I attended Holbrooks Primary School. In those days the boys and the girls were in separate schools, which had its advantages and disadvantages when you think about it. There was the main brick-built building, but also a wooden built classroom across the playground. The teachers must have done their jobs well because I don’t ever remember any difficulty in learning to read and write. I can still remember being so engrossed in reading Black Beauty that I was surprised when the bell rang, and I was woken almost like out of a dream as I had been enjoying the story so much. Thanks to the English Teachers, my love for poetry began in those days. The two poems that I quickly learned to love were Shakespeare’s ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ and @A song of Sherwood’. By Alfred Noyes. Here is one verse: Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves hear a ghostly bugle note shivering through the leaves. Calling as he used to call, faint and far away, In Sherwood, in Sherwood about the break of day. I feel a tingle run down my spine still to this day when I hear these words, just as I did 70 years ago, as I do when hearing beautiful music that brings back memories. When I was perhaps 9 or 10 a number of boys had to move to a school annex which was as I remember a wooden building next to Holbrooks Park. I heard later that it was infested with rats, but I never saw one! I remember the day we moved there. Whether it was to save money or to give us some exercise, we had to carry a number of books from the main school to the annex. I distinctly remember the spelling tests. There was one boy who was as fast at writing down the words and each time we had finished we looked up at each other to see who had finished first! While there I remember hearing a new word in the song ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’. The second verse begins. They told me last night there were ships in the Offing’. So, I hurried down to the down to the deep rolling sea’. Not having heard that the ‘Offing’ means imminent. I thought offing must be another word for port or harbor.

My Gran came to Coventry in 1915 from Swalcliffe, Oxfordshire to be a cook for a Spiritualist. She met my Gramp, a Coventry kid, and married in 1916. She would often say that everyone in her village had the same surname- Lines. I’m not sure now how good this was.