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Wednesday 17 October 2007

My Back Pages

On Saturday I travelled back in time to the Sixties, when I met up with 35 former Kendal High School girls. There was more than a whiff of nostalgia in the air as we remembered far off days in green blazers and berets; rules and regulations (keep to the left, no running); smells from the science lab; embroidering your name on the Domestic Science apron; sewing pyjamas; the first male teacher in the all girls school; spelling tests and wild flower identification. It may have been the era of The Swinging Sixties, but in Westmorland we seemed to be still emerging from an older tradition of girls' education, and to me the overall impression was that we were a class of girls who took life very seriously.

I enjoyed looking back, but it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at a different life. I must have been there (got the photographs and certificates), but it was a different me. As a well known poet of that generation said

"Ah, but I was so much older then,I'm younger than that now"

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