1977 Back to School

Well as sure as eggs is eggs September brings the inevitable return to school life.

I was now a 5^th year (year 11 in today’s speak) and in the final year of High School. Those years from starting in 1973, as a fresh faced 1^st year in a pristine bri nylon lemon coloured shirt buttoned up to the neck, neatly tied brown tie and regulation skirt had past so quickly (almost as fast as it has got me to here on this blog).

As have my teens' years now. She has a couple of years left at High School and I was amazed the other morning when she came down stairs ready for school. She looked as if she was off to be a stand in for Amy Winehouse (with out the tattoos as yet) not off to be educated in the National Curriculum. After a bit of a ‘to do’ the ‘look’ was toned down and off she went sulking.

I was telling this tale to ‘J’ a few nights after and she was in heaps of laughter and the word ‘hypocrite’ was mentioned. Hypocrite? What did she mean? Now I have no recollection of this but apparently I would be rolling up my skirt at the waist to make it shorter and applying mascara on the walk up to school!! Well a girl can’t go out without her mascara can she?

So it was now head down and full steam to my o’levels. No messing just hard graft.

I was launched into the world of Literature, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Twelfth Night. Obviously as a teen Shakespeare left me cold, that was until we started to dissect it and I understood what this guy was now on about.

Even better was when we went to the Bolton Octagon Theatre to watch a live performance of Twelfth Night. This was my first time in a theatre (that’s if you discount years of Pantomines (have I mentioned I saw Engelbert Humperdink in Panto at the London Palladium?) and the Sooty Show at the Tower Ballrooms, Blackpool!!).

The Octagon is a great theatre where the audience surrounds the stage. Live theatre is such a joy.

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(it amused me that there is a note in the programme 'Cigarettes and tobacco used in productions are supplied from Rothmans of Pall Mall' ...)

Along with the Shakespeare came the dissecting of poetry.

Our ‘book’ was ‘This Day and Age’ an anthology of modern English poetry. I was introduced to Siefried Sassoon’s ‘At the Cenotaph’, ‘Case for the Miners’, Wilfred Owen ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (one of my favourite poems still), contrasting Phillip Larkin’s ‘Toads’ to Robert Frost’s ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’ and Stephen Spender’s Spanish Civil War poems ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ & ‘Port Bou’ amongst so many more.

I could understand this well, so English Lit was going to be a doddle/easy peasy.

Not so my Maths….. I ended up with a private tutor!!!!!!!