Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Education
This is still Bedford?
This is Bedford, yes. And we went, we went to this elementary school for quite sometime. I moved to some other, to some other billet...these were called billets. We were billeted with the Chancellors. I later was billeted with another family. Finally, at one time there was no, no place to...there was at that particular time there was nobody willing to accept children who were moving and I was put into a home for evacuees who had not been placed anywhere. It was a home run at number 1 Cardington Road, which is a very long road in Bedford. At number 1 Cardington Road one of these homes was run by Mr. and Mrs. White who were teachers...both were teachers from London and they ran this hostel. I nearly called it a ??? because most the kids who were there were kids who either didn't get on with the landladies or with their...in their billet or uh, or something happened at, at the billet and they had to leave and there wasn't anybody else to take them at the moment. There must've been something like twenty, thirty, maybe forty children in this, in this home. Uh, Mr. White was quiet...he was quite a uh, I would say a very unkind type of a person. He used to beat us frequently for every...discipline was with a cane...with a bamboo cane and Mrs. White always tried to be prevent him from beating the...from caning the children, rather than beating...caning. And beating has the uh, has a sense of using your hands and beating somebody...we're talking about caning. Uh, this is at the other end...on the other side of the river so it was too far away from Goldington Road School so I went to a new school, which is called the Silver Jubilee School. The Silver Jubilee School...the Silver Jubilee means that it was...that it must have been uh, silver jubilee is 25 years if I'm not mistaken so it must have been after Queen Victoria...it must have been during King George V's time...twenty-five years of his reign or something was set up. I can tell you that during this visit before Christmas this school doesn't exist anymore though it was a very modern school, beautifully built, beautiful playgrounds. It's been replaced by town development and only memorial is where the school stood and the street next to it named after a very interesting headmaster who I remember to this day by the name of JJ Boyce, B-O-Y-C-E, who, who was a very...I remember a very fair type of person as far as caning was concerned and punishing, punishing uh, people.
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