Seven-year-old’s poem was out of this world
With all the recent media coverage, it would be difficult to be unaware that we have reached the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took that first giant leap for mankind while poor old Michael Collins remained orbiting above them in the Apollo 11 command module. For those of a certain age, it was one of three stand-out moments of the 1960s, never to be forgotten. (For younger readers, the other two were the assassination of John F. Kennedy and England winning the World Cup).
Pam Angliss, 57, certainly remembers it.
She said: “I was seven at the time and I wrote a poem about the moon landing that was published in the Kent Messenger. The poem wasn’t very good, but I can still remember it.”
At the time, Pam was Pam Farrant and living with her parents Connie and Ronald Farrant in Ardenlee Drive on the new Vinters Park estate, which was still being built at the time.
She went to East Borough Primary School which was in Union Street, Maidstone, at the time of the moon landing.
She said: “Our head master was Mr F.H. Baker. I think his name was Frederick, but we kids called him - although not to his face Fatty Hairy Baker.
“My teacher was Mrs Doyle. On the day of the landing, we all sat in the school hall and watched the astronauts on a large black and white TV. My mum had a bit of a crush on Neil Armstrong and put a picture from the TV Times in a frame on our wall.
“Dad wasn’t too amused.” Pam recalls her poem went: “The moon is round like a half a crown, it wears a dusty dressing gown.
“Neil Armstrong’s going there today, to land on the moon and shout ‘hooray’,
“‘Am I the first man on the moon, or have I got here a bit too soon?’
“All the people now have thought, they want to be an astronaut.”
The primary school later moved and Vinters Girls became a secondary school, which Mrs Angliss said was somewhat akin to St Trinian’s.
She recalled: “I remember in the 1970s when platform shoes were first in fashion, the head banned them being worn at school and the elder girls went on strike. There was a photo of a row of girls showing their shoes in the KM. The stairs in the school were steep concrete so looking back, I don’t blame the school.
“Sorry I digress but memories keep coming back.”