Wade Deacon Grammar School for Girls

It is now January 2021 and we are in the middle of a Covid 19 pandemic. We now have a vaccine and hopefully will be able to regain some form of normality of daily life. I have been at home now for nearly a year with my husband. We know we are very lucky to have a warm home and a garden and we are fed and watered. So I have no excuse not to get on with this blog although I am still feeling my way. I did my first ‘Zoom’ session last week. I still prefer pen and paper to modern technology. We have added a lot of new meanings for words to our vocabularies such as ‘Lockdown’ and ‘Tier Four’. Corona used to be a make of lemonade when we were little. Now it is a nasty virus that is killing a lot of people.

One way of keeping in touch online is Facebook and one can reconnect with old friends too. We ‘Skype’ with the family and use ‘ Whatsapp’ to contact friends. So much to learn! We are using our time in Lockdown to tidy cupboards and re-organise photographs. All these will be digital too in future, no doubt.

I am surprised to realise that I have no official photographs of myself from my time at Wade Deacon Grammar School for Girls. I have no class photos or whole school photos even. The few personal ones I have found are rather poor quality, unfortunately. My brother has his sports photos, mainly rugby teams. I was not, you may have guessed, the ‘sporty’ type!

By the time I went to the WDGS it had been divided into two separate halves . This happened in about 1946 before which time it was co-educational. Someone drew a line and decreed half was for girls and the other for boys. This was awkward as it meant the boys got the Assembly Hall and we got the Gym and the Dining Room. There was an imaginary line dividing the playground which we ignored, of course.

We girls used to have to walk through the boys’ bit to have our whole school assembly (obligatory in those days) and the boys had to walk through the girls’ bit to get fed in the Dining Room! It all made for an interesting experience.

My brother must have been in the Lower Sixth by the time I started there and my Father was Deputy Head of the boys’ school. Little did I know back in 1957 that I would be returning to my old form room, Room 30, on the back corridor, as a Teacher, about 11 years later!

Now you will understand the title of my blog but I will now return to the time when I entered 1L as a new girl beginning my secondary education.