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Topic: Early Meories Page 3
david
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Early Memories Page 3
on: June 29, 2013, 17:25

The toilets in the upper playground at the infant’s school were horrible, the smell was atrocious and perhaps it might have been a good idea to have the health and safety people there then.

My dad used to tell me that when he went to school, which would have been between the years of 1915 and 1924, they didn’t use pen and paper for writing on, they used slates.

Having had one of these slates as a toy I can only imagine that the screeching noise made by 30 or more children must have been horrendous.

We started off with pencils and paper and progressed to ink and dip in pens, we used to mix the ink in the school toilet at Church School.

We started off with a jug, a large bottle and the jar of ink powder, we added the powder to the jug of water and mixed it well.

That was quite easy, the hard part was getting it from the jug to the bottle without wasting most of it.

When you finally got the bottle into the classroom that’s when the real fun started.

You now had to get the ink from the bottle into the inkwell. Where the bottleneck was about three quarters of an inch wide, the inkwell hole was only about three eighths of an inch wide.

Don’t forget this was the days before kitchen towel and tissues so if you spilled the ink it just ran everywhere.

It must have been good ink because your fingers were stained blue for days afterwards.

I couldn’t wait until Christmas for my Platingum pen set containing a fountain pen, propelling pencil and ball pen.

The rules at the time wouldn’t allow you to use the ball pen as they were supposed to encourage poor handwriting.

The fountains were refillable by moving the little lever on the side which filled the tube inside the body of the pen with ink.

Later on if you were lucky you got a cartridge pen for your birthday, the problem with them was the cost and availability of the cartridges so it was usually back to the dip-in pens.

Joined up writing was a major learning curve for most of us, the art of joining those letters was almost as good as painting a masterpiece in oils.


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