Raymond and the Roman cavemen

In a move that was probably seen as really progressive at the time, my 1960s county primary school (we didn't have much truck with academies back then), boasted a Partially Sighted Unit, commonly referred to as 'PS' - where a small group of partially sighted children, aged between 5 and 11, were educated in glorious isolation from the rest of us. There were, however, a few exceptions to this rather patronising situation, and one came to join our Year 1 class of 7 year-olds, in the form of Raymond, who was permitted to join us for History lessons with Mrs Wonce a fortnight. A rather shy boy, Raymond had the look of a rather startled owl when we looked at him because of the thickness of the lenses in his glasses. Mrs W, who bore a more than passing resemblance to Frankie Howerd in drag, made Raymond sit at the table I shared with three or four others, and we did our best not to stare and generally to make as welcome as a group of 7 year-olds could (which in general terms wasn't very much and probably didn't do much to make him feel anything other than a strange addition, plucked from his comfort zone to join a mainstream class). We quickly learned that Raymond (never Ray...) was very keen on history as a subject, but that his fortnightly appearances could be very unsettling. Back in the early 70s, the history curriculum was highly selective and started with the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages before taking in the Romans, Saxons and Normans - but if you only came to every other lesson, your appreciation of the majestic sweep of history could soon become disjointed. Raymond was doing fine until we got to the Stone Age and joined in with the depictions of cave dwellers and their animal drawings we were expected to produce in picture form and then label, but then for reasons I can't quite remember, he missed the next two lessons and rejoined us for the thrilling account of the arrival of the Romans. This caused a change in Raymond that was as startling as near miraculous. He wanted to know how we'd got from troglodytes to Legionnaires and from cave painting to Caesar hunting down Boadicea's Iceni. We hadn't much of a clue either, but under his earnest questioning and magnified gaze the only possible option was to make it up. Mrs W wasn't that much help - probably away with another table trying to titter ye not at their artistic interpretations, and - this in the age when talking wasn't allowed in class (as opposed to today, where discussion isn't so much encouraged as compulsory), so that our gap filling commentary was also conducted in whispers, with a few pointed references to pages in the text book. Chronology isn't a strong point at that age, and I can dimly remember Paul B introducing a dinosaur or two into the equation. I don't know how much Raymond managed to assimilate, and I've often wondered since how he ever managed to fill in the gaps between the making of flint tools and straight Roman roads and funny names for places, such as Olicana for Ilkley or Eboracum for York (which seemed to be about the only things the Romans ever did for us that we could glean from Mrs W and our Schofield and Sims junior history textooks). I just hope that we didn't bring to a very premature end the promising career of one of Britain's premier partially-sighted historians.