I, being me, asked for one too. An Irish brogue would say, "Go and play Robert, and thank the Lord for your good fortune", and I'd be shuffled out the door.
I'd already scoffed my lovingly-prepared-by-Mum lunch, of course. Little toad.
Those kids were mostly transitory - here today, gone tomorrow. Poor kids, welfare kids. Some had pretty rough lives.
Coming to school in old part-uniform, falling asleep in class, always snotty and sickly. Occasionally, a bed would be made up for them at the back of the class where they would sleep most of the day away.
It made the rest of us keep quiet, so I guess we actually learned something on those days.
Where I grew up, Child Welfare Officers were a fact of life back in those days. They drove around in little grey government cars, generally Austins, Prefects or Standards. Usually a man and a woman, dressed in suits, standing out a bit in the neighbourhood.
We would see the car come into the street and wonder who was getting a visit. In those days, we did not think about class, or rich and poor as such.
But we did know that some families really struggled for various reasons; abandoned mothers before the days of the Domestic Purposes Benefit, sick fathers who just could not work - usually returned men whose lives were shattered by war.
Sometimes, just hopeless families ruined by violence, drink and apathy.
If we happened to be wagging school we would take to the hills, as urban rumour had it that they would grab kids off the street who were not at school.
I never, ever found out if that was true - I doubt it now, but when you are small and not where you were supposed to be, you have to be a bit nippy about things.
Everybody in the neighbourhood would see where the little grey car pulled up. Adults would take note and mutter amongst themselves, usually sympathetically but sometimes thankfully, as they maybe knew what was happening in the home.
Children would be taken and maybe return in weeks to come. Sadly, they were children whom most of us were told by our parents not to play with and to keep away from.
They did not have Christmases, let alone birthdays. They did not have other kids around to play. Their parents usually kept themselves very much to themselves.
The houses were run-down and the grounds overgrown in the days when people took huge pride in their houses and gardens, all state houses either being rented or having been purchased off the State Advances Corporation.
It sounds as if people were unkind. They were not intentionally so, but they were very protective of their children, despite us all having a pretty free and easy life.
We mostly did as we were told in those days, so did keep away from these families.
Of course, our parents probably knew a lot more than they would ever share with us about our troubled neighbours.
In those days, adults kept a lot of information to themselves - children did not need to know the seedier side of life.
Kids would be sent outside when serious adult conversations were undertaken, and woe betide you if you were caught eavesdropping.
Many reading this will no doubt have similar memories of the 1950s and 1960s. The days before social welfare benefits at least enabled some troubled families to cope a bit easier.
They were lonely, pinched little kids with scared or angry faces. They were never at school long enough for us to know or befriend them.
I guess the mug of cocoa, something most of us took for granted, was a big deal to them.
