Dear Mo, (as you prefer today)
I dug out my 1971 Magpie diary today to look up the brief entry I’d made about your 18th birthday all those, not so many, years ago, at Thornton.
It was a Thursday.
“Mauron’s Birthday. Ma & Pa gave her £1…Hair wash. Sr. Genevieve gave Cheryl and Mauron a big box of chocolates and came down to the common room after study for coffee. Had a cake sale and made £3.75. Went for a walk and phoned Bernard to book a table.”
Of course my future self would is unable to read between the lines and pull out the underlying emotions, inevitable petty squabbles, and other little bits and pieces that constituted our very hum-drum but intimately relevant lives at an all girls boarding school so this entry didn’t offer up much.
We were 17/18 year olds, Upper Sixth Formers, on the verge of leaving school to start the rest of our lives.
We were the oldest in the school, prefects charged with minding younger classes while they played sports, or washed their hair or cleaned their dorms. None of this is on the page and when I first read it this week I thought,
‘This tells me nothing!’
We would have nuns for coffee in our common room? Do you remember that?
But as I continued to read on…
and then to flip back to previous entries…
things began to come into focus…the odd word triggered memories of happenings…too complex to write about in full…too mundane sometimes to bother…and surprisingly a picture slowly appeared.
The day after your birthday we went on a Christian weekend at Burnham and on Saturday 13th I wrote,
“2 discussions on Freedom (to Love; to Choose) quite good. Walked to pub for cigs with Jacqui, had a drink and met some others there, sweet. Social – ugh. Super mass. Jacqui was horrid at the social, just like Ping – ignores all her friends.”
I remember quite vividly the different people we became when taken out of our environment. The other teenagers at the retreat were not from a convent boarding school, probably not from boarding schools at all and some of them were boys…oh my!
The other seemed much more mature, to me, because they presumed they could pop off in the evening, down to the pub, have a drink, smoke a few cigarettes, without having to hide under a bridge or ask permission. They were comfortable with the release from school and all its restraints…we, on the other hand. were a little heady from the freedom. Jacqui was a year younger than us as Ping had been a year older, both girls were very confident and at outside events tended to want to ditch us (as gauche…which we were when out of our element) and go their own ways, flirting with the boys, flitting around the new people as a moth would a candle.
I’m imagining I felt discarded. I hated that feeling. I think I grew up vowing never to make anyone feel that way around me…except for perhaps a select few!
The next day:
“A last talk on Freedom; to Destroy. 330pm mass, a really united celebration. 230pm an evaluation. We just got to know everyone and it’s time to go! We left at 5.10pm. Got back to school, saw film – good.”
Shame I didn’t write more about these series of talks.
What did I mean by mass being a united celebration or ‘super’ in the entry before? Sometimes we stood in a circle around the altar, a casual approach to worship, maybe the readings were more contemporary translations…or we had a chance to paraphrase passages of scripture.
I know the feeling of just getting comfortable in a situation only for it to be over. That still happens to me. I have a tendency to take things slowly…with age I’ve learned to jump in sooner, grasp opportunities, be more out-spoken.
No mention of the title of the film…usually a G rated all school event in the hall.
The following week-end was the annual Bring & Buy.
On Sunday 21st I wrote,
“Bring & Buy. We went to lunch at Bernard’s. They gave us £1 boots tokens each!! We had a fantastic lunch and Sally Westly, Hilary Betts and Marjgrot took us there and back. Mauron won the jar of sweets!! Watched Exodus, fantastic.”
Lunch was the table I had booked the week before from school, on the phone at the end of a long corridor in the new classroom wing. We were only allowed to make calls at certain times and then had to wait for the phone to be free.
The Market House was where Bernard was the cook. A little rotund man with thick, round glasses, he drank tea all day and was a smoker. Miss Kelly owned the restaurant, or at least she was ‘kept’ by the owner. The bar was under the stairs…we enjoyed many a drink standing there in the foyer. You won the jar of sweets…lucky you! And Exodus was good. Apparently we were watching films every weekend! I remember them as being shown on the evening we were to break up for Christmas or summer or when we returned from holiday. Perhaps things had loosened up on the eve of our leaving for good!
The following Monday, 22nd, we went to Canterbury for our interviews,
“Sister Marcelline took us. Got to Canterbury at 1230pm. Had lunch, saw Jonathan on TP (teaching practise). Were shown around after maths test, met people. Interviewd with principal and a nice man. Not bad. Got home at 845pm. Fagged out. Central heating.”
These last two words, ‘central heating’ I can only think as meaning the heating was on! I remember waking up in the mornings to ice on the inside of my bedroom window! I have memories of going to bed fully clothed so I didn’t have to get undressed in the cold.
We had another retreat the following week for 3 days!! Were the nuns trying to prepare us for the outside world?
So just a short blast from the past to wish you a Happy Birthday!
Did we ever think of what life would be like in the future? We were very wrapped up in our ‘now’ lives of the 1970’s and George Orwell’s 1984 seemed very futuristic.
I don’t think we even considered the 21st century, we were so caught up in what was going on around us, the first man in space, the moon landing, flight of the concord, the first heart transplant, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the assassination of both President Kennedy and later his brother Bobby and so many more unfathomable things that were unfolding in our present lifetime; what could possibly be new to come?
And yet here we are living in a world that is a lifetime away from the one we grew up in, exploring the pathways that led us to the women we are today, the parents we became, the wives, the friends, the siblings
the proud grandmothers,
Now our children are forging their way…uniquely equipped with a completely different foundation to ours and managing equally as well!
God bless you and yours my friend!
Vivyun-Chonk xxx