'Breakfast doesn't have to cost a fortune' - Your Letters: January 31

HAVE PORRIDGE FOR BREAKFAST

There have been a few letters on the subject of school breakfast clubs and children going to school hungry.

Seventy years ago when I started school, I never went to school hungry. Breakfast was usually one of the branded porridges made with water topped with a little sugar or salt, or maybe golden syrup. Sometimes after breakfast I would push a low wheeled pram from the ‘Dock’ area in Dudley across the busy Queens Cross to the log yard, and collect a log of logs, and return home.

Sometimes after school, along with others, I would walk to the top of Russells Hall before the estate was built, and pick pieces of coal from the old slag coal tip there. At the time, 1954, there were still railway buffers and a partial track at the site. Also there would be a quarter mile walk to the local shop on Dock Lane, before breakfast.

At the end of January 1955 I went to the West Malvern school for TB cases and spent some months there. I have written about this before for Professor Carl Chinn.