AUDREY Hunt caused a major alert when she went missing from home at the age of two.

She had watched enviously as children walked past her home to West Oxford Infants’ School. One day, after lunch, she decided to join them.

She mingled with the other children in the school and it was some time before teachers discovered they had a stranger in class.

Meanwhile, mum and neighbours in Bridge Street were frantic with worry.

Audrey, now Audrey Sapnik, recalls: “We started school at three years of age and I must have been eager to go. I mixed with the other children and no-one noticed me until it was rest time and I didn’t have a board to lay on.

“I was quickly dispatched home with a ‘big girl’, only to find my mother in tears and half of Bridge Street looking for me.

“I don’t think I got into trouble, because everyone was so relieved to see me.”

Mrs Sapnik, now of Nuffield Close, Bicester, was prompted to write in after seeing herself in Terry Smith’s picture of a class at the school in 1932 (Memory Lane, December 14 last year).

She writes: “What a surprise to see the photograph. I remember the day it was taken. I am the girl in front of the Pixie House, on the right. I have the biggest ‘strop’ on my face – because I wanted to be inside the Pixie House.”

She has sent in another photograph of the same Pixie House, taken in, she thinks, 1932-3, when she was aged four.

“I am the one with the curly hair, still outside! The two boys in the knitted suits, right and left of me, are the Stell twins. They lived at the top of Bridge Street.”

Mrs Sapnik remembers the surnames of five of the pupils in Mr Smith’s picture – Tipping, Floyd, Breakspear, Morgan and Langford.

Miss Gunn and Mrs Alden were the teachers.

She tells me: “I love Memory Lane and look eagerly for names from the past.”

Any more memories of West Oxford School?