Colin Moram was at Ardingly from 1943-48. He spent his first year in JH before moving up to the senior school, where he was in F Dormitory, in 1944.
The food & tuck
“Well I can remember the rice puddings, which seemed to happen fairly frequently! Food was – I don’t remember being frightened of the food. It was ok. We had – I don’t know whether that still happens – but we had tuck boxes, wooden tuck boxes. I can remember my grandfather making one out of wood, he was a bit of a carpenter, quite good. It still has my name on it and in daughter’s house, in her hall.”
“I can remember I used to like roasted chestnuts. I can remember receiving raw fresh chestnuts. I don’t know how – whether they came through the post or whether they came back – I do know that we used to go off into the woods and have a fire and roast them, or burn them probably, more often than not! But I used to like roasted chestnuts. How often it happened or not is difficult to say, but it’s still in the memory there, sitting round a fire in the woods, coming back smelling of fire.”
(Interviewer: Do you remember what the rationing was like? What impact that had?)
“I wasn’t really aware of it. There must have been times when we were a bit hungry because there used to be a bridge between Junior House and the main body, it used to come out behind the Under. And there was – I don’t know what it was for or why it was there – but quite often there was sliced bread there, and we used to steal it! It might even have been put there intentionally to supplement anyone so they didn’t go hungry, but it seemed as though it was illicit, that we used to take the bread which was left on the bridge.”
Signs of war: D Day
“Well, we used to go down to the front of the main entrance to the school where the paper man used to come. You used to be able to buy a paper there at regular times. And I’ve still got the paper announcing that, with diagrammatic sketches of what they thought the landings looked like, with all these boats and planes and things. I’ve still got that, that I bought.”
Signs of war: Flying bombs
“Latterly we had a succession of flying bombs which would go over. We had a French teacher who would shout, ‘Under the desk!’ There was an anti-aircraft gun stationed just this side of the village, I’m not precisely sure where, but we used to hear that rattling away when these bombs went over.”
The Cadet Force & National Service
“I never became a prefect, but I did become the Company Sergeant Major – there was a Company Sergeant Major on Head’s House and School House – which I found quite interesting, and served me well in the National Service after the war.”
“We used to prowl, do various themed things and prowl in the Scouts in the woods around Ardingly, which we did latterly in the Cadet Force when we had field days in Ashdown Forest and Ditching Beacon. I was in the shooting team which was very interesting and I used to enjoy. Dusty Miller, the housemaster of School House, used to look after that and we used to go off sitting in the back of an old flat bottom truck which he had, which I’m sure wouldn’t be allowed today! No seatbelts or anything like that! But we used to go off and do shooting practice.”