CHARNEY HALL Letters Home
It was after Sunday lunch, sweets in hand, that we had time set aside to write home.
“ Dear Mum and Dad,
Thanks for sending me this week’s Eagle comic. At 4.5d it is good value and I really enjoy reading about Dan Dare and the Mekon, that green man with a big green head.
We played football against Rossall this Saturday and got thrashed 4-0 as usual and I met the great Stanley Matthews. He is their coach now as he plays for Blackpool.*
Courtesy Daily Mail
I’ve cut my middle finger on my left hand. We were chopping up matchsticks with chisels in the joinery shed and I was about to pick up some when Milburn’s chisel missed a matchstick and stabbed me instead. He didn’t mean to but Mr Hirst had to take me to the doctors in Cartmel and I had one stitch in it. The cut was very long and extended from my knuckle to the tip of my finger. Mr Duncan was incandescent but I told him it wasn’t Milburn’s fault. It’s now bandaged up with a splint so I’ll have to write with my right hand in the end of year exams which won’t be easy. Thought I might get off sitting them all together but Mr Duncan insists I must!
Never mind….!”
And then there was a letter to write to my very first ‘serious’ girlfriend.....always signed on the back of the envelope with SWALK (Sealed with a loving kiss) as was her reply.
Now at the age of prepubescence there was no sex in the relationship, just kissing and then only when playing ‘kiss chase’ or ‘spinning the bottle’ at a party. My parents knew nothing about it. They never talked about sex and if it ever threatened on the 8” TV screen, they turned it off. We picked up the basics from our playmates. I definitely knew how babies were made but premarital sex was strictly forbidden by our parents’ generation. We didn’t dare partake. Doing that to a girl was considered a cardinal sin and, God forbid, if she became pregnant, it was the end of the world.
A girl was sometimes sent away by the parents to have the child. Then the baby was put up for adoption before her return to her home town.
The alternative was to ‘fess up’ and get married as soon as possible and I didn’t want that.
One day at school I received a ‘Dear John’ letter from my ‘sweetheart’. She told me that she was now ‘going out‘ with one of my friends who attended the local grammar school and that we were ‘finished’. He was slightly older than me, one of the more dominant boys in our gang and if I were to admit it, in the right place at the right time.
It was then that I experienced my first feeling of loss and betrayal. ‘Loss’ because I had genuine feelings for the girl and ‘betrayal’ because they took advantage of the situation when I was away at Charney Hall. A double whammy and it hurt badly.
The experience taught me that girls were not to be trusted especially if you were at boarding school. Falling in love (“whatever that is”) and having a commitment at that age was fickle and was possibly not worth the risk of the heartache of breakup. Besides I had exams to pass - I didn’t want to waste my parents investment in my future.
Five more years would pass before I dared to date someone else after leaving public school - alas the second of a series of blunders into relationships which would set a pattern for some of my early adult life.
There are many plausible arguments for single sex education but in my case, and I suspect in many others, it is evident that one distinct disadvantage is that it can initially inhibit the ability to empathise with the female phyche!
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