IT'S A SCHOOL RECORD...

I'm at the foot of this extract.  (I masked off  the subsequent names) 

I turned five years old towards the end of 1963, but didn't start school 'til early '64. Around five months later, my family moved to another house a few minutes down the road, which meant that, out of the one year, nine months I spent at my first primary school (before we moved house yet again), I lived most of that period in that 'second' home.  (I'll refrain from indulging in an examination of why five months of school days in one house seems, in retrospect, no lesser duration than the 16 months of school days in the next house, as I don't want to drive you all nuts - or away.)

Anyway, some time in the early or mid-'90s. I revisited my first primary school, and was astonished to find that it still had the school records from my days in its possession.  The kindly headmistress generously let me borrow them to photocopy (before they were forwarded to Education department HQ - which should have received them years before), and while poring through their ancient pages, I was surprised to find that there was no record of our ever having moved house in '64.

That means, as far as the school was concerned, I lived in the same house for all the time (21 months) that I was at that school, whereas, in fact, only five months fell under the umbrella of my old address.  (Had the school ever had cause to write to my parents, the letter would've gone to our previous house and they'd never have seen it.)  It didn't seem right to me, so I carefully pencilled in the address of our 'new' home so that the records were correct, and that other house was officially recognised - even if it was around 30 years after the fact.  (I did that after photocopying the pages however, so it's not in my copies.)

My one regret is that I didn't photocopy the relevant pages in colour, as I only had access to a black and white copier at the time, but at least I have facsimiles of the school record of admissions from my relatively short time there, before my family moved to another neighbourhood and I attended another primary school - at which I spent five and a half years before going on to secondary school.

Anyway, I'm sure you must find all this riveting, so I've enclosed a few extracts from the records to illustrate this post.  Don't get over-excited now.  What I find interesting is that names I didn't know then, I knew later, as some of them popped up in my second primary, and others in secondary.  Even some that I did know ended up going to one or both of my later schools.

The previous post was a 'Journey Into Mystery' - this one has been a 'Journey Into History'.  (Gosh, I'm sharp, aren't I?)

This time I'm at the top.  (I masked off the preceding names)