Boarding school - fresh air

I have a lasting impression that I was exposed to extravagant amounts of fresh air while at St Christopher’s. I suppose it is not uncommon for schools to expand by means of tagging on rooms and buildings wherever there is room in the grounds; however, at St Chris the senior school seemed to have been constructed specifically to oblige everyone to leave the warmth of the building and expose themselves to the elements between classes.

A lot of the rooms were built around open cloisters, with roofed but open-sided walkways to get from one to the other. It is only fair to say, however, that these same rooms, on their other sides, opened up fully to the garden, so that in a good summer classes could be taken in the fresh air, which more than made up for the rigours of a Hertfordshire winter.

Summer classes out of doors *

Then most of the senior boys’ bedroom/studies (or ‘cells’) were also built as cloisters outside the main building, and some were even wooden huts out on the school field. I am thankful to say that girls slept indoors, but I nevertheless suffered from chilblains throughout the winter.

Even indoors it was a mighty chilly place, with winds whistling down the corridors. There was a minor transgression known as ‘passage dwelling’, when children congregated around the radiators in the warmer corners of the building, vying for the opportunity to warm their backsides against the hot metal, instead of being where they were supposed to be – somewhere else.

As if that was not enough, we all had to get up and go for a walk every morning before breakfast, rain or shine. And after meals we had to wash up our own pudding dishes in a row of wooden sinks which stood outside in the courtyard, roofed, but open on one side.

Spartan, I would call it, as was the regime when we fell victim to colds. If we really felt poorly, we were isolated in a sick room, given no food other than fruit and juice, and obliged to do frequent inhalations of friar’s balsam. We got better pretty quickly! There was an upside to health care however: I can remember attending Matron’s surgery on a daily basis in the winter, to be given a large, gluey, sickly spoonful of extract of malt with cod liver oil. And I have to say that I remained largely healthy for the six years I was under this regime, and that I grew out of my chilblains eventually – (probably when I began to live in centrally heated houses after the war).

The senior boys' "cells" *

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* Photographs from "St Christopher School 1915-1975" by Reginald Snell