When Asian children came to Edith's school

It's years now since I retired, but I still see a face sometimes I recognise. They'll be older now, of course, but I see them around town -- different places.

And only recently in Comet one of them came up to me and he said: "Is that you, Mrs Taylor?" And I said: "Why, yes, but what is your name, young man?" And he laughed and said: "Patel, Mrs Taylor" -- which didn't help me very much because, over the years, I taught an awful lot of Patels.

It was the early 1960s when I first moved to Pikes Lane Primary. They'd just started the nursery school, teaching three year olds, but I never really took to nursery teaching. I liked the middle infants best, the five to sevens. They'd got going and you could do something with them.

I hadn't been there very long when we began to get the first children from the faraway countries. It was a rare thing then and all very new.

I can remember the first arrivals turning up, straight off the plane. Plonked into school on their first day, poor little things. They could speak no English at all. All they could say was yes, no, and toilet -- so at least we could attend to the basics.

I had to start from scratch teaching them the language. I would go round the classrooms, assembling small groups, and we would act out little playlets together, little activities like having a tea party.

We wouldn't do writing exercises. It was all speaking and little activities like that -- to promote language skills. And I'd correct them grammatically as we went along.

Or I'd take them, a few at a time, to the Aquarium or the Library, or to the open market. I couldn't speak Urdu any more than they could speak English, so it meant we all had to make a big effort.

Once a year we would go on a picnic outing -- out to Heysham Head. And I would ask the class to bring sandwiches for their picnic, and then I'd describe on the blackboard what a sandwich was.

I explained how a sandwich might have jam on it or lettuce on it or tomato. But then, come the day of the picnic, one of my boys, Suresh, he turned up with such a concoction -- a big thick slice of bread topped with lettuce and tomato and then strawberry jam on top of it all.

You never saw such a thing. And he wolfed it all down.

One of my girls, Kadiga, who was lovely -- she would tell me how the girls of her family all lived in one terraced house with their mother, while all the boys lived next door with her father. And then, the next door along, lived her grandparents.

There were 16 children, I think, in that one family, and they occupied those three terraced houses. The families were beginning to get on in life, you see, as more income came in. And gradually the community was growing.

Local people would grumble about this, the way some do today. But relations between the teachers and the parents were always lovely and friendly.

One family asked me to become a godmother to their children. And I was invited to tea.

You'd get lovely Christmas cards too from the children. It didn't matter if it said "Happy Birthday, Auntie" or "Now you are 6" -- they just wanted to send you a pretty card, the prettiest card in the shop.

One message I got said "Lots of Lux". I'd string the cards along the classroom wall for everyone to see.

I never noticed any aggressiveness among the children until the arrival of a pair of twins from Uganda. This was when Idi Amin was expelling the Asian community from Uganda. These twins, Sara and Nasser, were only five years old, but they were so enormous. Their limbs were like tree trunks. When Sara lay down on the floor you could not pick her up.

I mean, you can pick any child up off the floor -- can't you? But not Sara. You couldn't budge her. She was like an octopus. We just had to leave her till she stopped shouting.

Pikes Lane was a scruffy old school, but the feeling there was so special that teachers never thought to look for jobs elsewhere.

The children were always posing new challenges that teachers had never had to face before, and we would try different methods to make things work.

We would be working in this tatty old building. Exactly how old it was, I'm not sure, but there was a notice in one of the logbooks which read: "Clogs and shawls must not be worn in the corridor", so it must have been turn of the century.

We were in what was known as a social priority area, which means, I suppose: "It's a bit rough here", or rather: "It's a lot rough here". But the roughness was more in the buildings and the working conditions.

There was no crime then. No bullying either -- except for Sara and Nasser, of course, who would bash anybody.

I used to love watching the children at playtime. They'd play their old-fashioned games out in the playground -- like "Cat's got fever, cat's got fever".

They had another game too. What was it they did? You know those games where you stand in a circle and you run around? And one of the girls had no shoe on and she had to hop around the circle and leave her shoe behind another girl. And then somebody else would come and pick the shoe up. And that left somebody else without a shoe...

I'm not explaining it very well, am I?

How it was arranged I really don't know, but it lasted simply ages, hopping around and around . I only half understood it even then. It was so like the children.

It was something I loved and only half understood. It was just like them.