All the streets had their lanes.

Ours was friendly with nettles and the manure Nan collected in a bag. There was a wood yard and a coopery where timber sky-scrapers were turned into barrels and sawdust. There were yards that served as cemeteries for bindweed and soursobs, broken staves and the reek of wine.

The lane by the side gate was different. The grass was matted — dank with rain in winter, thick with dust in summer. Tins and newspapers skulked in the boles of trees. Drifts of oyster-shells were remnants of some sinister paper-chase below walls sprouting jags of glass and prickly wire. It was the lair of boys with Argyll pullovers and brilliantined hair.

I was saved from the lane by the gate. I crossed the asphalt yard; climbed the two cement steps, and went through the cloakroom that smelt of Phenyle and carbolic; entered the classroom that was a duplicate of the one I entered at Kindergarten.

There were the same friezes of alphabet letters and nursery-rhymes, the same saucers of cotton-wool wheat ranged along the sill, the same bulbs torn by fresh green spears, the same tables hung with hessian book-bags, the same pickle-jars full of the same tired daisies and snapdragons.

I met another headmistress, who with her soft swan’s bosom and pepper-and-salt hair might have been the same headmistress I met before. But her name was Miss Hecker, and when I saw her approaching me at the end of a corridor, I muttered as the other children muttered: ‘Miss Hecker, double-decker, policeman came and tried to get her,’ and she was diminished.

I met another teacher, and Miss Trembath with her shivery-grass hair was replaced by Miss Traegar and a rain of hairpins that peppered our primers. And as she gathered them we peeped through our eye-lashes down the neck of her dress and saw the white doves that nestled there.

We learned to count to the click of beads on counting-frames. We learned to draw a pig from circles and a stick-man with a little hat. We sang ‘Birdies are Nesting for ’tis Spring-time’ and ‘I Had a Little Nut-tree’ and ‘Where are You Going to, My Pretty Maid?’

We drew wavering lines that should have been straight, and looped rick-rack patterns with wax crayons on sheets of butcher’s paper; ravaged the pages of exercise books with HB pencils that deteriorated from slender candles to pock-marked stubs; wrote a diary of all the things that happened to us and were not allowed to rub out.

We read, and there was Dot who sat in the sun, Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the crooked man who walked the crooked mile. It was a race to see who could finish their primer first, and I stayed behind after school and read to the teacher; when I finished a page she stamped it and a swallow hovered in the margin.

There were other rewards for good work.

There were red ticks and gummed-paper stars and early minutes; there were scraps embossed with violets, kittens in baskets and angels dreaming on scalloped clouds.