Memories are Made of This

What do dates mean to you?  Do you remember anniversaries?  I do some and not others.  It’s peculiar what is retained as important for commemorating and equally what is allowed to fade into the shoreline as the waves of time pound steadily over the memories.  Sometimes it’s embarrassing when days you should remember just fail to remain steadfast.  My Ex-In laws both have birthdays that slip right past me.  It could be argued that these dates might well be just the things to consign to the past, but it is awkward as my Mother-in-Law always remembers my birthday and a neat little card arrives promptly for the day.  It seems as if I’m not observing some decent manners through all this, but it’s not like that.  Just the hooks my memory hangs its coats on function for a different purpose than for simple good manners.

I was pondering this and others truths with the Jubilee that has just passed this weekend.  I have to admit that I wasn’t overly bothered by the run up to the celebrations.  True, I bought some bunting.  Flappy, plastic stuff that disturbed my sleep over the weekend as the vicious June weather eked its terrible revenge on the revellers both noble and common, and we had taken great delight in decorating the front of the house with the bunting.  I got wry pleasure from watching my dear friend Ian and his partner Matthew trot to the pub for their lunch time drink and see Ian cast a disgusted glance at the jaunty decorations on my house.  My brother was of similar mind, but less generous than the tolerant Ian, announcing on his arrival at my home ‘I didn’t know you read the Daily Mail’, surely the lowest and cruellest taunt any intelligent-thinking, republican, atheist can lob.  However, I told him to get stuffed (in my head at least) because I have rather liked the Jubilee.  I’ve seen quite a lot of it on the telly as I’ve snuggled in against the cold, but it did come as something of a surprise that quite so much was planned.  Am I finally sinking into an abyss of self-obsession that it didn’t occur to me that quite so much would be on in London?

The thing that completely stuns me are the people that come to stand on a section of pavement for hours, if not days, just to have the Queen’s car go past in 10 seconds and they claim with radiant honesty that it was marvellous, they had a wonderful time sleeping on said pavement and it was all worth it.  I think of the queues for the loos, that surely must be monumental, the queues for the tea vans, that blasted feeling when you’ve been outside for hours, a kind of noisy leathery feeling, and wonder if the trains run a Sunday Service and how on earth would you manage getting home through Liverpool St without bursting into tears?

Yet, I do have a twinge of envy at the people behind the lines of police constables calmly striding down The Mall bringing thousands to the front of Buckingham Palace. The excitement coursing through the crowd must be amazing, all to celebrate 60 Years of the Queen’s Reign.  Will their memories be any more important than mine?  Mine will revolve around sitting with my daughters, chatting and drinking tea.  On Monday DN1 was working at the pub where she has a job so we ended up in that village enjoying the Street Party atmosphere.  The weather was kinder than Sunday when we witnessed the stoic courage of the Queen grimly standing firm when less resilient souls would have taken shelter from the appalling weather on the Thames.  As I write Prince Phillip is still in hospital, and to see the Queen alone at St Paul’s yesterday was poignant.  Small and alone despite the congregation around her, I felt I wanted to scream ‘Now you know how it feels to be abandoned’ to the world.  Somehow she seemed to embody enforced solitude with such complete dignity, yet although not by as much as a blink could you justify the perception, the misery was wrought deep for all to see.

I suppose one of the satisfying things about the Jubilee has been the conversation it has prompted.  We all have shared the experience in one way or another, we have our opinions, but there is satisfaction in knowing that those opinions are mutual.  The ripple of agreement in the pub was settling.  We all thought the Queen was stunning standing aboard deck for hours on end, and that it looked freezing on the Thames.  The idea that reality was in focus is something I find very comforting having had so many years when my perception has been clouded by pain coursing through my veins.  Now I find that I seem to think and feel like others, and can have ‘water cooler moments’ when I don’t have to check views expressed first so I can find where real boundaries are as I had no notion of where reality starts and finishes.  My memories are as one with society in general, I’m settling into sanity.

But what to do with the memories of the further past?  Here there is a bit of dichotomy.  Some things are embedded into my psyche, like the date I started my O levels, some are not.  For younger readers of the blog, O levels were the exams you took before GCSEs were invented, before coursework was ever an option and largely consisted of learning by rote and regurgitating to order.  My Latin grade, a rather disappointing ‘B’  was achieved after a truly disastrous language paper by cramming over the course of one evening 22 chapters of Sallust’s Catiline (in Latin, of course) in addition to the some but not all of  The Aenid by Virgil (thanks to Claudia for this late correction).  I seem to recall, casting my mind back over the eons of time that has passed since that day in the County High School gym where the wobbily exam table awaited me as ever, that is was all the boring bits of The Aenid.  I cannot recall which day I took the second Latin paper, but the date I started my O levels is forever engraved upon my memory: 5^th June 1978.  Why?  Surely my A levels or even my finals, largely undertaken in a community hall on a square in Bloomsbury with that wobbily table, again, were more important that my first experiences of ‘you have five minutes left’ and ‘please stop writing and put down your pens’?  But no, every year on the 5^th June  I raise a small toast with my morning cup of tea to the O levels I took. 

It wasn’t as if there were the first exams I took.  Oh no.  Moving to independent education from the appallingly discriminatory village school (my mother taught there and, so she told me years later, my combination of intelligence and inability to fit in – some things never change – left me alienated by students and staff alike) I found myself taking end of year exams from the age of 7 until I was 21.  In addition at 10 I took the 11+, I passed, Common Entrance, I passed, entrance to the Ursuline Convent, I passed, and St John’s Billericay, I’ll leave you to guess that outcome.  Those exams were probably the most important I took for not only did they determine my future education, but also that of my brother.  I went to the girls’ grammar school in Chelmsford, much to the joy of my mother, and in doing so freed up the limited cash available to ensure my brother had the public school education my parents wanted for him.  That he has always regarded this sacrifice as unnecessary and pointedly sent his children into the State system grated with my mother.  However he would not be the man he is now without the confidence and broad education that his school gave him.  He might disagree, probably arguing the case more cogently than I can defend it.  One of the few times I openly railed against this two tier system was when they had just come back from dropping my brother off at his boarding school for the first time when he was 13.  Years before, I had had a place, and indeed a House and a uniform list, for the now defunct Felixstowe College when news of my 11+ success came through.  I knew I had to be pleased for the achievement but having read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers I wanted to board.  I wanted a dorm, I wanted a midnight feast and all that I imagined went with taking your pyjamas with you to school.  However being compliant and understanding (and how those characteristics have served me badly over the years) I was outwardly thrilled and inwardly pleased to have made my mother happy.  The County High School wasn’t easy, having been a big fish in a small pond, I was now with girls who were far brighter than me.  But also there was the problem of language.  I’d been at a ‘nice’ independent day school where the boys left at 8 to go to Prep School, we had indoor shoes and outdoor shoes, wore berets in winter and panama hats in summer.  Suddenly I was on the bus with a bus pass, had dinner tickets and everybody else had a ‘Mum’.  I had Mummy, until the day she died she was Mummy, and we ate lunch.  I had a brother who wore a powder blue blazer with white edging and matching cap, and at 10 was in corduroy shorts and bomber jacket in the winter.  We both came home for ‘little tea’ when the muffin dish was used whilst we munched on crumpets or muffins and watched Blue Peter.  We went to the South of France for holidays, staying in a cheap little Pension my parents found in Beaulieu Sur Mer, and had lived in the Middle East as younger children holidaying in Lebanon.  I was different.  We weren’t grand, I lived in a modest little place in a village outside Chelmsford, but the bergere suite that I’m looking at now as I write, was there in that bungalow sitting room.  I didn’t fit in.  After a couple of years we moved to the house in Danbury which my brother sold after my father’s death, half of a fourteenth century hall house filled with ghosts and creaks, and although it felt easier as a family to be somewhere more in tune with who we were, it didn’t help my sense of duality.  I learnt to call it ‘dinner’ at school and ‘lunch’ at home.  My accent moved around like a third rate, rep actor.  It still can, although now the plummy tones are the thing most remarked upon.  That’s because I did go to independent school again, for my sixth form.  When my parents got back from dropping my brother at his House at his Public School I burst into angry, jealous tears.  I remember gabbling my resentment at the favouritism and the looks of total astonishment on their faces.  They had no idea of the sacrifice I had made over the last four years to keep the family on track.  Why would they?  Chelmsford County High School for Girls remains one of the best state schools in the country.  Just, even now I would bomb it to smithereens if I could.

To their credit they acted.  Not just that night when we went out for a Chinese meal I so enjoyed, but also within weeks I was being interviewed by the Headmaster of my brother’s school and was awarded a place in the sixth form for the next September.  My own Headmistress, a fierce, and I found out later, quite strident lesbian, was appalled.  They were destroying my chances of success, in her opinion.  Interestingly my friend Heather, who I met at Felsted, had a similar experience when her father told the equally strident Headmistress of Felixstowe College that she was to leave and go to Felsted for her sixth form.  Gerald, her father, was told that Heather would ‘sink like a stone’ being a second stream student who wasn’t even allowed to take French, concentrating on needlework and cookery, as nobody could have regarded her as academic.  I read Psychology at University College London, and Heather took Geography at Cambridge, although she had to wait until the results of her French O level she took in her Oxbridge year were published to confirm her place.  None of the girls of my level at CHS achieved anything like I did.  So I’m led to believe.

Maybe I remember the date because I knew it was the start of my way of getting out.  From a place where I didn’t belong, to something more comfortable.  It wasn’t entirely comfortable, in fact in many ways it was so much harder than the ‘just didn’t fit’ I had got used to.  But I ate lunch, had tea and took my pyjamas.  The comfort has come much later in life, now really.  When I remember the days that changed who I am, even if at the time I didn’t know why.