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teens

the summer of 61

Picture
strasbourg: july 1961
 
There's a write-up of the 'Summer School' in Strasbourg University in my old school magazine dated 1961-62. It's written by a sixth-former whose name I don't recognise. I had just come to the end of my year as an upper fifth-former and was 16 years old. Obviously the writer in the school magazine had done it in the way it was supposed to be done and attended the lectures and been on the planned visits. For myself and my five form-mates, apart from Josephine who was there with her entire family, supposedly as chaperones, when our teacher alighted from the train a stop before Strasbourg and waved us good-bye,  we realised we were on our own! Yes, we never saw her again in the entire fortnight, any more than we did Josephine's family, of which the mother, at the time of our teacher leaving the train, was suffering from a debilitating migraine and needed her husband's undivided attention. Once we were in the accommodation provided by the university, we tried one lecture the following morning, didn't understand it, decided not to attend any more and for the rest of the time enjoyed our complete freedom exploring the city in the way we wished. This began with our looking for local boys. We noticed a couple, so lingering and looking in the window of the patisserie (the likes of whose cakes we'd never seen before) they caught us up and stopped to talk. I was soon hooked up with Jean, and Sheelagh with Willy. Although there was no-one for Helen or Judith yet, as Helen was my closest friend and Judith, Sheelagh's, we stuck together in the two weeks that followed, or in pairs at any rate, enjoying those cakes, walking in the park, visiting museums (I still have the entrance tickets to the History Museum and its Torture Chamber section) and the cathedral, or lying by the river in the sun and then often meeting up with Jean and Willy in the evenings who took us to clubs etc. where there were some chances for Judith and Helen to do some occasional flirting, but it was me who learnt about 'French kissing' from Jean! We took them to the university refectory too, where we could eat for free. I see from an old photo that Sheelagh must have taken, that I was smoking – it looks like a Gauloise! Or we attended the 'Soireés that had been organised for us by the University where we met students from many different countries – European and Scandinavian mainly. I can remember being kissed secretly outside by a Finnish student! My 'friendship' with Jean lasted the full two weeks until we had to leave Strasbourg, with exchanges of addresses, of course, but once home again I was back with my very respectable English boyfriend. I've often thought since, how much trouble teachers would be in if this was allowed to happen these days, but I also think how Mrs Gray, our teacher had perhaps perfectly well known how it was likely to turn out for us and had decided that the best 'education' she could give her private all girls' school fifth form pupils was the one we actually received! 
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I was to return to this city twice more in the years ahead; Pete and I hitch-hiked there from Paris in 1964, and much later I spent a day there with Nick and Mj on our way from home Switzerland some time in the 1980's.


my summer of 61...

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This was the year that changed everything; or rather, the year where things began to change for me.  As always, of course, we were five years apart so in 1961 I was 11 to your 16.  What would I have made of you if we’d met the summer you went to Strasbourg?  I imagine I’d have thought you beautiful, and entirely grown-up, with the seductive glamour of sudden freedom.  I was still a kid, just out of primary, the days of pulling faces at old ladies on the way to school behind me now.  But the playground photos show an awkward girl, uncomfortable in her specs and her unattractive blouse and skirt.  I must have passed the 11+ though, and the entrance exam for Haberdashers, and any early rebellious instincts were abruptly hauled back into striving for success.  There was an interview with my primary head teacher and my parents, to get me ready for Habs, in which we concocted the fiction of me enjoying historical novels, and another with the compellingly odd Haberdashers art teacher Mrs Carter (I remember plaits wound round an agreeably fleshy face), where no doubt I waxed lyrical about such things.  And now, I remember her saying, this is not the 64,000 dollar question, but…  I don’t remember what the question was, but I must have answered right enough, because I was in on a scholarship. 

So, the summer.  While you were meeting boys and learning to smoke and French kiss, I was probably buying school uniform in – was it Bentalls in Ealing?  The heavy dark green gymslip and knitted jumper, old-fashioned sage green blouses, and two hats, black velour for winter and panama for summer, and regulation indoor and outdoor shoes (Clarks of course); worst of all, a dark green gabardine mac.  This might have been the summer my mother told me to ‘look in the sideboard drawer’ if I had any questions about growing up.  A search revealed two nasty little white pamphlets, evidently courtesy of the church, one on the human body and the other on sex, in its sanitised form.  I don’t think this was the summer I started my periods, or the one where I pestered for a bra.  It may have been the Cairngorms summer, the four of us in awful 1950s garb, photographed on a bleak mountainside.  You can’t see it in the photos, but I have stuffed toilet paper down my pale blue nylon polo neck, to disguise the tell-tale nipples showing through.  I was certainly learning by heart the words of the school song – I could probably sing you most of it from memory still: Mater nostra quae securas/Servas aede filias/Spatium iuventutis schola/Restat perdurabilis…  And I was getting ready for leaving behind the Roy Butchers and Christopher Bakers of Sudbury Junior Mixed and meeting the Krysias and Rowenas and Marilyns of Lower IVA, for travelling to school on the tube, for Latin and chemistry and the terrors of geography and lacrosse.
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What would you have made of me, if we’d collided one day that summer?  An intense little girl lost, taking herself very seriously, desperate to please? Or would you have seen the self I’d already chosen to show to the world: studious, confident, intelligent, piano player, stamp collector, reader of historical novels?  Either way, if our paths did happen to cross on a London pavement in July or August of ’61, I imagine we would simply have kept walking.
 
 
​...and after

At the end of my third year at secondary school, I joined my parents and brother in Etwall, then a village on the outskirts of Derby, location for my father’s latest promotion. Etwall has since been swallowed by the city’s suburban sprawl and we lived on one of the newer housing estates which were probably the beginning of the end for the village itself but then it was still surrounded by woodland and farming country. A sizeable but independent settlement, it boasted an old-fashioned village shop as well as a more modern affair with a cigarette machine outside, spotted soon after I arrived as a source of essential supplies. There was a church with a tower (or a spire?) and a Methodist chapel, a petrol station and a doctor’s surgery and, I think, two pubs. There was also a primary school and a new, purpose-built and highly successful secondary. Two disadvantages in my parents’ view: it was a comprehensive and, worse still, it was mixed. The result? I spent four years going backwards and forwards on the Blue Bus followed by a trudge across the Trent Bridge for the dubious privilege of attending Burton-on-Trent High School for Girls.

The disappointments of this arrangement were thrown into relief by my first summer there, which began with a taste of imported freedoms never repeated.  A party of my Haberdashers’ friends arrived with tents and camping stoves and we camped out in the field at the back of our house for a week or two. We quickly attracted the attention of the local boys – I remember being lumbered with a rather gawky individual nicknamed Flash – a Gordon, perhaps? I don’t recall details, only that there were certainly beer and fags, music perhaps, and agonies of worry when Deborah found she had left a condom in a pair of jeans which my mum had washed for her. I don’t think the sin was ever discovered - I’m not even sure that my mum would have recognised the offending item. Anyway, the girls went, and I settled (not very gracefully, and already a confirmed atheist) for chapel on Sundays followed by a walk up the back lane for a puff at an illicit cigarette or two. I also quickly traded in Flash for my first ‘real’ boyfriend, a bank clerk and a chapel boy like myself. A year older than me, it didn’t seem long before he had his own car, a turquoise Ford Anglia. By which time we’d discovered the pleasures of sex, and gin and lime, and were undoubtedly, whole-heartedly and totally In Love.
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These were strange times. The late start and geographical distance meant that I never quite fitted in at school and the already incomprehensible physics lessons were made more impenetrable by my boyfriend and I regularly sneaking round to each other’s houses in the middle of the night so that I spent my days in semi-somnolence, daydreaming and writing poems. I still shudder at our foolhardiness and imagine the horrors that would have ensued if we were caught. Geof would turn up in our garden and throw handfuls of lead shot at the window until I woke, when I would creep downstairs and let him in at the dining room window. Or I would skulk past the sleeping houses, through his garage and climb the ladder he had left earlier into his bedroom. But our secret was never discovered and somehow I managed not to fall pregnant.  By the time I reached sixth form I was already tiring of his devotion – I recall an illicit encounter with a strange guy I came across when ‘revising’ in the library in Derby – but it wasn’t until I made it to UCL that I managed to persuade him to let me go. Headstrong and wilful, secretive and misunderstood, I became the archetypal ‘difficult’ teen, slamming doors, leaning dangerously out of my bedroom window to smoke and nursing intense passions for the more glamorous teachers. I joined the Peace Pledge Union and delivered leaflets around the housing estates under cover of darkness. I saw myself as a rebel, idolised Bob Dylan, buying a mouth organ and occasionally borrowing a guitar and trying out the chords for Ramona or Don’t Think Twice. Sometimes I stormed out of class in tears. When it became clear that I was expected to go to university I dug my heels in and announced I would be applying for the Civil Service instead, only relenting at the last moment and sitting the Oxbridge entrance exams. But my heart wasn’t in it: London was the only place on my horizon and I couldn’t wait to get there.

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  • HOME
  • THE EXHIBITION
  • ARCHIVE
    • THE BEGINNING
    • CHILDHOOD ARCHIVE
    • TEENS
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    • MAPS
    • WHERE ARE WE NOW?
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