The school dinners that I was forced to endure as an extremely reluctant pupil, throughout the 1950’s, and early 1960’s, left a lot to be desired. And as if thick, brown gravy, lumpy mashed potato, waterlogged cabbage and transparent custard was not enough to contend with, my infant’s school in Dover added an extra unpalatable item to the daily menu – twenty minutes of enforced inactivity.

Following a lukewarm dinner that smelt of stew, even when it was “Friday fish”, as it drifted along the school’s labyrinth of corridors, and seeping invisibly under every classroom door making rows of little noses wrinkle in disgust, my contemporaries and I were led like a flock of sheep into an empty classroom to suffer our ritual.

From a neat pile in one corner of the room we each collected a straw mat that, when stood on it’s end, was as high, if not higher, than the unfortunate individual who was carrying it. Except for eight little, pink, wiggling fingers, no other part of the child was visible at all. As we shuffled our way reluctantly to the center of the room a number of children, namely boys, carried their mats on their heads and resembled leaf-carrying ants bobbing along the forest floor. The remaining children, the girls, held them out in front of them as they walked and looked like an advancing band of little warriors hidden behind huge shields. Only a glimpse of their white ankle socks and shiny, black, single-strap shoes gave away their true identity.

“Now children”, the teacher would announce with firm but gentle authority after we had moved noisily into a vacant area of floor space, and far enough apart so that we could not chat, “I want you to sit on your mats – as quiet as little mice and as still as statues – to allow enough time for your meal to digest”. With as much noisy protest as we dared to make by banging our feet and slapping the palms of our hands on the shiny, wooden floor, we plonked ourselves down on our instruments of torture. Whereupon much fidgeting and squirming then ensued in an attempt to delay, for as long as possible, the bottom-numbing ordeal that was about to follow.

Following a brief period of giggling and countless, but altogether fruitless, requests to “be excused”, our “gaoler-of-the-day” would put her foot down. “I do not want to hear another sound from any of you. Is that understood”? The gentleness had now parted company with the authority.