Page 95 - Through a glass brightly

and breadth of what was covered on that course. I doubt if any school was doing anything quite like it at the time and when I add in the trips that we made (I was on the Canterbury trip) and the visits to art galleries with Mrs Zabel it all reflected an astonishingly broad curriculum. Furthermore, I spent my Wednesday afternoons going into London and opening and closing the curtains, I think at the Old Vic but it might have been the New Vic. Certainly, I stayed very late and had to get the 11.40 train home from St Pancras to Borehamwood. My father would come down at 11.55 on his bicycle to walk me home. (One night I got on a non-stop train to Nottingham (Northampton?) and the ticket collector arranged for the train to be stopped at Radlett so that I could get a train back to Borehamwood!) On the way home we would talk through the plays which I had seen – very often a matinee and a different play in the evening. I have been besotted with the theatre ever since. I also remember that I frequently went to the Proms. It was six shillings and sixpence for the tube fare and the ticket. Miss Smith used to enter the school for the lottery for the last night of the Proms and we always got tickets. I seem to remember going two or three times.
All this is good and, without question, enriched my life. However, the school didn’t really suit “also -rans” like me. Of course, it is difficult to be objective from this distance but my feeling is that those of us who were rather middling were given insufficient guidance about note- taking, study, sitting exams et cetera. The bright ones coped but people like me obviously didn’t - and the school had enough bright pupils not to worry too much about those who weren’t. I didn’t do particularly well in my O-levels but we put that down to the change of school. But my parents were very upset at my A-level prelims and complained to the school that they hadn’t been warned that I wasn’t doing well. They were told very definitely that “I was not university material “. (I now know that at least one of our group had a similar experience.) My parents didn’t argue and immediately set about finding a suitable job for me. I remember having tea with people in the church who had interesting jobs and finally settling on becoming a private secretary. (I would actually have been very good at that!) I applied for a secretarial course at Pitman’s. Again, at one of the reunions we discovered that most of us taking A-level history got poor results. I feel this has to be a result of a poor selection of syllabus - we were the only school studying our two periods and I think we had special papers for A level? And I should never have been shoe-horned into art A level! But I also don’t think we were taught to master the material properly, revise properly, and take exams - and ironically the time spent on the ‘broad curriculum’ possibly detracted from good results. In the event, I scraped through with enough qualifications to get myself into a very poor teacher training college. When I finally ended up in Daisy Street County Primary Junior Mixed and Infants in deepest Liverpool I suddenly discovered that I actually liked teaching and the rest, as they say, is history!But I think I would say that my future career and academic qualifications were achieved despite Queen Elizabeth’s rather than because of it. By the age of 27 I had discovered “Tony Buzan” and have rattled through various qualifications ever since. But I have often thought I’d have liked to have gone to university after school - and not find my own way there!
Cheers - from a late developer!
From Glenda at 12.18
Thursday, May 21st
Val will have the exact date in her diary but I think this will have been the Swimming Gala in the year we left - about July 1963?
I do remember the biology teacher (name? - I can see her face) took an 8 mm film of it all and have often wondered what happened to it!
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