Aspen House                     Part One: General Reflections - 3                      by Patrick Noakes

After assembly we went off to our classes - separate, single rooms on the paths around the school, built of wood and raised a few feet above ground level, no doubt to escape damp. Steps led up into the classes, where desks, sufficient for no more than about twenty pupils, awaited. Children had the one class and the one teacher for every kind of academic lesson, such movement as there was between classes being linked to ability. Children making sufficient progress would "go up" into a higher class, whereas those too old to stay where they were, which in the circumstances was a frequent occurrence, were moved up because of their age.

Outside this rule was Mr Clanfield's woodwork shed. The building had a corrugated sloping-roof and ran along the left-hand side of the playground, where a fig tree overhung the corner at the far end. Down three or four steps, behind open air wire fencing, it looked out across the playground towards the garden shed and the holly trees, beyond which were the vegetables patches the children tended, with Mr Perkin's class, Class One, in the distance.

All classes were open to the elements, the walls being perhaps four-and-a-half feet high. Above them were not windows but heavy-duty green canvas screens, drawn-to only in high winds and rain. The recovering children were in the healthy open air throughout the school day, which in springtime, summer and autumn was heavenly. These seasons made the bitterly cold winters, when we'd sit for hours in freezing temperatures, barely able to grip a pen or pencil, almost tolerable. When the little pond was frozen over with ice inches thick, then we were allowed into the warmth of the teachers' quarters. The cold seemed endless and was extremely painful, but it was seen to be beneficial, an aid to medicine.

Many children, myself among them, made complete recoveries at Aspen House.

After morning playtime we were given breathing exercises, told to breathe deeply and draw our shoulders right the way back, "Until you could hold a coin between your shoulder blades." That was what Mr Brunswick said. We'd file into the assembly hall then, now doubling as dining hall, for our dinner [at times it was the art room, and we also had singing lessons there, and so on.] Tables seating eight boys or girls were set around the sides to catch the open air, while teachers ate at a table in the centre. The meals were cooked opposite, in a large steam-filled room on the ground floor of the teachers' quarters. They were varied and nutritious: carrots, cabbage, sprouts, peas, potatoes, dumplings, etc., with lamb, beef and pork, various kinds of pies, and thick gravy. Sweets were rice pudding, apple pie and custard, jam roly poly and the like, and "rest" followed immediately. We'd file out to the blanket room for our blankets, then lie under them on canvas collapsible beds inside and outside the dining hall, according to the season and the weather.

We had treats here and there. At one, a yearly trip to a children's concert at the Royal Albert Hall, we'd sing Parry's arrangement of William Blake's Jerusalem, coming in for the second verse. Sports were held at Brockwell Park, and of course there was a sports' day; and on one very special occasion Mr Perkins took some of us to watch England v. Australia, at Lords. But our day-in and day-out routines were the same as you'd find anywhere else - set in the open air, though, amid daffodils, roses and tulips, hedges, trees and lawns, at a school unlike any other.