Page 46 - Through a glass brightly

So, the Eng Lit class. We seem to have done it in one year, as on 19th September 1960 I record “Egg, Jervy (sorry, ladies, but that’s what you seem to have got called), Ruth and I had to go and see Miss Miller about Eng. Lit., which we may do for O level.” It must have been offered as we would never have heard of it? We had the classes with Miss Barber (later Mrs Riddle, sounds like something out of Harry Potter...) on Tuesdays after school and mostly all I say is - had Eng. Lit. - but at the beginning she seems to have given us a couple of tests before we started on the set books, maybe to test our ability to respond to text?? “We sat there for hours. We couldn’t do it.” A week later in October “Had another of Miss B’s awful Eng. Lit. tests. I got 8 and a half out of 27 for the last one. We didn’t have enough time for this one. I’ve got a feeling she’s doing it to give us a gentle hint we’ve taken too much on.” (At this point we seem to be running a shoe-shine service to raise money for something though I don’t say what. One morning the policeman on crossing duty came in to have his shoes cleaned to our great delight!) Do children these days have as much fun in school as we did? Now that they are talking about online learning and the future of education looking so different, how could you possibly replace all that human interaction and collaborative undertakings with anything meaningful at a distance? Anyway, no more details are given about the books we studied so that’s all I have on that.
I did look up the Queen’s visit but the diary I was writing then had only a very small space for each day and I don’t give any details. I was trying to see what lesson we were doing when she toured the school as, unlike Jen, my memory was that we were playing netball on the top courts and so that we would actually have a visit from her in a classroom, we then repaired to our classroom and were discussing netball rules when she came in.... Not exactly riveting and understandably she had nothing to say or ask about that and left pronto. That’s my memory but is it scrambled? What do other people remember?
It’s crazy down here. The police
chief keeps saying they don’t want
people driving for exercise,
although national guidance is now
different, and they’ve closed all the
car parks and are chasing people off
Dartmoor, but on the local news last
night someone said what we all
know- that they had walked around
the town and met 60 people in an
hour. So the next day they had
driven for 5 minutes, walked for an
hour and met 6... Yet we have the
lowest rates of infection in the
country (having been an early
hotspot in Torbay). Someone
parked their car at Thurlestone near
the beach and came back to find
their tyres had been slashed. They
are just terrified of holiday makers
coming down here and so endangering all the locals...I feel a little anxious about this today as my daughter has gone out for her day off in honour of her birthday tomorrow and is going to the coast for a walk - in my car as her usual vehicle is a camper van, which is asking for trouble.
From Cary at 14.58
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