A Curious Girl: Sweet and ignorant times...

I got an interesting e-mail from someone whose friend's daughter went to my primary school. It would be more scary if I hadn't heard from this girl since (especially if it was Claire, my one time best friend, who doesn't actually know I'm a Christian - if I see her again, I'm just going to have to say, "Claire - I'm a Christian!" before we get talking on old times). The woman who wrote to me asked what other memories I had of that school.

(Note - I changed all the teacher's names to initials...)

I remember my first day with Mrs. B. I remember we painted a picture straight away. I was friends with Caroline, whose mother's name was Helen, making her opposite to me and Mum. Mrs. B gave us all smileys on our first day. There was a quiet girl called Catriona, Katie, who never used to call her name, and was friends with a girl called Susan. I remember Mrs. B giving us a tour of the school. I can remember attempting to memorise all the teachers' names. I also remember Caroline mistaking Mr. W for Mr. R because they were both notoriously loud and frightening. I remember playing 'Witches' in which I, the witch, had to catch the others playing and put them in the dungeon. We liked to walk around the playground chanting 'Who-wants-to-play Wiiii-tches!' or 'Who-wants-to-play Sti-cky-Toff-ee!' and people who did would join the chain, until we had enough people to play. I remember playing hopscotch with Christine, my child minder's daughter, who was a year and a half older than me. I remember Mr. B, who always addressed me formally as Miss, for some reason. He was funny. And when Mrs. B put me with Jennifer for the first time, and we found we had the same sense of humour. After that, she always got our names mixed up, we were together so often. I remember making friends with the new children on the Christmas Tag day. I was Mary in the Christmas play, with Jason, a red head I had a typical five-year-old crush on. (That's a crush when I was five, not that lasted five years)

I remember my second teacher whose name I don't believe I ever learned to spell. I cried on Father's Day because I suddenly realised I was missing something. I remember when the parents teamed up to buy that teacher a leaving present. I remember being humiliated at having to drink water with my school dinner, and I also remember sitting next to Susan, who had one yellow tooth which she continually showed me, and used her knife and fork the wrong way around. I remember making the year 6 boys laugh when they asked me who I loved, and I picked one of them at random. I remember being friends with Hayley and Vicky, because they were shy and found me funny. I remember sandals and sunny days, and the way the blackboard looked in my second teacher's room as it dried after she'd washed it.

I remember being the slow one in Mrs. C's class - finishing late at everything. On my birthday I remember missing two play times and feeling utterly depressed. I remember doing the Red Indians and drawing two feathers on pictures of myself because I thought that I'd been brave two times. All the boys put as many feathers on as they could. I remember playing ponies with Jennifer and Christina. I also remember always being the villian in games of tag, witches, sticky toffee - just about anything. I was practically the slowest runner in my year, which was probably why. I remember Mrs. C yelling 'YOU'VE ONLY DONE TWO LINES!' to my utter humiliation. I was so proud of myself when I did two pages of the story of 'The Musicians of Bremen'. I hated having to rewrite stories - I'd rather make up my own. I drew in chalk, crayons, charcoal and craypass, wore a plastic mac back to front when painting. One of my stickers from the head teacher got stuck to that mac, and I was disappointed. Mrs. C used to frighten me, but there were lovely days when I went to Mr. D's class room to hear stories. He was funny and always told good stories, as well as having an apparent fear of crocodiles. He was Australian. We used to tease him about crocodiles. I remember finishing many of my reading books in a night. The only story I remember, however, was the story of Saint Christopher, who isn't even a proper saint anymore. I remember sentence makers.

I then went to Mrs. W's class, who was a lover of art and craft. We always made interesting things in her class. I remember being friends with Amanda, and not really knowing why, as whenever I went around her house and went to her bedroom, she suddenly started to be horrible to me. I remember when it snowed and we had to go home, and the story I made up about a snowman. I remember being useless at skipping until I was seven. We did a topic on transport. On Tuesdays we all went into groups, and I went to the top ability group in Mr. D's class with Christina and Jennifer. It was also fun because after the not so fun comprehension, when got to draw or do another activity - once we made a graph of our favourite Ninja Turtles. Another time we learnt about handspans, and why they aren't used anymore. I remember the Year Sixes who played with us in the field at summer time. I remember constantly making and breaking friends.

I remember being in Mr. D's class at last. He was quite lenient - perhaps a little too much - but he like all our ideas, like when Jade made badges of endangered animals. She still does make badges, better ones, of course. I remember that he left on Friday 13th December, and some of us stayed behind and wrote 'Mr. D is the best' on the blackboard. When he came in, we all leapt up and chanted it. And he gave us all chocolate.

I remember playing 'Narnia' with Christina. I remember Mrs. B (the other one), the fill in teacher and also how I used to yearn for the two days a week in which we had Mr. N, our head master, because Mrs. B was strict - still is. We did the Romans and that was a topic I really enjoyed. I remember learning why the year was 1992; it was the number of years since Jesus was born, he said. I remember Miss R, the full time teacher after that, a teacher I hero-worshipped for a time, who thought my stories were good (I wrote one starring her!!) and taught us to play rounders (baseball, near enough). She read us Jeremy-James stories, which I still think are hilarious. She got married, and seemed to have her career in between having babies. I spent a lot of time that year discovering the joy of long phone calls with Caroline. I have no idea what we talked about for so long.

I remember the miserable days before the new school year, during which I mostly complained to my Mum. I had lost my handwriting book that I was supposed to write in over the holidays, plus I had the scariest teacher alive. Mr. R. The first day was a tremendous relief, and I started having packed lunches, and sitting with Jennifer, Christina and Claire. My memories get a little dark at this point - Claire was fun and a good friend to me, but she wasn't a very good influence. It's not like I was the greatest influence either - I think the friendship had all the wrong kind of balance. Claire confided in me that she didn't really like the other two - they were too silly, or unpopular, or something. Anyway, she was forceful and quite malicious towards people she didn't like - I was easily influenced and also had a good imagination, without much moral fibre behind it. I snubbed Jennifer and Christina after a while. I don't know why I did, other than to please Claire - they were such good friends to me. Mr. R's class was a roller coaster ride, because I spent half the time with the 'dunces' and half the time with the brains, mainly because I shuttled between excellent test results and poor work. Of my maths, he once said I wa 'competant but not confident' and I think that was my main problem. I didn't believe I could do well, so I didn't try very hard. A problem that has lasted until I discovered Philippians 4:13. We went to the Arethusa centre over a weekend that year - it was a brilliant trip, although I never tried the wall climbing as I was - am - petrified of heights. He read us The Hobbit and it became one of my all time favourite books. I learned to write with a fountain pen. We used to go to Miss H's class (Year 4s to Year 6s) to do reading. Usually the older ones heard the younger read, but because I was a better reader, I listen to a boy called James read. I read A Horse and his Boy and found it brilliant. I think I gave it to Christina as a birthday present, along with The Magician's Nephew. One of the better presents I've given her, I feel.

The next year I had a different Miss H. She was a bit of a rough one - I did not do too well in maths as I had bombed the test and they put me in the third group out of four. She always seemed to criticise me. This meant I was in Miss H's maths group, and felt I couldn't get out of her sight (there were no other groups for subjects). It was purgatory. My maths and English did suffer, somewhat, but she paid me back in geography and art; two subjects I can remember loving under her teaching. Maybe that was what turned her back into a human. I was in the choir that year - we went to the Cathedral for a carol concert and to another school for a music festival. We sang 'Summer is icumen in', a sea shanty medley, and 'Any dream will do' from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I saw that musical in London when I was in Miss H's class. And that was the year I snubbed Jennifer for no reason at all, and found that Claire could be mean to me, too. And it was also the year Miss H segregated us for one day into left and right handers, and treated the lefties better (she was one) in order to teach us about racism. I've respected her ever since. We learned about Egyptians and Aztecs, and Victorians. Couldn't stand the Victorians, but the others were all right.

The next year I was put into Mr. W's class, the other Mr. Terrifying who had taught my mother of all the humilating things. But - oh joy of joys - I WAS IN MR. R's MATHS GROUP! Yup, top of the lot, they'd seen sense. And I suddenly discovered I loved maths when it was suitably challenging. Mr. W's class was another roller-coaster ride - but of a different sort. He was a peculiar, rather temperamental man, who was apt to explode with fury at certain moments. And we briefly had a student teacher who was (yet another)Miss H, who read us The Demon Headmaster (Mr. W is a marvellous man and this is the best school I've ever been to), which Christine, the ex-childminder's daughter, had once read to me, in return for me reading her (slightly more slowly) The BFG. We did media and I had a rather prolonged obsession with journalism. I seldom did homework, but I remember enjoying geography and biology, as well as writing the occasional story in English (a murder mystery, the Anglo-Saxon swineherd, and Escape from Kraznir all bring me fond - cringe-worthy - memories). I became better friends with Christina (I know I'd been playing with her for all those years, but it genuinely did take me that long to discover that we had so much in common) who was a classical music lover at the time. We sat very near each other when we were put in order of intelligence. Isn't that ridiculous? Order of intelligence! I was third, after Kenneth - Christina was first. That was maybe a frightening year, but it was a very good one. Claire and I were dubbed 'the terrible twins' by her Mum (I agree). We went to the cathedral again in choir, and another music festival - we sang 'Jonah Man Jazz', which was brilliant. I still have the words somewhere. We did A Christmas Carol for our Christmas play, and several interesting assemblies in which I was a minor role, as well as being a journalist (yay!) for our Jericho assembly. We acted out a lot of things in class. It was great - I remember acting out the Walls of Jericho thing as the King of Jericho, and after the big battle I was the only dead one. (When a guy called David said, 'Where's the King gone?' my response was a rather loud 'Have you no respect for the dead?') We used to stay in to play chess - we had a tournament, and I beat one boy with the four move checkmate, and lost my other two. I wasn't very good at it. We played hundreds of games in the playground - I rediscovered my friendship with Christina, despite attempting to avoid Susan (she of the golden tooth), who was my current childminder's daughter and Claire's ex-best friend. How stupid the politics of everything was back then. I remember looking around new schools, to see where I'd be going. It turned out to be a different school to Claire. I remember the talent show, in which we missed performing our great production, written and directed for the most part by Christina, with an additional poem by me, starring Chris, me, Claire, and a few others. It was the trial of the witch in 'Hansel and Gretal' - I wrote the testimony of Gretal. Mr. W for some reason seemed to take a fancy to it - we always seemed to come up with big ideas that he spent a lot of time making us work on. It was a lot of fun rehearsing - a pity we never got to perform it. I remember the very last day, autograph books in hand, saying last goodbyes to every pupil, teacher, dinner lady and Mr. N, our great headmaster. Mr. W raced some of the boys on the track in the field. Mrs. W, the choir teacher, signed my choir folder. I nearly forgot that folder, and my PE kit, rushing in to grab it at the last, and joking with Claire that I'd tell Mr. W on this very last day that back in Year 4, he'd mistakenly punished me for a crime of Jennifer's - talking in assembly!! I remember that last signing of my book from Mr. N, off to my childminder's, reminiscing, wanting to leave everyone happy, being nice to Susan for once, wanting to say a nice word to Susan's sister who seemed to hate me most of the time, and Ruth picking me up early. After that, I went to Ruth and Grandad's, and told them all I'd finished primary school for good as we played in the back garden before tea.

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