Quick questions and (maybe) answers Hertford Memories thread

[Angela Woodford]

Angela - I would like to refer you to the time the Vth form in 2's were presenting the St Matthew's Day festivities and did that same game in the cellar.(I think I posted about this once). The {sick} thing was we had visited the butcher in Hertford earlier in the day, and the slimy things/the round squishy objects/ the firm rubbery things etc WERE brains/eyeballs/lungs etc, albeit bovine!! Nasty little creatures we were!! The smell was quite unpleasant!!

OH! I almost wish you hadn't said that! How did you get the butcher to sell you such horrors?

"Er, um, it's for our Cookery/we're putting on Macbeth/a Biology experiment/it's an Animal Rights protest!"

Did the apple peel form a J, Katharine?

Not a single firework to be heard yet here - Ferdinand out for his evening fur-freshening - I remember trying to spot fireworks from the Upper fire escape.

[icomefromalanddownunder]

- I remember trying to spot fireworks from the Upper fire escape.

I don't remember whether we received our indoor firework throwing induced Conduct marks on Guy Fawkes Night, or on just another boring evening in paradise.

MaryMc? Alex?

xxxxxx

Didn't hear any fireworks here: they tend to save them for New Year's Eve. Yes, that's right, when things are at their most combustible. However, possibly thanks to The Simpsons, some SA oiks go trick or treating. They don't bother dressing up or putting in any effort to earn their treats. I don't bother answering the door. Fortunately, they haven't caught on to tricking either.

[MKM]

I thought our conduct marks were for sitting on the fire escape watching fireworks, so it must have been 5th November, or thereabouts. I don't remember having any indoor fireworks, let alone throwing them.

[NEILL THE NOTORIOUS]

Kim -- I am amazed that they were still issuing 1/3 bottles of milk in your day (I imagine you are no more than 30 !!!)

Seriously -- In my First School, in Highbury, London, we were issued with the little bottles of milk, and a blanket, and had to lie down and "Rest", for a period !
now this was in the early 30s --- so I thought it had ,long, long, died out.

Having been Chairman of Governors of a First School --- the idea of a "Rest" with today's children, gives me the giggles !

[Jo]

Kim -- I am amazed that they were still issuing 1/3 bottles of milk in your day (I imagine you are no more than 30 !!!)

Seriously -- In my First School, in Highbury, London, we were issued with the little bottles of milk, and a blanket, and had to lie down and "Rest", for a period !
now this was in the early 30s --- so I thought it had ,long, long, died out.

Having been Chairman of Governors of a First School --- the idea of a "Rest" with today's children, gives me the giggles !

I Neill's imagination. That would make me about 32, I think

[Fjgrogan]

Neill, did you never hear the phrase 'Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher'? I believe that was when it died out. We never had blankets or rests though, so she couldn't steal those!

[englishangel]

It was 1971 they were stopped (my husband went on a march his first year at Uni) but my own children (21 in 4 weeks) had them at their infant school in Hastings where they were for a term in 1994, though not in Buckinghamshire when we moved back here.

[Angela Woodford]

I'm baffled. Did I miss something? Milk at Hertford lived in a metal containery thing by the back door, unrefridgerated.

Little third-of-a-pint-bottles were at infant and junior schools.

[Fjgrogan]

Milk at Hertford came over from the kitchens in a metal container with a ladle-type measure. There was a particular way to carry it between two girls when crossing the square to ensure that it didn't slop.

[kerrensimmonds]

And Angela is right. The little 1/3 pint bottles of milk only applied as far as I know to children in Primary Schools, in the after-the-war years (but I don't know how many years!). There were also 1/3 pint bottles of processed Orange Juice. I remember having those too, in Primary School, and seeing crates of them (they must have been the equivalent of long life, heat treated......) in the WRVS storage room at the back of the Council Offices above which I grew up as a child, and from where I went to CH in 1957.

[Angela Woodford]

Oh Kerren! The free Welfare concentrated orange juice! It was utterly delicious. My big sister used to compress the flow of water from tap to glass to make it froth. What a treat.

It must be in the "Away from the Bombs and the Boys" that CH girls were sent to collect rosehips from the hedgerow to make vitamin C syrup during the War. Although I remember too the popularity of Delrosa during the fifties.

That unhygenic metal milk container by the House back door! In the evening, when the UV upwards would make a hot milk drink, they would heat that milk - sometimes a little "off" in summer - in one dedicated milk saucepan. Who wasn't reluctant to wash the thing up? It just got put in the big stainless steel sink, filled with water. "Just one more use" the next hot-milk-drink-er would think; until the saucepan was encrusted with malodorous boiled milk residue.

For the rest of my life I've felt nauseated by the smell of boiling milk!

[Angela Woodford]

Thinking of Hertford in the snow, I was wondering how it was all organised in the Great Snow of 1963 - do any Old Girls remember? ISTR that the snow never melted properly until the beginning of March?

I don't recall a very snowy winter in my time - '64 - '71.

Hey, to think that hockey must have been cancelled! Wonderful.

[kerrensimmonds]

I remember it well. We were taken out on crocodile walks, in our leather shoes, along paths which had been cut through the snow (sometimes as high as our shoulders). We returned with soaking wet shoes/socks/feet.....and yes no doubt all sports were curtailed, for the duration, as I do not remember any clearing of the School Field (let alone Ashbourne).

[Angela Woodford]

That was quick, Kerren! Thank you -

Crocodile walks! Even for one such as I, who dreaded hockey, that must have been horribly boring, and wretched too with icy wet feet! You, as a keen sportswoman, must have been really fed up.

The Houses were very well heated, weren't they? We used to line up our wet gloves on the radiators. But I remember the process of stripping off in the gym changing areas as being very chilly before going into the gym and leaping about for Nellie as a warm-up!

[Katharine]

No Kerren, I'm sure it wasn't crocodile walks. The route was set each day, and as I recall we left between set times with different sets of Mons front and back but we could walk in groups of 3 or more along the set route.

Did we have country dancing once a week instead? That was in the Gym with Miss King playing her fiddle with a couple of girls as well and us all prancing around stripping the willow or whatever.