I started school in September 1955 and attended Kerrisdale School, which was about a five minute walk from where I lived.
When looking back on memories we have, I often wonder how much has been influenced by what we have heard others say about the event, often afterwards. So the reader will just have to accept my memories as how I remember the event, and not actual fact.
My mother had been very determined that I should start school the year that I turned six, even though I was still only 5 1/2 when the school year started, as my birthday is in December. It wasn’t until several years later that I found out that many of the girls in my class, who also had birthdays in December, were actually one year older than me.
In 1955 the schools in Vancouver, BC, Canada, were coping with the large number of children born shortly after the end of the Second World War. I remember having three full classes in each grade all through elementary school. A full class had 40 pupils, five “columns” of desks (from front to back) and eight desks in each column. This lasted most of my 12 years at school.
On the first day of school, there were too many children in the classroom I had been assigned to. There were 42 children and only 40 desks. I wouldn’t remember who it actually was, so I must have heard my mother say something about the situation. Two children were picked out to start a year later. The reason, I heard, was because they could not yet hold a pencil, so their mothers were told to teach them a few very basic skills so they could start a year later. How true this was, I have no way of knowing.