Well, what a lovely weekend. Surrounded by school friends though always makes me reminisce about school days. So here is a vignette for you, from Loughborough High School for Girls, 1995.
On Wednesdays during assembly time there would always be a staff meeting. For the pupils this meant that prefects, rather than your form teacher, would take the register, and, crucially, the deputy head rather than the headmistress would lead assembly.
The headmistress, Miss Harvatt, was a formidable lady who drove high standards of academia through a mixture of fear and... actually it was mostly fear. Brilliant at her job, and driven beyond belief, the staff seemed scared of her; the pupils were terrified of her. Whilst 100% of pupils received 9 GCSEs at grades A* to C (mostly A*), 100 % of pupils had also crossed her in the corridor at some point with the greatest imaginable schoolgirl crime: having the itchy, grey knee-high socks pushed down to the ankles, so as to appear slightly less swotty. This was something of an achievement when you were dressed head to toe in the same shade of grey.
Wherever Miss Harvatt travelled, the corridors would echo with her war cry of, “Socks!”. As someone who was perpetually cold, with socks generally pulled up as much as possible, I was only “socked” once; however, it was memorable. I will say this: it’s very hard to pull up your socks whilst carrying a school bag, a gym kit, a hockey stick, a violin and a cookery basket.
Anyway, I digress. Wednesday assemblies were the deputy head’s domain. Very much the White Rabbit to Miss Harvatt’s Red Queen, Miss Steel scampered around mostly looking tentative. She was a pleasant lady, organised, good at timetabling, but didn’t nearly have the authority of the head. Her shining moments of the year were Prizegiving and the Carol Services – anything where she could make the whole school stand up, sit down, file in and file out with a wave of her hand. I see her wearing white traffic warden gloves, but my mind may have invented that detail.
Schoolgirls being cruel, Miss Steel was mostly famous for her speech impediment. She had a soft “R” (making her the White Wabbit, I guess), and for some reason, tortured the word “foyer” out of all recognition. Believe it or not, I don’t recall the school actually having a foyer, yet somehow she seemed to say “ferwoway” at least once per week as 500 girls tried (“twied”) not to titter.
1995 was a hot sommer. As a sporty institution (apparently – although the closest I ever got to a sporting activity was hide and seek in the library – where generally I was hiding from the PE teachers where were trying to make me throw, hit, run towards or run away from something).
Loughborough High School for Girls’ tennis team had been doing very well. (“Twuly vewy well indeed.”). Miss Steel congratulated them on one memorable Wednesday morning.
“Congwatulations to the Under 18 tennis team who won the final wound of tennis this weekend in Wichmond, beating Wutland and a vewy stwong team fwom Weading.” She paused and beamed out at the 500 girls.
“I am vewy pweased to announce that our school is now the top wanking girls’ school in the countwy.”
Twue story. Happy days.
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