Fifty things I remember about my time at Sissinghurst Primary School

This is part of my 50 things I remember project. Here is a list of all the 50 things posts.

1. Mrs White the dinner lady saying: 'Eat your fritter'. A fritter was a diamond-shaped piece of battered fish.
2. scratchy hemp skipping ropes
3. peering through the silver grey fence panels at the flowers in the church yard
4. staying in at break because a funeral was going past
5. looking through the gate at the fourth year juniors sitting in the field with the goats
6. Helen Pope's and Bronwyn Riley's heads touching as they shared an advanced spelling book. They would also play their recorders for hymns in assembly
7. Using pooters to catch insects (beakers with two tubes, one you suck and the other to vacuum up the creatures. Mr Martin explained that the sucking tube had a valve to stop you getting a mouthful of ants.
8. Mr Martin telling us to sing louder in order to drown out the new children who were crying in assembly.
9. The clunk-clunk of the fire escape door. And being too scared to use it, until I learnt to read the 'push bar to open' sign.
10. Leaning against the wall to get up on to stilts -- there were three sizes, bigs, mediums and small, all splintery and varnished in bright orange and yellow.
11. Being told off for telling the girls who came to take us for games that our teacher always let us play with the stilts.
12. Mr Martin's fierce orange eyebrows
13. Mrs Covelli's fierce black eyebrows
14. Being told in assembly that Mrs White was very ill, and then later that she had died. And then sitting on her memorial bench, and wondering if she was watching.
15. I didn't like the name of one of the dinner ladies so I called her Mrs Jones. Her real name was Mrs Grabham (Mr Martin said that this was a very appropriate name, and we should do what she said or she'd grab us).
16. On hot afternoons going out for a nature walk round Chad Lake.
17. There was a wendy house behind the blackboard.
18. Weaving on cardboard shapes with fat yarns.
19. Ned Crowe coming in from boys electronics in the hall and picking up a thick piece of wool from the floor and saying 'Whatever is this'.
20. Holding hands with Ben Bower and him saying I was just the sort of girl he would like to marry.
21. Country dancing -- and crying because I couldn't do Lucky Sevens, and being surprised at how kind Mrs Covelli was.
22. Mrs Covelli escorting Mairi Smith out of the classroom, holding her shirt sleeves up so her painty hands wouldn't get everywhere and calling her a messy little girl.
23. Not being allowed to go home until all the scissors were accounted for.
24. Mrs Covelli counting down from ten while we tidied up.
25. Jonathan Martin getting under the mobile classroom
26. Digging down in the gravel in the adventure playground and finding the gravel got wetter the further down we went.
27. Digging a hole in the sandpit and being afraid we might get to magma.
28. Priscilla Parish holding forth on the correct way of taking a crisp from someone else's packet.
29. Buying packets of crisps from the school secretary Mrs Smith, who had wirey black hair and a beatific smile.
30. Insisting that the nit nurse checked my doll's hair before she checked my own.
31. Mrs Suthers making me stand up on my chair to sing a song about Jesus because she said I hadn't been listening.
32. Mrs Hall explaining the correct way to carry chairs (which I can't remember) and the incorrect way to carry chairs (which I can remember): Don't carry it on your head. Don't support it on your hips with the legs sticking out to the side.
33. The smell of scented rubbers, and scented felt tip pens.
34. Calling felt tips 'felts'. 'Can I borrow your felts?'
35. Queuing for the loo before going into the swimming pool and discussing whether it was all right or not to wee through your bathers before you swam.
36. Walking back from the games field holding hands with Eleanor Milburn and doing 'All girls together, no boys.'
37. Nearly up-chucking at the smell of Emma Bowyer's fishpaste sandwich.
38. 'Georges win! Andrews in the bin.'
39. Gordon Russell dropping a fat, snotty tear on my green reading card. He was standing behind me in the queue to have his reading heard, and had just been told off. I was cross, because it was a newish reading card and I would be stuck with the stain for a very long time.
40. I had to do a maths exercise which involved colouring in a square to show how many boys there were in the class. They ran around so much that I couldn't count them, so I coloured in all the squares. Later, I was told off: 'Mrs Covelli doesn't have 30 boys in her class!'
41. Being frightened of a dinner lady's twisted hands and shining knuckles -- Mrs Filmer must have had painful arthritis, which is probably why she always seemed so cross.
42. Finding a cross carved into the trunk of the lime tree in the front playground.
43. Horrid boys trying to push girls into the damp and smelly boys' loos in the back playground.
44. In the summer, we were allowed to eat our lunch in the front playground. My form teacher Mrs Covelli came and kindly asked me what I was doing alone in the cool deserted dining hall. I explained that the sun was too bright and hot, and that I preferred being inside. She sat with me and ate her lunch, and complimented me on my pink Victoria Plum lunchbox.
45. Singing lessons with Mrs Crowe, in which we sang 'We All Live in A Yellow Submarine' and 'John Brown's Baby's Got a Cold Upon its Chest'.
46. One afternoon our teacher was late back from lunch. We lined up outside the locked classroom and sang 'We all Live in Tub of Margarine'. When she still didn't come, we sang 'We All Live in a Bubblegum Machine.'
47. A rumour flew round reception that if we put two words too close together, the thing to do was to put a neat dot in the middle of the line.
48. Getting changed after swimming under my blue towling poncho. The highlight of the swimming class was doing a whirlpool -- we would walk round the circular pool, pushing against the water, and then stop and let ourselves be washed backwards.
49. A lesson where we had to read one of a set of non-fiction books -- they covered every topic you can imagine, and we could choose whatever we liked -- and answer some questions at the end.
50. Simon Butler asking a girl who had come in to do work experience how to spell 'kerfuffle', and her looking really confused.