Peter Lane joined Ardingly College in April 1945, just two weeks before VE Day. He was nine years old and in the Junior House. He moved up to D Dormitory (Gibbs) in the Senior School in 1949, and left Ardingly in 1953.
Before Ardingly
“I was brought back to London for a short while and then the bombing started, well it had already started, and I was at my grandmother’s house – we lived there then, at that time – and so I was evacuated to Haslemere. I don’t know how my mother found Haslemere or how she found the people I went to. I didn’t go away at the beginning of the war, with the big trainloads all with luggage labels round their necks. But she took me to a place in Haslemere, just on the edge of the town, and left me there, basically. I just stood there on the pavement and watched her go off in the bus.”
Why Ardingly?
“She found Ardingly by going to the library and looking up schools and things and found it was just within her budget. It was a widows and orphans scheme that I think my father had paid into, so there was some money for my education. My mother didn’t have any – the business had gone bust long before, what with the war. And so she sent me to Ardingly because she had to send me somewhere. She was going out to work so she couldn’t look after me, and my sister too, she was sent away. And Ardingly, I happen to remember in my mind, she said it was the cheapest school she could find. She didn’t even really know where it was, she’d never seen it. She knew it was a public school so she thought, ‘oh it must be good, it’s a public school.’ Of course you could, some of these grammar schools would take boarders, but they were not public schools. And I can tell you now, I do remember it, the fees were £29 a term. That was boarding.”
The staff
“There was a matron – I think there were two matrons for JH. In the more senior dormitories you woke up to the sound of a bell at seven o’clock or whatever, but she would come in and clap her hands and say ‘Time to get up’ and all that, you know. I mean, they were dragons! I always remember being very surprised to learn that ‘matron’ came from the Latin and that they were the stand-ins for your mother. I remember thinking, ‘well, crumbs. Fancy being the stand-in for my mother, you’re nothing like my mother. My mother’s a nice lady!’”