I Look Back At Schooldays

School - one way or another, I've been going to it for thirty, no, thirty-eight years.

I went to school as myself - sometimes with a hop and a skip, sometimes sullenly.  Not creeping like a snail, but weighed down, perhaps by unfinished homework.

I went to school, briefly, as a trainee teacher - into schools in Bristol with hope and adrenalin sloshing around somewhere in the region of my stomach.

I go - have been going - to school for longest of all, as a parent to two boys. 

Here's my youngest on his first day at school, his older brother leaning over him, gently protective.  Look how they match - their coats, their uniforms, their collars poking out.

Tomorrow is the last of the school days.  Yes, there are exams to come, but this is it: this is the moment I've been anticipating - one of those beginning-endings which lift my perspective from the day-to-day, and which lead me to take a long view backwards, forwards, inwards.

I already miss the routine of it - the pattern of my years. The start of the autumn term, which brings late summer heat along with new shoes, oversized shirts, and an upgrade to the next class.  Then the darkening, cooling mornings, the frenzy of preparation for performances, the exhaustion of December before the wide winter skies of January, the walk or drive home under the architecture of leafless trees, red sunsets long before bedtime.

And I'll miss summer sports day which in later years has become athletics day - the day of the year I'd take off work to sit on the grass and watch young people do ancient things - throw javelins, jump hurdles, throw a discus, then run like fury in baton-tied teams.

Then those glorious slumps into long summer holidays - endlessness: endless freedom.  The sheer stretch of it out all the way over August.

For years, we made Monday 'Sweet Day' (why do people choose Friday? - Friday has enough built-in joy).  Monday needs an additional energy - a rationale like chocolate, or ice cream.

We made the best of Mondays and we made the best of the work-juggle - the rush to the school gates for pick up, the days of illness which had to be managed somehow. The exhaustion at my desk, at their desks, the morning after a school concert had gone on past the watershed. 

I'm proud of the way we've have made the best of the my sons' years at school: all that learning done in-between the need to conform - sit down, stand up, be quiet, speak, stand, walk, run, no holidays in term time, no exaggeration of uniform... all that learning we've done, leaning into each other, holding onto ourselves with both hands.

I Study A Photograph

I started at South Hampstead High School in 1975 and left in 1982.  This is a photograph of my form in our first year.  We were called Upper III 13.  Our form teacher was Mrs Audigier.  On our first day, she taught us to pronounce her name by writing 'Mrs ODJ' in white chalk on the board.

We had to sit alphabetically and I can still remember the names of every girl in the class, from Jacqueline and Rebecca to Suzanne and Victoria: we were together, more or less, for five years, until we were reorganised in the sixth form.

The year after this photograph was taken, Gina became seriously ill.  I remember our headmistress, Mrs Burgess, coming to tell us that she had died.  We were in the middle of a Geography lesson.  None of us learnt a single thing from Miss Smith during the rest of that lesson.   Lucy died the year after we left school.  These losses are some of the hardest I've had to try to understand.  They colour my feelings about my school years with sadness.

I hadn't seen this photograph for forty years until earlier this week.  What I had remembered about it is that I was sitting slightly apart from the rest of the class and I looked grumpy.  I remember my feelings of shame when the proof came back from the photographers and my parents didn't want to buy it.

When I look at this photograph now, I see beautiful girls with eccentric potential.  We aren't lined up neatly, and we don't care.  I see myself as fierce and resentful.  Instead of feeling shame, I feel proud of my young self's containment and her survival instincts. I remember the warmth I felt towards Emma.  I see Noele in the back row, who I hardly knew then but with whom I was to develop a long-lasting friendship.  And I see Madeleine: the beautiful, wild American girl who friended me out of the blue on Facebook this week and reconnected me to this part of my life - Madeleine, from whom I first learnt about Sigmund Freud, about star signs, about trick or treating, about glamour, about other ways of framing the world.