Well initially the schools had a hell of a job, because they have an awful lot of children. There’s the infants school, the junior school and the secondary school. They had an awful lot of children coming in terribly distressed, they also had a number who didn’t, didn’t come in, because they weren’t allowed out.
[Farm]
Well quite a few of her school friends had been through the same situation. She had a week off school as most, er families did when they’d suffered it like, really. So she wasn’t the only one when she went back there and, her farming friends understood the situation, those that were non farming just said er, “Oh you’ve got foot and mouth eh?” and, and that was it like really because they probably didn’t understand you know what she’d been through at all.
She actually did have a few extra days off because there was exams on the day that she should’ve gone back to school, so, she wasn’t able to do those erm, all of those because she just simply hadn’t been able to revise for them in the week you know, leading up to that like really. So, but, because the school where she attends it’s from a big catchment area, they’d gone through cases of foot and mouth from the early days right through till the end. And the school and the school teachers were quite, you know, used with coping with it because they’d been, had people suffering from it for a, for a many weeks really.
[Community]
. . . so you had this combination of stress in the children and the schools coped with that very well.
[Community]
We use to get parents phoning up saying, do we send our children to school or not, is it safe for them to come to school, can they catch it, can it be transmitted from farm to farm by the children? To which we sort of said, well, “we’re sorry but we don’t know, we’re going to have to put the responsibility onto you. We can say we will support you if you keep your child off. We support you because it’s your livelihood, and if you need work for your child we will send it home for you or we will get it to you some way.”
[Community]
They didn’t like their farms, they didn’t like their homes. One of the older ones, said to me, we have them until they’re 7, one of the older ones said to me “I just don’t like it.” I said, “Why?” “When you go in the [cow] sheds, it’s all spooky.”