When my gran was young

 Well, step-gran to tell the truth, as she was grandad's 2nd wife.  She came from mining stock at Radstock and was the last of 7 children, and born around 1906.  I have a book which I got from the bookshelf, intending to send to the charity shop, but opened it and it will now stay.  Here is what life was like at Radstock school around the time my step-gran was there.

From an article "Tyning pit was more than a mine, it was a living community" by Ron Perrett, Radstock:

"We went to the Radstock Board School.  I don't know why it was thus called.  Then and at no other time in its long history had it ever boarded pupils and never in my wildest imagination can I see it proclaiming itself as 'The Radstock Boarding School, seminary for the further education of collier's sons and daughters.'

    I think my first childhood memory was of the schoolroom where my education started.  I have thought very hard but there seems to be nothing before this.  Initially, we were to be amused rather than educated.  There were large frames of counting beads, bricks and modelling clay and the most fascinating of all, shallow trays filled with sand.  We drew pictures with our forefinger and to erase and start again required no more than a slight shake of the tray.

    The passport to the Grammar School or Secondary School as it was known then, was the School Certificate.  All of us who were candidates for this examination were, for the next year, to be the Headmaster's special charge.  If there had been factory farming in those days, we would have best been described as battery hens.  We were placed in a special class and were fed twice daily.  This was on a controlled diet of arithmetic in the morning and English in the afternoon.  The only time it varied was when results in the morning were unsatisfactory.  Arithmetic would then be fed again in the afternoon. . . . .

"There was a little sweet shop, that conveniently stood on the road to school, halfway up the hill directly opposite my grandparents' house.  It wasn't really a shop at all but a very small cottage converted for this purpose.  It was kept by an old lady by the name of Miss Rivers  She was small and softly spoken, and ever patient as we stood deliberating, sometimes at great length, as to the best way to spend the 1/2d (half-penny) tightly clenched in the hand.

    She always wore black dresses that accentuated the whiteness of her hair.  The sweets were laid out on two large tables facing the door.  They were so big in relation to the tiny parlour that they had veritably taken it over and squeezed the old lady into a corner by the fire.  There she sat in a high backed chair, always knitting when she was not serving us.  To me, it was more than a sweet shop - it was a fairy grotto.

    We could have liquorice in sticks or strips, a liquorice pipe or liquorice bootlaces.  Or we might buy a packet of sherbet with a round dab on a stick for licking, or with a tube of liquorice sticking from its top for sucking through.  We could buy four aniseed balls, a packed of sweet shredded pipe tobacco  or a gobstopper that changed colour as we sucked it.  Of course, we had to watch this magical process which meant its removal from the mouth every few minutes.  But often we would chance all on a lucky dip.  The bag had a magic about it and the mystery of the unknown.  What a permutation of sweetness and with a 1/2d in the hand, who could make a decision?"

(I have to say, all these sweets - and many more - were still available in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up and Lucky Bags were often the choice then - gone up in price to 3d by then!)

Another, briefer, extract:

"My grandfather was a miner, as were initially all the boys.

    Grandmother baked all her own bread in the huge kitchen stove.  She made every garment and mended every garment.  She planned every meal with economic precision.  Shoes for the family were cleaned and laid in a row every evening, ready for the next day.  She sent her children to school clean and well clothed, even if gracelessly so. 

    I can remember mother telling me that after washing and putting her eight children to bed, she retired to her own and gave birth to her ninth.  No wonder then, in a moment of great stress, she confessed that if things did not improve she could no longer face life.  Grandfather left the pit at Writhlington where he worked, walked to Braysdown Colliery and begged for a better paid position." (He was successful).

Taken from "Where Have All the Cowslips Gone" - Wessex Memories, edited by Venetia Murray.