Memories of Dundee - Part Two

In my first year at Primary School (Dens Road), one morning for some reason our class got out early. I couldn't go home because my sister May took me home. Accordingly, I was sent up to May's class, Miss Bruce of the senior grade. She set me down beside May and gave me a paper to draw on. However I was a distraction for her school friends, particularly Gladys Thomson her closest friend and she began helping me to draw. The big thing at the time was the Queen Mary, the second largest liner in the world, only a couple of feet shorter than the Normandy, the French equivalent. The Queen Mary had three deck and three funnels.

The girls were showing me how to draw the Queen Mary and this was such a distraction in the class, that Miss Bruce decided it was too much and told May to take me home. So she got away early too!

Also in the Primary Infants, we were taking for an outing to St Mary's Woods (where St Mary's is now). As we went through the shrubbery we came upon a bush with a beautiful spider's web sparkling with rain drops and we were all admiring this until two of the class pests, George Swankie and Gordon Wright, who lived in the same street as myself, Caldrum Street, came along chattering to one another and not paying attention to the teacher and brushed passed the bush, completely destroying such a beautiful thing.

Other memories of school are the bottles of milk we bought for ½d each. We brought in the milk money on a Monday morning for the whole week supply. They weren't free at that time. The bottles had a wide neck, with a push-in cardboard top. This top has a small semi-perforated hole in it, which was meant to be pushed in to accommodate a straw. However some of the perforations weren't so good and quite often, when these were pressed the whole top went in and the mild erupted out of the bottle and onto the desk, books, clothes etc. These cardboard tops were often collected by boys, just to put strings and use as a kind of currency in the same way as cigarette cards. The girls would sometimes use these to wind wool around and once this was a ball shape, cut it to make pom-poms.