Dorothy Rutledge remembers classes being held in people's houses

Well, my dad was school caretaker and my mum used to help him and also look after us, of course. There were three of us. And I was eight when the war started, so I was quite a little girl and we, I went to school. The first part of the war, we couldn't go to school. They had to wait until they got the air raid shelters ready for us before we could actually go to school. And then the junior children started going to school about October of 1939, and the very little ones, the infants, met in people's houses so that there weren't many of them together; there'd only be about six or eight children met together in people's houses and a teacher would come round and teach the small children. And the interesting thing when I went to the junior school was that it had just been built. It was a new building and it had only just opened and we didn't have any furniture. The furniture hadn't arrived, so we had to sit on mats on the floor but we were able to go into the school.