berry daines

“What starts in school?” you may ask. There was a lot of nonsense about ‘fitting in’. This was illustrated by the difficulty of buying suitable black shoes for the offspring. Three children, two with wider feet and one with narrow feet. It’s possible to buy school shoes in the right sizes if you travel to a city with more choices. Otherwise, there were telephone calls about detention because of the ‘wrong’ shoes. The ‘correct’ shoes (after the local shoe shop had ordered the right size especially) were often in a bag, to be changed into after walking to school in a more appropriate pair with sturdier soles. There were threats that “this will be added to the pupil’s records!”.

“Oh no!” I tried to humour them. “Not the record!”.

I was summoned to a meeting: “Mrs X wants to see you on Friday morning!”.

“Does she?”. Regretfully I declined, having a prior appointment that day. The receptionist was unhappy, nervous about what to tell Mrs X. I advised that the meeting should be with shop owners who weren’t stocking the correct sizes of uniform stuff, not me.

“One size fits all” does not apply to shoes. Nor should it apply to education. Now that the young people have completed their studies (despite various obstacles), I’m seeing advertisements about school attendance. We often received an A4 sheet describing the perils of missing a day (or more!) of school. Nobody misses being bullied by a teacher. Nobody learns much by using obsolete methods. Hopefully the lessons learned in Pembrokeshire have helped our family to never collude with madness.

I’m bemused to notice that the auto type suggests the next word after ‘school’ should be ‘shooting’. No, it really shouldn’t.