I Remember When with Milton Rendell

Do you remember when you started school?

Although it is the norm for kids as young as four to go, in my time not many of us went to kindergarten.

I didn’t even know kindergarten existed when I was a kid until I heard other children talk about it when I was in the playground and I remember at first I felt a bit left out.

My first school teacher was Miss Hansom at Guildford Primary School in 1966.

Our classroom was what they referred to as the prefab buildings, hot in summer and freezing in winter with none of that fancy air-conditioning.

Guildford Primary is the oldest state school in WA so the main school wasn’t big, however when you are a kid everything feels big.

I loved primary school, there were always games to play and we had great fun running around.

We would all go home with skin off our knees and dirty clothes and the boys didn’t wear shoes most the time.

Most of us either rode or walked to school and I used to walk with my friends John and Rita Di Marco who lived across the street from me in Bertie Street with Peter joining us when he started school a year later.

Just imagine John was seven turning eight and Rita and I were five turning six and we walked ourselves to school each day.

The walk was just over a kilometre and a half and with little legs it certainly takes a bit longer plus all the stops we would make.

On the way to school we would bump into the other kids we knew and chat away, it was quite a communal daily event.

There were no signal lights to help us cross the roads and had to navigate two major roads to get to school.

I think most would have a heart attack seeing kids doing today what we did then.

Do you remember who you first sat next to on your first day?

I do, his name was Terry Bishop, a cheeky kid who used to wrap the teachers around his little finger with his charm.

To all the parents and grandparents out there, the new school year is now beginning so no doubt plenty of tears will flow from the adults and the kids when they start their new journey in the education system.

Thank you to everyone for their support of the articles and if you have story or memory to share please let us know at memories@realestateplus.com.au