Continued from Post 4
After discussing her family in the last part Ina goes back to talking about Swansea and boarding school.
We did our share of the domestic work. There was a duty roster. There was 'carry-in'. This was waiting on the tables - simply bringing in the trays of food to the dining room. We swept the dining room afterwards. We washed the cutlery and dried it - about 60 place settings each meal. Potatoes were peeled on a machine but on Saturdays we had to take the eyes out of enough potatoes to last the week. We also polished the cutlery on Saturday - quite nice because we sat and chatted. And the dining room chairs got a special clean on Saturdays. On Saturdays we all had to tidy our lockers. On Tuesday evening we darned socks - mostly the boys' socks. On Sunday afternoon/evening we wrote letters - to parents and relatives. When we had misbehaved we had to do extra chores such as clean the windows. On one occasion it was raining. We had been caught having a midnight feast. We found it so ridiculous cleaning windows in the rain - we put on bathing costumes and carried umbrellas and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
The food was extremely dull and sparse. I felt hungry for a good deal of the rime. After breakfast we would line up to have malt - delicious sticky syrupy and sweet, only in our younger years. I expect everyone experienced poor food at that time - just after the war. An ice cream van came to the school one or two days a week after lunch. I saved my pocket money to buy one - Walls they were from. We also bought sweets at Blackpill - Spanish root, liquorice etc. Sweet coupons had to be used at first. When sweet rationing was abandoned the country went mad and they had to be put back on ration again but the second time round we had all learned our lesson!! Bread was also rationed - there were bread units. We only experienced them when in Scotland when we went to buy bread. On Saturday at tea time we always had a big shining current bun as well as bread. On Sunday we had 2 cakes - a little plain sponge cake and then a choice of more fancy cakes. We would go into the dining room before tea to our table and 'bag' our cake. There was a strong ethic about this. If I'd bagged a cake, no-one else would have it altho' the initial bagging might cause some controversy. Lunch on Sunday was always cold because it was the Lord's day and as little work as possible should be done then. I didn't realise that it was a national custom to have a roast dinner on a Sunday. We had lots of milk puddings - rice, tapioca, semolina, all very bland with the minimum of milk, I imagine. Powdered probably. And Sago that we called frogspawn. When I was about 14/15 a German woman called Waltrout became cook. She was big, fat, warm, cosy and was kind to us. She tried to improve the food just by simple things like sprinkling biscuit crumbs on top of custard. She tried to make the food look nice. We were very pleased. She seemed to think we were OK people and not a painful second best duty. After I left school - the first Christmas after - Waltrout invited us to go to Germany along with Miss Peat, a member of staff. I stayed with her family in Brest. My memory is of cobbled streets and church bells ringing and sitting at coffee mornings eating absolutely delicious cakes but not speaking any German. I was also given embroidery to do because all good German fräuleins sewed and knitted. Waltraut's father was a businessman and he invited me to go on a trip with him. Miss Peat tried to dissuade me but I fancied the idea of seeing a bit of Germany. She warned me not to mix my drinks. Not having drunk any alcohol this didn't mean much to me. We went to Hamburg and Kiel, I remember. We drank Moselle wine and ate pig's trotters with very sharp sauce - horseradish I think. I soon realised I needed to keep Waltraut's father at arm's length. A couple of times he told me that at hotels there was only one room and we'd need to share. Somehow I managed to evade him saying I would sleep in the car and so on. Somehow a room always materialised. He tried caresses and so on but I disappointed him and soon after we returned to Brest he went off again - with another young girl. Was he successful? He came over to London and took me to the pictures at Marble Arch. We saw 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. My virtue remained intact.
The Director of the School and of the College was Rees Howells. He and his wife had been missionaries in Africa. In her very strong Welsh accent she repeatedly claimed 'We walked 'leven thousand miles'.... Perhaps it was ''leven hundred'. He must have been charismatic because he had collected quite a crowd of devotees. There was also this belief that he was immortal - he would be on earth for the Second Coming of Christ. He had written a book and I remember my father tut-tutting about this claim. However it affected me deeply when he did in fact become ill but everybody glibly said he would be restored. He wasn't. I had nightmares. Furthermore Joy who called him "dad" invited me to view his body. We entered the room where he lay in his coffin with his wife bustling about, "beautiful, indeed, beautiful". There was a sweet cloying odour. Nobody ever explained how mortality had struck down the immortal. It helped to shape my cynicism regarding the claims that people make.
This is, from the left, Agnes, mother (Ruth), father (William/Bill) and Ina. I think this is when the parents are about to go back to Peru for several years after a furlough in Britain. I reckon it's about 1951 and Ina is about 13. I am guessing Beth (or Ruth) took the photo.
In the next Part 6 Ina goes on to talk about the role of religion in her childhood.