I am writing this in May 2021. At last we are beginning to emerge from the long incarceration of the Covid pandemic. I’m afraid I didn’t get down to writing more and indeed got somewhat apathetic. Life has been very strange and everyone, young and old have suffered the effects in some way. We feel for the young and the very old and especially the ill people. We have all lost a year of our lives.
Since we were vaccinated against Covid things have started to look up. We have all missed hugs and seeing our families in person. Christmas was cancelled last December and this week we received our Xmas gifts from our eldest son’s family.
As soon as we were allowed we went to visit our middle son in South Wales. That was wonderful and like getting out of prison. Everyone is a little nervous now about going anywhere and it will take time.
Our village actually produced a little book with thoughts and poems about Lockdown. I wrote a brief piece but it will be a nice souvenir of a very odd time and one we may want to forget!
So now I must get back to my schooldays. I have joined a Facebook Group on line and we have reminisced quite a lot. I found an old school magazine which I edited whilst in Lower Sixth. Ours was called The Phoenix and the boys had The Griffin.
Even the adverts bring back memories. Calvert’s for school uniforms and Whittaker’s for school shoes. That was the year we moved into the new girls’ school building, leaving the old one which we shared with the boys. They had actually used the first three classrooms which had been built for us on the new site. That suited us, however, as they had to walk past our form room in the prefabs , to get there. This provided us with much entertainment.
Let’s go further back, still to my first year at the Wade Deacon. I was in 1L and our form room was, as I said, earlier, room 30, on the back corridor. I used to take parties of sightseers along the corridor to peep in the hall where my Father was in charge of the boys. I’m not sure how impressed the other girls were by this!
Thursdays were cheese and onion flan days so I hated those. I loved school apart from school dinners. I would write plays and make my friends act them out after school with me as Director. I started a club called The Luny Club which was very exclusive and only certain people were allowed to join. We played games such as ‘Tossing the berriere’ which involved throwing one’s beret as far as possible. I produced a hand written magazine for the Lunies. Methinks I was a strange child!
HUNTINGFORD MATTERS 