Former resident of Amerside Law, Anthony Murray, recalls his days as a pupil of the school in the 1940s:

   I was born in 1936 and started school in September 1940. Although we did not realise it the school was a pretty basic establishment at that time. There was a porch on the front of the school and the door went in at the west end of that porch. There was a large mug sink in the porch with a cold water tap which was the only communal water supply. A wooden passage linked the porch with the village hall which is now the school hall. There was no canteen and the boys' toilet was a stone trough behind the school, without a roof. The girls were a little more civilised with a covered toilet in the back yard.
 
    The school garden stretched from the back of the school to the main Belford road and was cultivated in full, each class or part class being responsible for a section
 
    I started school during the war and because of the numbers of evacuees there were a large number of children. The younger children's classroom was divided with curtains into three sectionsns and Mrs. Innes, Miss Campbell and Miss Swan had classes of different ages. Mr.Tully our Headmaster was fortunate because he had the big room all to himself with the older children, but of course he had a large class because children stayed at Chatton school until they were fourteen. There was a knot missing at head height in the wooden wall between the two classrooms and he used this to keep an eye on the younger classes.
 
     I only properly remember four of the evacuees. Jimmy and Joe stayed with my grandparents and aunt in the farmhouse. They were older than me and I never knew their surname. Shirley Lamb and Betty Bainbridge stayed with Miss Howcroft in the village. Miss Howcroft had her hair done up in buns on either side of her head and played the organ in church. Betty Bainbridge is now Betty (Liz) Dickinson and lived at Tilery Cottage at Chatton Park before moving to Wooler.
 
    We all carried sandwiches to school and water was boiled on the stove in the big room to make tea, cocoa or melt Oxo cubes.
 
    Like all children I had a variety of childhood fears but one of my greatest was the arrival of the travelling school dentist. He came with a clinical white caravan which was parked in the school field and he stayed for three or four days. The apprehension of waiting for your name to be called out and the length of time it took to make the journey from the classroom to the caravan was beyond belief. The item of equipment which sticks in my memory was the dentist's drill. It may have been powered by electricity but I think it was a foot treadle affair and worked rather like a pneumatic drill. Over the past forty years some things have got better.
 
    My mother never drove but during the years that my sister, brother and myself were at Chatton school she walked us there and met us after school every day."