and rice pudding and things like semolina, which I couldn’t eat.
This memory is part of a longer memory entitled “Forest Hall, Killingworth and West Moor in the 1960s-70s”.