The North School Adventure

RAIN ON MY WINDOW. Morris Pottinger

Small boys had to go to school eventually. My first was to the North School half a mile up the road from Whitehall Farm. In due course I was followed there by David, Norna and Isobel, and there exists a school photograph somewhere with all four of us in it. Miss Sutherland was my first teacher, followed by Miss Wilson with her sister keeping the school-house warm. I still remember my first day, spent the morning at school, came home to Whitehall at midday and told my mother I was not going back in the afternoon as I knew it all, having been already taught by her, a former school teacher, to read pretty well. Taken ignominiously up the road again and that was that.
The North School which we went to is now a shed for implements for the next door farm of Clestrain lying just below the School. Stronsay also had Primaries at the Rothiesholm School and the South School, and an Infants Room with Miss Gorie in the Central School. Our single school-room had a cast-iron coal-burning stove in the corner, the only heating we had. That we had to take a lump of coal or a couple of peats with us to school did not apply to us, though it was a fact in many cases and not a myth. Our father provided a horse and cart when needed to take a load of coal from Davie Chalmers in the Village up to the School.
Tumble end-over-end blackboards, hugely big maps on the wall with the British Empire in red over almost the whole map. We thought that anyway. A very ancient wall map with the North Sea denoted theron as the German Ocean. Bare, well worn, wooden floor. Twin wooden slightly sloping desks with hinged lids, a fixed seat which we could not bang, a deep groove for slate pencils and nibbed pens, an inkwell, and lead pencils which needed a small sharp penknife which we all had. Sometimes used to illegally carve initials on the desk, totally frowned on but still done. A belting offence, but worth it! Someone had an upmarket rotary pencil sharpener which we all wanted to borrow, a very small token fee being charged where it could be exacted, a sweetie, a bit of chalk, a cigarette card, a marble. Private enterprise at an early stage.
We had wooden framed slates, lines on the front for writing, squares on the back for sums, written with the slate pencils of course, and some of them could make the most excruciatingly squeaky sounds as we wrote, quickly dealt with by Miss Sutherland. I fear some scholars - not me of course - made rather a meal of it at times, wearing the usual schoolboy look of innocence which took in no-one. Great care was needed with these slate pencils, they broke rather easily. A small piece of sponge or a damp rag made up the tools with which to clean our slates, hence “Wiping the slate clean” came into our language. Reading books were carefully distributed and as carefully collected at the end of the day. Later than in my first year we had copy books, lined to perfection above and below, beautiful copper-plate script ( writing ) at the top of the pages, and we had to copy these examples within the lines, just so much above, just so much below. I never had the hand to do it well enough, practice though I might. Perhaps a bit too impatient, most surprising! Crayons as well as lead pencils. Later came writing with the nibbed pens and ink though prone to blots. Used at times to blot a “friend” with ink when teacher was looking the other way.
Sometimes in these primary years we had painting, or plasticene modeling, or clay modeling, or filling in shapes. My best effort was when Miss Sutherland gave us varied coloured shapes to paste onto matching outlines on a sheet of paper, supplying us with sticky Gloy paste for the purpose. I finished in half the time allowed, Miss Sutherland thought I had given up. Not so, I had found that the backs of the shapes were sticky like postage stamps, so all I had to do was lick them and put them into their proper place, a nice neat very clean effort. She did not do that exercise too often as the results were usually Gloy paste over everything and everybody, hair included. She later told my mother that she had been doing that for years and had not known that the backs were sticky, hence the Gloy. They had a good laugh together about it.
There was of course a big desk for Miss Sutherland. Within its cavernous depths lay the tawse or two-toed belt, but I do not remember it being very much used in the North School. Windows were built high so we would not be distracted by seeing what was going on outdoors. Just across the road from the School was the North School Quarry, worked on occasion when the roads needed doing or to have a stock pile of crushed stone. The stone crusher was brought to Stronsay from Kirkwall on the Earl Thorfinn, set up in the quarry and clanked and thumped away all day while they were working. Fascinating to watch at playtime, all the differing sizes of stone from large chunks to crusher dust coming out of the differing shutes and barrowed to their respective storage heaps. Most of the workers were from the Village, taking any odd job available though the herring fishing had precedence, the quarry not then being worked. Too near the school for explosives, the rock was all taken out with wedges and sledge hammers, arduous work in the extreme. I think the father of Capt David Pottinger of the St Ola was quarry foreman or manager, and our father told us he was a magician at his job. It is interesting that all the old flagstone quarries in Caithness would have been worked in the same manner, all manual work, no diggers, no explosives, no fork-lift trucks. But as I already wrote, our windows were high, we could not watch save at playtime.
Outside the schoolroom was the lobby, pegs on the wall, coats hanging from them. In wet weather there was a very damp smell from soaking coats but we had no drying facilities, nor do I remember any coats being dried at the fire.
Toilet facilities were two tiny sheds, strictly boys and girls, each with a wooden bench seat, a double holer we called them, with buckets below. We were also segregated in having boys’ and girls’ playgrounds at either end of the school. Worked well enough, and sometimes we were allowed to come together for games, under teacher’s supervision of course. You never knew what infants would get up to, better be safe. I once tripped and fell headlong into a stone wall one playtime, cutting my forehead deeply which needed stitches, and the honourable mark and bump on the bone are still faintly there. No comments, please!
Going to school in the morning would be an adventure in itself. Whitehall Farm was a mile up from the Village and the children from there went mostly to the North School for Primary, though some went to the Central School as beginners. I do not know what the criterion was other than personal choice. We would watch to see if the Village pupils were coming up the road and then either join them or head off quick to get to school before them, smug in so doing. There was always a certain tension between us, they were the Villagers, slightly below us in the social scale we thought, total nonsense of course, but it was amazing how positions could be taken even in a small Island. Those were the days when rivalry and competition among school children was normal and natural, both in the playground and in the classroom.
Outside school we had odd things to do. Going home at a leisurely pace we explored the side road, picked wild flowers to take home for mother to put them in an empty jam jar, red campion, ox-eyed daisies, dandelions, buttercups, vetches and primroses, red clover, bird’s foot trefoil, looked for lucky four leaved clovers but not many to be found, found mauve ladies smock and splendid purple orchids and frondy mares tail in a small marshy area we called the Clay Holes, looked for bumble bee nests by hitting likely tussocks of grass and listening for the angry buzzing of an outraged bee. Now there are few to be seen, which is a pity as I really loved these solitary buzzers. Still do. But we dug out the nest anyway, sucked the good honey from a few cells with a bit of hollow grass stem, left the cells where we could see a young grub developing, put the desecrated tiny comb back into place for the bee to repair and look after her growing grubs. We would later look to see that she had returned, left a marker somewhere to tell us where the nest was, not really a hive as they were solitary bees, then left her strictly alone as she had paid her dues. Looked in the roadside drystone dykes for rabbits, caught a few. We certainly dawdled on our homeward path.
Before I leave the primary schools of Stronsay, and of so many other rural areas, these peripheral schools such as the North School to which we went, the South School and the Rothiesholm School, are now closed. The one roomed Rothiesholm School I must mention. As a family we moved in 1893 to farm Rothiesholm from Upper Stove in Deerness in the Mainland of Orkney, stayed there till 1913, flit to Hobbister in Orphir west of Kirkwall looking out onto Scapa Flow, returned to Stronsay to Whitehall 1919.to 1944.
Rothiesholm – pronounced Rousam - was Primary School for our father, his slightly older brother David, his older sisters Nan and Jeannie, youngest brother Steven. Not his older brothers John and William, John going directly to Kirkwall Grammer School when they moved to Stronsay, William (Bill), two years younger than John, going first to the Stronsay Central School and then to Kirkwall.
Out of these simple country schools John became a surgeon in South Africa, then to Gisborne in New Zealand, served in World War 1 on a Hospital ship in Alexandria, Egypt (Gallipoli) finally settled in very Scottish Invercargill. David, M.C., graduated 1911, served as a doctor all through World War 1, stayed on in the Army till 1930, then went to Invercargill to join his brother John. Recalled for World War 2, served from 1940 to 1944 as CO of the 2nd New Zealand General Hospital, first in North Africa, then in Italy, sent back home in 1944. He had done enough, was one of my heroes. Steven became a doctor practising in Willenhall in Staffordshire. Our sister Norna also, now a retired doctor in Thurso.
Years ago there was a photograph in the Orcadian of six men, reprinted a few years back. They were six Professors from all over the World, Australia, Canada, South Africa, United States, England, Scotland. They had all come home to Orkney quite by chance that same summer, not by arrangement. They had all been in the very same class in Kirkwall Grammer School. All had come out of these tiny country schools save my father’s first cousin John Tait from Kirkwall, later a Medical Professor in McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
So are we really so far forward today with our glass palace schools and massive education budgets? We must be, surely. Or have we lost something precious along the way? I rather think we have.


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