This is a page from my primary school spelling book. I was in class 6G.
You may have had something similar, a small notebook used to record the spellings you needed checking when you were writing something in class. If we had a query we'd go and queue at Miss Green's desk and she'd tell you what the spelling was and you'd write it down. It was also the book in which you listed the words you'd got wrong in your exercise book and had needed to be corrected, so it paid to check first. Don't I have lovely handwriting?
colourful is always a classic, conscious is pretty tricky for a ten year old and commanders-in-chief looks more like showing off. I see from the rest of the book that I was particularly focused on awkward plurals - echoes, heroes, octopuses, potatoes, tomatoes, thieves, volcanoes - or perhaps we just had a special lesson about words ending in o. I wonder what Miss Green thought when I asked her to spell frigid? Also you'll see that one of the words in my C section is incorrect, and it would be terribly easy to blame my teacher for this but it could just have been a transcription error. She got benefiting right on the opposite page so I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt.
This is the first page in my French folder. It won't surprise you to hear that I drew a Paris Metro train on the front cover.
We did French in the top class one afternoon a week as preparation for big school. A nice European lady came in and talked to us and we repeatedly repeated things, often numbers, animals and colours. Just being able to count to ten would give us confidence later, which I suspect is why she never led us into the morass of the seventies and nineties. Almost everything we did was oral so as not to scare us with actual spellings, but occasionally Mrs L got us to draw pictures and label them with the proper accents and everything. We started with parts of the body, which is always a good choice for classroom demonstration, then moved on to two pages of clothes and the inevitable symbols for weather. I still look exactly like that pencil portrait, obviously.
By the end of the year we were capable of answering Où vas-tu? with the correct prepositions and had the first hint of the grammatical horrors of a language with two genders. I thought this was well advanced, but checking my primary school's curriculum today I see they start teaching French two years earlier and this term the top juniors are 'consolidating their knowledge of grammar' and being taught how to order in a café. C'est la vie.
This is Tap The White Stick, a piece of music I wrote for some school event.
I think it's original, I don't think I was consciously copying any particular existing piece. It's not difficult to come up with a tune, but perhaps rather more prodigious to be able to write it down in proper notation on actual manuscript paper. It would have been devised on the violin because I couldn't play the piano, even though my parents had somehow acquired a second hand instrument in the hope that I might. I should say that the guitar chords were added later by an interested adult, I wouldn't have had a clue myself. Also I think the intention was that I would eventually end up conducting a rendition by the school orchestra, which admittedly was mostly recorders, but blimey how good is that title?
If all this sounds horribly smug then don't worry, I was properly taken down a peg. In 1975 my primary school decided to hold an inter-house music competition and I thought I'd be excellent at organising Scot's contribution so took total control. We should do it like this I said, and I should do this bit my myself, and in the end I had a finger in everything rather than sharing the input more collegiately. I was absolutely convinced we were going to win because the other three offerings were less polished and less varied, more ten minutes of singalong and scraping, so I was emotionally dumbstruck when Dickinson won instead. I had wise teachers. I think this crushing defeat taught me to be more humble and less single-mindedly oblivious, but arguably it also quashed my organisational drive and I've never really wanted to take the helm of anything public since.
This is the puzzles page in my hand-drawn magazine, Splodge.
I had a lot of spare time when I was 10, in between school, watching TV and all my musical activities. My brother would much rather I'd been out in the back garden for a kickabout or minigolf but I was more frequently to be found at my desk in the bedroom devising things on paper. Splodge was an attempt to create an entertaining magazine, perhaps inspired by Puffin Post which arrived quarterly in the post and contained all kinds of young-brain fodder. My magazine had puzzles, jokes and competitions, plus very short chapters of not very good stories that were over-reliant on TV characters. The puzzles included mazes, calculations and some quite complex crosswords, indeed I reckon the triple word grid above is pretty good for a ten year old.
Alas my classmates weren't particularly interested, even when issue 1 came with a free strip of ½p Green Stamps, and I see I had to amend the closing date for the story competition from Nov 13th to Dec 12th using a strip of sellotape. Nobody responded anyway. Also this was a time before reproduction was viable so there was only ever one copy, hence the instruction Do Not Write Into The Above Squares!, which really didn't help circulation. Splodge ran to eight issues before I finally admitted to myself that nobody else wanted to read it, but hey here I am 50 years later subjecting a far wider public to my self-published ramblings so maybe it all started here, on two sheets of A4 paper.
