Christmas-time was magical

I would like to contribute my memories of St. Edmund’s school in Monsall. It was a lovely school and one I hated to leave.

I started to go there at the age of three years, so that would be in 1934. The nursery school was away from the main one where my sister and brother went, and their education was much stricter than it was in the infant school. Their headmaster was a real tarter!

By the time we moved away from the area I could write properly (joined up writing they called it) and I remember using chalk and slates instead of pens or pencils and paper, at the age of seven years.

Christmas time was a magical time there, with a giant Christmas tree and in the hall, a lovely roaring fire (the only time it was ever lit).

A week or two before Christmas we were taken two at a time, to a spare classroom filled with lovely toys and we could choose which one we wanted, then our name was tied onto the toy we’d picked. Later they were placed under the Christmas tree and after singing a few carols sitting cross-legged on the floor around it, we waited for (I think) someone to blow a whistle and we all rushed to find our gifts.

It was many years later that I found out, that the funding was left to the school by a councillor who stated in his will that the money he left was to be used for the children until it ran out!

Bless him whoever he was. Are there other people from St. Edmunds who remember their enjoyment of the Christmas’s spent there?
Eva Cook. Nee Hyde