My next school was the Girls’ High School. That school was in its final years before the changeover to the comprehensive system, and the upper school was already under construction. Nevertheless, the school kept to its old-fashioned organizational and disciplinary system, so the all-girls school had four houses with a system of house points and merit points, and a very strict uniform policy.
The winter uniform was so extensive (blazer, beret, raincoat) that I couldn’t have much of it because we couldn’t afford it! In summer, a fabric was selected and we could have our own summer dresses made. Shoes were always flat and practical, black or brown, and mum took us to Clark’s twice a year to be fitted for school shoes. I was so shocked when I came to Turkey and the shoe stores would ask us what size our children’s feet were – no measuring or fitting at all.
I was at that school for two years and at that time I was beginning to grow up and take an interest in pop culture; my love for David Bowie definitely started at that time and I clearly remember Ziggy Stardust pin-ups from the centre of girls’ magazines. I wasn’t very discriminating; I also liked Donny Osmond and the Sweet!
We started learning French at the high school, and had a school trip to Paris with Mr Bigg, the French teacher. We visited the Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysées, l’Arc du Triomphe and Montmartre. Memories are hazy, but I do remember Sacre Coeur and the buzz of Montmartre, and being allowed to drink red wine – at eleven years old!
The old school had individual wooden desks with lift-up lids, inkwells, and depressions for pens and pencils. I put my packed lunch inside my desk, and every day when I went to eat it, it would be gone. I never told anyone, so I suppose I went hungry. Even though I knew who was probably bullying me, I nevertheless made every effort to be accepted by that group, since they seemed to me to be the “cool” ones.
Although I was clever, I didn’t want to be associated with the swots. For the most part, they were the wealthier children from big houses in the countryside and surrounding villages. I didn’t aspire to be like them, I was more concerned to fit in with what I think I perceived to be my socio-economic group.
In fact, the girls I admired were bullies who walked around in cliques and delighted in being anti-social and rebellious. Even while the bullying towards me escalated and continued, I still wanted to be like them and liked by them. I was always on the periphery of their group and not quite accepted. Their taunts were the reason why I started smoking at 13, and why I started plucking my eyebrows, much to mum’s dismay.
I enjoyed English, history, and geography, but I didn’t liked sports. I preferred athletics to team sports; even though I wasn’t very good at most of the disciplines, I was only responsible for myself. In netball and hockey I dreaded the feeling of being a let-down, and the possibilities that presented for bullying later. I wasn’t the last to be picked for a team, but I was never the first, either. Netball just struck me as a heap of petty rules that spoiled the flow of the game, while hockey was always freezing cold and muddy, with black and blue ankles for good measure.
I was quite good at middle distance running, so I enjoyed the track events and later I liked cross-country running, although by then I had started smoking, and a cross-country was more often an opportunity to skive off and smoke with friends under one of the newly-built footbridges on the Springlands estate. We got caught once, by a female teacher who drove around the course to check up on us, but I don’t remember the consequences.
By this time, I was at Sudbury Upper School, in the second year of intake for this brand new, state-of-the-art comprehensive school, and I loved it. The bullying had largely stopped by now, and I wasn’t afraid to be seen as clever, frequently coming in the top three (with Glenn Parker and Colin Mathieson) for exams.
The school had everything: six science labs, a gym, a sports hall, a swimming pool, tennis courts, 3 or 4 football/rugby/hockey pitches, a carpentry workshop, needlework and cookery classrooms fully equipped, a huge art department with facilities for pottery, sculpture, and printing, and a theatre.
We also had some fabulous teachers: Richard Penny, Mr Fraser and Mr Holden for Geography, Clive Waddington for History (I didn’t like Mr. Britten), and in the sixth form, Mr Faulkner and Charles Lamb for English. Pre sixth form, there was Mrs Knock for maths, and Mr Copp for French. I took advantage of everything I could. I selected mostly arts and humanities subjects for O levels, but I remember the Chemistry teacher trying to persuade me that I could succeed at sciences and not to give them up. I selected biology because you had to continue one science up to age 16.
During my time at the Upper School, I had a Danish penfriend, called Anna (I wish I could remember her surname). When I was about 14, we went on an exchange trip to Denmark. I enjoyed the freedom and friendships on the trip, and loved their family home and how welcoming they were, but again, as I had with the better-off school friends, I did feel out of my league. When the Danish group came to us, we took them to the local youth club, and I think we had a trip to London with them, but I remember little else except how to say “I love you” and “thank you for the meal” in Danish, and the hilarious names of some of the sweets: “Spunk”!
Fading Memories 