Middleagemum.com: The School Reunion

stover school

How were your school days? Fantastic fun and full of learning, or a grim stretch of miserableness and academic struggle? I went to an all girl boarding school in Devon for five years, due to my dad being in the RAF and being abroad most of that time, I left in 1976 and it’s almost 40 years to the day since I returned. I was never going back, ever. Boarding schools will do that to you.

In a life before Facebook, if you weren’t a letter writer, you lost touch. Phone calls were expensive and almost always hovered over by a watch-tapping parent, anxious to keep bills down. Dispersed all over the globe once set free, even those of us who were besties struggled to keep connections going -friends who lived abroad had to be written to on unworkably fragile airmail (does that still even exist?). And if you lost touch, how important could they have been anyway? So what was I doing last Sunday, heart sinking like a stone, just like it did every time I drove up that driveway back to school for another term, heading back for a reunion lunch?

At boarding school you know your classmates really, really well. We shared dormitories, clothes, every meal of the day, teary waves of homesickness and joy at letters from home. We could identify the owner of each pair of drip-drying knickers, hanging overnight on the luke-warm dorm radiators. We knew when each-others periods started, which pop star we were currently in love with (Peter Frampton and David Bowie, mostly). We could pick out, blindfolded, our closest friends just from the way they smelled, we were that close. We were, as Bev said this weekend, each other’s family.

So not surprising then, the overwhelming rush of unsettling emotion I felt when I saw my class mates again, most of whom I hadn’t seen for four decades. As my eyes became accustomed to how they looked now, I didn’t fight back tears, I battled with a Harry Potter level, magical wave of nostalgic time travel. Fabulous, but unnerving. ‘Weird’ hardly covered the first ten seconds.

stoverschoolterrace

We were amazed at how little the school building had changed, it was almost exactly as we remembered it, right down to the way the back door need a shoulder-shove to open it. It’s also a beautiful place, something that I’d blocked out completely. I remembered the way the flagstone floors looked where we queued for the one phone (one phone!) to make calls home and the slight change in atmosphere as you walked passed the head’s office. In an odd twist of fate that you couldn’t make up, we learned our old head, Miss Smith, died days before we visited.

We stood where our desks were in our old classroom, and I gazed out of the window at the totally unchanged view of Haytor (above), remembering how I daydreamed away French vocab lessons by planning my next sewing project (my friend Vicky’s mum knew me as ‘needlework Mandy’). It was incredibly moving.

The memories tumbled out with extraordinary clarity. We remembered the names of teachers, gardeners, girls in upper or lower years from us in a flash, which considering I can hardly remember what happened to me two days ago is nothing short of miraculous. What’s that all about?

stovergirls

But, of course, the best thing was reconnecting with the girls I spent nearly every day of my life with for five years. They were older, but exactly the same, Cindy’s huge clear smile, Bev’s infectious laugh, Laura’s quietly curious mind, Vicky’s sense of fun and Amanda’s singing. I stared into their faces and saw the girls they were then, trying to come to terms with the odd disparity between knowing them SO well, yet not at all.

We were missing my best friend Charlie, who died tragically last year, perhaps that’s what made the experience resonate so strongly, every step I took around school, I took with her. And once reconnected, we all yearned to know what had happened to Atsuko, Janet and Lynne, who disappeared completely. Where are they now?

school 1976

We took our O levels 40 years ago this month, and dressed (after the 4.10pm tea bell) in the cork wedges, denim skirts, floaty maxi dresses and embroidered cheesecloth tops that Topshop and Zara are currently full of. We were style muses and we didn’t even know it. We wore our hair long, sunbathed using cooking oil and (apparently, although I don’t remember it) iodine when we supposed to be revising. We sang Annie’s Song by John Denver, Hues Corporation’s Rock The Boat, Karl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting and Bachmann Turner Overdrive’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (thanks for the list Bev).

It seemed a lifetime ago, brought back into focus for one glorious, sunny afternoon. One visit back to the school building was enough for me, wonderful, but I’ve done that now. However, reconnecting with the girls was astonishing, the bonds we forged decades ago although a little rusty at first, remain amazingly strong. What a joy. And thank heavens for Facebook.

 

12 Comments

  • I was at a boarding school in Dorset and took my O levels in the summer of ’76 and left it that year, so I was reminiscing to myself about this as I read your article. I also remember clearly listening to Bye Bye Miss American Pie on the lawns of my school outside the gym.

    Thank you for the evocative article.

  • Amanda says:

    Ah yes! Done McClean! We sang that too and puzzled over the lyrics. Glad it resonated Fiona, Ax

  • Rosemary Raughter says:

    As a former boarding school girl (in the ’60s) myself, this piece really rang bells for me. In contrast to your experience, though, I hated our first reunion, thirty-five years after leaving. We seemed to have little in common with each other, and those nasty in youth seemed to have become even nastier. Oddly, though, in the years since I’ve kept in touch with a few former schoolmates – not all of them, in fact, close friends at school. I’d stick pins in my eyes rather than go to a full reunion again, but I’m so glad to have made contact again with a few of those I knew then, with whom I share so many memories, some silly, some really significant, and whom I now look on as proper adult friends. I hope it works like that for you.

  • Amanda says:

    Rosemary, thanks for your interesting comment, we did have one person who, when contacted, said she couldn’t think of anything worse than coming back and visiting a school where she’d been so unhappy, so I guess it’s not for everyone. it’s good to hear your experience had a good ending too, I’m sure mine’s going to. Ax

  • Soraya says:

    I loved reading this. Thanks so much for posting xx

    ps. I was born in 1976, and reconnected via Facebook with former State School friends. Our class of ’92 small group, brought together at the the funeral of a classmate, are now firm friends. Though geographically scattered, we are there for each other via our chat group for laughs, tears, troubles, and celebrations. We meet up every 3-4 months and call ourselves The Committee. It’s wonderful, and I enjoyed so much reading your words and seekng the photos.

  • Goodness, that brought me up with a sharp jolt. I went there from my school for some sports match, tennis?, rounders?, deffo not lacrosse!!
    Team teas.
    Small, small world!!
    Happy (-ish) days!
    Zxx

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  • C Harris says:

    I was in the upper fourth at Stover in the long hot summer of 76. The school and grounds were beautiful. The memories not so. There were virtually no activities outside of the school day and I was so bored and very lonely. The food, what little there was of it, was appalling. We had to wash up after supper, didn’t have a single washing machine, or even a large sink for our laundry. The myriad petty rules were soul destroying. Only five items on the bedside table. You couldn’t make your bed until after breakfast; had to wear a long sleeved dress for Sunday lunch and so on, ad nausium. It’s only recently, via the old girls Facebook page, that I discovered how lonely and miserable most other people were……including those who attended decades before me. I lived for my weekly riding lesson up on the edge of the moor.

    The school day, spare time and food look to be a world away from what we experienced. I think parents were more trusting then, and just assumed that in loco parentis could be trusted, as it were. I’d like to go and see the place one more time. It was the other girls and SOME of the staff that made my time there bearable. I have bitter memories of other staff who were just damn nasty people.

    Perhaps I’ll go back one day.

  • Catherine Black says:

    Gosh. I stumbled across your article today. I too went to this beautiful school but only for one glorious, happy year in the late eighties. I couldn’t board as I lived only a bus ride away. It’s a place that fills both my happiest and saddest memories.

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