Free Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs by Norman Jacobs

finished my dinner, I crossed my knife and fork on the plate. Bob Marriott, who was sitting next to me and an old hand at school dinners, was aghast. He said, ‘You’re not allowed to do that! You have to put them down beside each other.’ This was the final straw. When my parents asked me what I thought of school dinners that night, I told them how terrible they were. So after just one day Mum gave up her job so that I wouldn’t have to go through that torture any more. However, she was really feeling the strain of being at home, but she then had a brainwave when she saw that my school was advertising for dinner ladies. This was the answer, she thought: she could work and keep an eye on me at thesame time. So, although the dinners didn’t improve, consisting mainly of such delicacies as a slice of beef mince pie, a dollop of cottage pie or some glutinous mass masquerading as stew with a lump of mashed potato, scooped onto the plate with an ice-cream scoop, and cabbage followed by tapioca pudding (commonly known to us as ‘frog spawn’), prunes and custard and sometimes just a plate of pink custard on its own, at least I had my mum there at dinnertimes.
    Eventually, once I got used to the idea of staying at school for lunch, Mum went back to the toy factory. I have to say there was an added bonus in this for me as she used to bring home ‘samples’. The toy she brought back the most often was a little cannon that fired matchsticks. I had several of these. Occasionally she also brought back a toy car. So, in the end, it was win-win all round. Mum felt a lot better as she was able to get out and enjoy the company of the other factory workers during the day and I got lots of new toys.
    In my last year at Rushmore, I was made not only a milk monitor but a stair monitor as well. In those days, all schoolchildren were provided with a free 1/3 pint bottle of milk at morning break. As milk monitor, my job was to help get the crates ready in the hall for each class to take up to their room. My fellow monitors and I had to punch a hole in the top and push a straw through every bottle. This was all right most of the year, but in the depths of winter these bottles actually froze up and it was hard to push the straw through. My function as a stair monitor was to stand on the stairs at playtime, dinnertime and going-home time to make sure that no one ran. If they did, then we had to tell them to stop and if they still carriedon running we had to report them to a teacher. It wasn’t a job I enjoyed for it felt too much like being a snitch.
    Towards the end of my school days at Rushmore, I had to take the dreaded 11-plus exam. If you passed then you went on to grammar school and if you failed it was the secondary modern. The 11-plus was created by the 1944 Butler Education Act and was supposed to establish a tripartite system of education, with an academic, a technical and a functional strand. Prevailing educational thinking at the time was that testing was an effective way of discovering to which strand a child was most suited. The results of the exam would be used to match a child’s secondary school to their abilities and future career needs. However, when the system was implemented, hardly any technical schools actually appeared and the 11-plus came to be characterised merely as a competition for places at the prestigious grammar schools, so that, rather than allocating according to need or ability, it became seen as a question of passing or failing.
    The examination itself consisted of three papers: arithmetic, writing and an IQ test. I passed the exam but that in itself led to two twists in my academic career. The first was that, in the school’s own end-of-year test, I only came seventh in class. Every year the top eight in the A stream were awarded a prize, usually a book of some sort. That year Mr Moore decided that he would award prizes to the top six, plus two others whom he thought