THE teacher was adamant – man would never reach the moon.

The reason, he said, was obvious – no-one would be able to escape the earth’s gravity.

The prediction came from Mr Kitchen, a teacher at Singletree, a school near Iffley Turn, Oxford.

Even at the age of eight, pupil Mike Brogden thought his teacher was talking nonsense.

“Wartime V2 rockets had done this very thing,” the youngster thought.

As we recalled (Memory Lane, February 29), Mr Brogden started his school career at the ‘Hut’ School in Beauchamp Lane, Cowley, moving to Singletree in September 1948.

He writes: “This school, no doubt a temporary arrangement to cope with a lack of school places, was set in a Victorian (or Edwardian) house which had housed evacuees during the war.

“There were gardens, fruit trees, a conservatory, toilets with no roof and a playground. There were four classrooms on three floors and a big room for assemblies and music and movement, with music from a radiogram at one side. There were no kitchens so I went home for lunch.

“First, I was in Mrs Bealt’s class in the attic. Nowadays, this classroom and its narrow staircase would be an unthinkable fire risk.

“I don’t remember much about my year here, other than being told off several times for not knowing my tables.

“Next, I went to Mr Kitchen’s class on the middle floor. He said he was to be called ‘Sir’. Sir said we were to do a project on transport and dictated the first line: ‘The first roads were tracks made by the feet of ancient man.’ I was able to re-use this line at secondary school when we also had to do a project on transport.

“Sir’s classroom had big sash windows (another hazard). At the end of afternoon school, we placed our chairs in the desks, perhaps to make it easier for the cleaning.

“Once, a chair at the front was knocked over and the row behind fell like dominoes, with the last chair flying out of the window and landing on a car below.

“We did gardening, played in the gardens, pranced around in the big room, played football on grass near Iffley Turn (not very often, I’m pleased to say), avoided the loos in the rain and did craftwork in the conservatory. I made a little boat.”

Before the school closed, Connie Norman arrived as headteacher before she moved to the headship of Rose Hill Infants’ School.

Mr Brogden, who now lives at Much Wenlock, Shropshire, recalls: “She did brilliant italic writing and on our departure, gave each pupil a book, inscribed with her italic message.

“I met her again in the late 1980s when she was a county councillor and I was working for Oxfordshire Education Service. She told me that, being a woman, she had not been allowed to apply for the headship of Rose Hill Junior School. This, it seems, was a job reserved for men.”

The young Michael was the only pupil from the ‘Hut’ School to go to Singletree.

“Richard Emmanuel, my schoolmate from Bartholomew Road went, I think, to St Christopher’s.

“I wonder which schools the other Bartholomew Road children attended - Michael Banner, Margaret Jones, Keith Cook, Anthony Jones, Josie Dear, Patrick, Natasha and Gillian Baldwin, David Welch and one or two others whose names I forget?”

• More of Mr Brogden’s school memories soon.