agneskirkwood

So all the kids are due back at school. I'll bet all mothers will breath a sigh of relief when they do go back. My great grandson starts school next week for the first time. It doesn't seem two minutes since he was born, but one thing's for sure, he's ready for school, his brain's like a sponge and wants to know everything about everything. Him going to school reminds me of something I wrote about ten years ago;

On visiting my son, I walked with him as he took my granddaughter to school. Being her first year she was excited to show me her classroom. We hung her coat on the peg with her name on, and proceeded to her classroom. A soon as we walked through the door, she ran to a seat at a row of small computers especially for children. The cheery atmosphere showed all the infants were excited and glad to be there. As I looked around the class room I understood why, and couldn’t help but compare it to the forties when I first attended school.

Gone were the desks and chairs in rows, replaced by a long table and chairs situated as if waiting to be set for a wedding. No rough floorboards full of splinters from constant shuffling of chairs in and out of desks, instead, a colourful carpet covered the floor making the room look homely. Inset lights shone from the white ceiling, where as in my classroom the ceiling was painted dark cream; probably six shades lighter at one time, and high enough to hold another storey above. The lights that dangled above us had thick twisted cable that looked like heavy rope, and probably needed an extension ladder to clean them.

A small wooden kitchen suitable for five year olds stood in the corner of the room, complete with pots, pans, fruit, vegetables, and foods, all made from plastic. No sign of the old school blackboard which was a dominant item in every classroom for over a hundred years, it had been replaced with a shiny white plastic board which used felt tip pens instead of chalk. The classroom walls were a mass of colour from the children’s drawings and paintings. A list of every child’s name hung on the wall with stars in gold and silver stuck on various names. The sound of happy children brought music to my ears as they chatted whilst working in little groups doing different things. Some of the children played games on the computers, some were busy in the little kitchen cooking and cleaning. The rest were around the large table busy painting, drawing, or building models from all sorts of packaging. The teacher moved among them keeping an eye on what they were doing. Every child looked happy and content, and glad to be there. As for the kids in my class were frightened to even whisper. The whole class sat at our desks in complete silence whilst the teacher was talking. This in my opinion led to boredom and daydreams, which caused some of us to nod off. Consequently when the teacher noticed, she’d keep talking as she crept up to the sleeping pupil with the eyes of the whole class following her, then, the old ruler came crashing down on the culprits knuckles. Very painful, I know because it happened to me many times.

I remember taking my children to school on their first day, and although their classrooms was different from my grandchildren’s, they were nothing like the classrooms in the forties. Let's face it, the way we live now is completely different as to what it was then.

This was the modern way of teaching infants, and as I looked around the classroom, it proved to me that, play proved to be the most natural way of learning children. It's amazing what over sixty years can achieve. Even the way we live has improved enormously. Yes, things are certainly changing for the better.

Really great to be home. Don't get me wrong I loved going to Holland to visit my son and his family, but three weeks is a long time to be away from home. Although it was great to be with my grandchildren in Holland, I missed all my grand children and great grandchildren back home. Of course not to forget my little puppy who was doing cartwheels with excitement when she saw me. It was so good going to my own bed that night; why is it no matter how comfortable a bed is, there's none like your own. Ah! It was complete Heaven sitting in my usual armchair with the remote at my side watching my soaps in peace, then change the channel to whatever I wanted.  Love watching the Olympics it's so exciting. All the different Country's competing against each other for the medals. Reminds me of a poem I wrote years ago called Race for life, meaning we're all winners or we just wouldn't be here in the first place.

Race for Life

By Agnes Kirkwood

Life begins in a marathon race

Like tadpoles racing for life's first place

The race is on to first reach the womb

Only one winner the rest meets their doom

For nine long month reward feels a glow

No need to worry just eat rest and grow

When times finally up and you have to meet mother

It’s full push ahead from one to the other

A great relief when the first breath is taken

The first cry means all pains are forsaken

Oh what a joy with the learning to walk

Then shortly after the learning to talk

Life's carefree until starting the school

We learn how to live according to rule

Find how to share with making new friends

Get fussy with clothes keeping up with the trends

Instincts kicks in to follow your heart

Finding your partner till death do you part

Life covers love hate sorrow and pain

Then the marathon race starts over again.

I cannot belive the amount of interest I have had in my book since I started my blog, and it's brought me back together with so many people form my past. So many like-minded people have been interested in the book https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_13/256-3789277-3462169?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+pit+block+by+agnes+kirkwood&sprefix=the+pit+block%2Cstripbooks%2C232" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">The Pit Block, so it is really good to see that people remember those good old (bad old!) days. Thanks for keeping in touch.

Here's a bit I wrote for a newspaper that asked to write a short piece about me and the book;-

ready to go back home to my wee pup and that little house I call home. It's been a great time here with my son and his family, but home is where the heart is, and so when I am finally sitting back in my chair, with a cuppa, I will be relaxed again, no matter that I will miss that "Dutch lot", and I will be inundated with the Donny lot again, I do still get a little time to relax and not feel guilty to hogging the remote!

It takes me back to when I used to to travel back to Scotland, and I tried to put much of the "going home" and home-sick elements into some of my writing. Here's a little extract from something I wrote once;-

In Holland visiting my son and family. Can't believe how tall the people are here. Even most of the women are six feet.Things are more expensive here, but the folks are so friendly. There's no language barrier either because everyone can talk English, probably because being an international language English gets taught at school. I can't help but notice how flat the country is, enabling cycling easier. Everybody rides bikes here and when you go to town there are bikes parked everywhere. Could do with a few people in UK cycling, only if we had the cycle tracks though, then it might take a few cars off the road to stop traffic jams. Another thing I notice, there's loads of small canals everywhere, might be to create flood overflows with most of Holland being under sea level. Not done much writing since I've been here, but read a great book called THE BOOK THIEF.

Just read another Catherine Cookson book from years ago. What a writer. I remember the first time I read one of her books, I couldn't put it down. I'm sure it was her books that inspired me when I was young to want to write and use the place I was born and brought up in as the settings to my books. It's a shame I had to wait until I retired to start.

When I first started writing, I had such great ideas, and my mind seemed to overflow constantly with new, different, obscure, bright and loud ideas, and getting them onto paper or on a computer) is the hardest thing, because as soon as you try to write it all down, it becomes a mixed and blurred, like trying to remember ones dreams when you wake up. So, to start with, it's not the easy flowing stream of words that they become after a while. One of the best bits of my early writing that I vividly remember is this section, that I have highlighted here;-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pit-Block-mothers-poverty-squalor-ebook/dp/B01F9AGJT6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469900406&sr=1-1&keywords=the+pit+block+by+agnes+kirkwood" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">

Hi all, this is my very first blog!

I was born in a small Scottish mining village in 1943 called Fallin, just outside of Stirling. The village then consisted of blocks of pit houses along the main road, a school, police station, a little corner sweet shop at the gable end of one of the blocks. As I blog regularly, I'll add different interesting places (to me and like-minded folk) to the list that I remember fondly.

What a wonderful upbringing, lots to do, although we thought we were bored, and places to escape to (that our parents didn't know about), and adventures to have around the pit, the blocks, the bings, the ponds and just about any other dangerous place you could think of. What gloriously fantastic memories that are conjured up in me and I am young again, running down that drossy bing.

From a piece I wrote 15 years ago, when I started to try my hand at writing, here's an extract from a piece that eventually did end up being a part of a chapter in a book I published;-