All this, however, was to change, and the start of this change came in the late 1930's when the appeasing government of Stanley Baldwin and later the arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain began to realise the need to re-arm against the infamous trio Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. War came on 3rd September 1939.
Large posters appeared on walls in the village urging us to join up in the services or, for the older or exempt classes, Dig for Victory, Remain Resolute, Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness Will Bring Us Victory. Senior pupils, of which I was one, often reflected on the latter, prominently displayed on the old blacksmith's shop across from the school, while waiting for some chastisement from the headmaster of the old school. Yes, I started the war still at school and ended it a member of the much maligned PBI.
The first six months of the war was an anti-climax: no bombs, no troops, no difference. True, the men on reserve had joined the colours, and some of my older mates, boys who had been at school when I commenced, had volunteered. The majority, however, waited for call up.
The senior pupils formed a first aid section for the girls and a fire brigade for the boys. We wore armbands displaying a red cross or a flame; I wore the latter. We had a stirrup pump. For the benefit of the present day's generation, this was a contraption one end of which was placed in a bucket of water. The other end (or top) had a handle which was pumped up and down by hand. Older hands referred to it as a beer and beef engine. The combined effect was to propel a jet or spray of water onto a fire. Two people were involved in this work: one to hold the small hose, the other to pump. The rest of the crew supplied the water in buckets.
I have long since ceased to be surprised by the deep intellectual thinking of the blimps that ran this country so disastrously for the first two or three years of the war: the Blogs anti-tank rifle that was far more dangerous to the marksman than the tanks; a two-pounder gun that had to have the wheels removed before it could fire, thus becoming immobile in a mobile tank war; a sticky bomb designed to stick to a tank which stuck to its user.
Therefore there was little surprise at the acceptance of a fire-extinguishing system which propelled water from a two-man pump supported by a bucket chain when the water could have been much more effectively thrown from the buckets!
His decision to equip eight fair-sized lads with a pump, six pails, white armbands and an unlimited supply of water did not, to my mind, say a lot for the Cambridge-trained headmaster. Climbing over old desks and 5 ft walls as training quickly turned the armbands grey, black or missing. Practice drill with real water resulted in one or two unpopular teachers getting wet. A jet of water shooting through an open window into the top class of girls of course did not help. I was on the jet that day. I saved my neck by insisting that I did not know that the window was open.
The climax came when the girls' first aid class at practice under the veranda got washed out. The headmaster pointed out that one bucketful of water may have been accidental, two improbable, three deliberate.
Thus ended the school boys' fire brigade.
The girls' first aid continued after I left, and no doubt longer. The knowledge of anatomy gained by the class must have helped a lot, particularly when the super race arrived to win the war for us.