My school days were not a
bundle of laughs. I went to rather strict girls’ grammar school in the 90s,
where the often ferocious teachers wore tweeds, brogues, and stiff, grim
hairstyles with the occasional grey sausage curls. I did have some best
friends, but not in the main.
I find it
impossible to say what the “happiest days of my life” were, since I know that
perspective on the past is impossibly distorted by the present, and that the
span of time is so great and the complications so numerous, it makes even
making a guess an activity verging on the spurious.
School days for me
were like the rest of my life since, a mixture of the pleasurable and the
torturous. The pleasurable parts are easy enough to identify – the commonality
of being part of a group, the simple fun of being young, advertised by the
precocious girls of the fifth and sixth forms.
