Well it sort of started for me just a few years ago around 1967, just a few years?? It was about then that I went to Ditton Junior School but I think it was called Infants school, it's really hard to take on board I was actually an Infant. Seems like a another person in a different time, the link between that person and me is very faint and distant.
My memory of places is still strong but the memory of me, of being me is becoming faint and ghost like. Talking of ghosts I did see one once not far from the school and not at all in any way where would you expected to see one. I'll show and explain in another post where it happened.
Ditton School was a marvellous place especially at 15:45, or as we use to say when the big hand is on the 9 and the little hand is on the 3, it was going home time! Our school was lucky and unusual as it had its own swimming pool not that we could use it much as it always had a leaky roof, leaky pool or no heating. I believe it suffered all 3 complaints almost always simultaneously, occasionally consecutively and certainly at least two problems were overlapping. Much like a Venn diagram, (I didn't know what a Venn diagram was in those days). We never actually used the pool enough to learn to swim but our parents (of all Infants that is) learnt that it took a lot of collections to keep the pool running.
The pool building was and is a lovely old building, here is a recent picture that I took from the web.
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Of course in the 60's it didn't look like this it looked more like this,
There was no door at the front nor the other paraphernalia that has materialised since. But I'm being cruel it never had these black lines either. So to do the lovely old building some justice I've attempted to reconstruct its appearance to a point, as it was when I was a child.
Yes that is a lot more like it, okay the window wasn't modern as it is now but it was there. the new blue door would be the boys changing area, the girls at the other end with the said pool occupying centre stage. Yes this pool needed a whole pool of money to keep it open which wasn't very forth coming, hence I learnt to swim at Maidstone and Swanly baths.
My memory of places is still strong but the memory of me, of being me is becoming faint and ghost like. Talking of ghosts I did see one once not far from the school and not at all in any way where would you expected to see one. I'll show and explain in another post where it happened.
Ditton School was a marvellous place especially at 15:45, or as we use to say when the big hand is on the 9 and the little hand is on the 3, it was going home time! Our school was lucky and unusual as it had its own swimming pool not that we could use it much as it always had a leaky roof, leaky pool or no heating. I believe it suffered all 3 complaints almost always simultaneously, occasionally consecutively and certainly at least two problems were overlapping. Much like a Venn diagram, (I didn't know what a Venn diagram was in those days). We never actually used the pool enough to learn to swim but our parents (of all Infants that is) learnt that it took a lot of collections to keep the pool running.
The pool building was and is a lovely old building, here is a recent picture that I took from the web.
Of course in the 60's it didn't look like this it looked more like this,
Yes that is a lot more like it, okay the window wasn't modern as it is now but it was there. the new blue door would be the boys changing area, the girls at the other end with the said pool occupying centre stage. Yes this pool needed a whole pool of money to keep it open which wasn't very forth coming, hence I learnt to swim at Maidstone and Swanly baths.
