More school memories
We continue with more wonderful accounts from Catherine Acons, who was a boarder at at Our Lady’s Convent from 1956-61. Catherine tells of her time spent there, incuding great little pictures from her precious Brownie 127 camera.
The great escape
Teachers
Friendly families
TEACHERS. were a mixed bunch.
Some seemed very qualified and others not so much. Eccentricity was the magic recipe for theirs and our success and our general lack of boredom.
With no excuses, dramatic reading of novels, poetry and especially Shakespeare, was recited, standing at the sides of our desks, heads up, shoulders back. We took turns at characters. I’ve been Henry V, Richard 111, Falstaff, Caliban and every ‘Rude Mechanical’ from ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ you care to mention.
With a friend I adapted ‘Morte de Arthur’, out of class, just for the love. The battle scene and his death proved a potential stumbling block. We made it a dream scene, with maidens swirling about in diaphonous robes, leading him to Valhalla.
Mrs Frost came and asked me about it, and she complimented us! Mrs Frost was the ‘Big’ girls teacher. The pre- university one! It was my literary jackpot! It wasn’t staged. I didn’t care. I had directed ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ with my pals, in the gym, to a full school audience.
But Mrs Frost’s accolade had no peer.
You see,there were some top moments.
French was with the Ooh la la, Mamselle la Parisienne, her real Polish maiden name that she proudly revealed, now forgotten, sorry folks, but she is most certainly not forgotten. But we called her ‘Ooh La La’. Cherry red lipstick, perfume, stylish swept up hair do, pencil slim skirt and, wait for it, yes,heels!
She taught me to love the language, second only to delighting us with naughty stories about...men! Paris,and other loveliness. She would whisper these anecdotes, conspiratorially, then suddenly, as rosary beads jangled their approach, would launch into a very loud spate of verbs, the class joining in with great gusto.
Sometimes she’d start a rant about the Nazis then quickly calm it to a slow, threatening polite stream of damnations. In Polish, but oh,we knew.
She taught us the ‘Marseillaise, the French anthem,which she’d have us sing at the end of every lesson, if she had the chance. Our Art teacher also wore lipstick but somehow was not liked by the nuns.
She had dyed red/blonde hair too and a way about her of which they probably would say “She’s no better than she ought to be”, if that were an Irish expression because, oh have I not said? They were all Irish.
She left, mysteriously, mid-term. We learned much later that she’d been seen, at the Adam Faith concert, in the back row of the Essoldo Cinema, cavorting with a young man, sitting on his knee, in public, no less, and kissing! Or snogging, it was then. Lovely word!
This is the condensed version. Others would include “The lipstick all over him,wasn’t it?”, “She’ll be pregnant now, so she will”, “Didn’t she just get what she deserved? So she did!” and a lot worse.
Those choice phrases coming from the ever colourful postulants,the teenage trainee nuns, who we’d try talking out of going the whole mile to the vows.
Storytime was often with a gaggle of us, with one of these great narrators of the blarney, on the coconut mats under the vaulting horse, up in the far corner of the gym - “And didn’t he just....ah so he did,.... and wouldn’t she,so she would...”
There were fairies and leprechauns and poltergeists, and some poor wretch who been sacked from her job for not wearing corsets, oh, and Rebel songs, sometimes in the full Irish. I had not a clue! but I loved it.
To this day,when I’m in Ireland, I feel weirdly at home and my ability to fall into the regional dialects is uncanny and most embarrassing. THE great escape:
I ran away once, in the night, in my jamas, winter coat on top. Standing in Park Street, outside the caretaker’s house, beyond the gym, not sure to go left or right, I realised that going to Gran’s, who, despite nearly banging their door down, had been forbidden by the nuns to visit us, anyway, (“If we let her,they’d all want it!”).
She might just return me, or, Dad would kick up a fuss, or Mum would cry, or the cops would get involved or the world would end. Or even worse, I’d get expelled. Delicious but deadly because then I’d be doomed.
I got back in, all the way back up to the creepy top floor dorm .
A ‘big girl’ got me back to bed in secret. She gave me a whole packet of Rowntrees Pastilles from her tuck box,
for being brave.
One girl had got away before. Mary O’Grady, I think.
Her Gran sent her back but not before the breakfast time warning by the Head. “Any girl who runs away will be instantly expelled”.
A big girl started applauding. Those brave enough joined in. The excitement rippled down the long tables to the younger end. We all got punished. It was worth it. What puzzled us was that there was only one girl allowed home each weekend, to horse ride.
I wanted a horse.
FRIENDLY families:
On some Half Term Hols my Dad couldn’t fetch me so I was farmed out to willing friends’ parents. Thank you, the families of Penny Turner, Patsy Rowlands and Ellen Ward.
I’ve never been keen on Prince Andrew, as my RAF Dad had to be in London on parade for this royal baby’s birthday celebration. Meaning I couldn’t go home.
By today’s standards, home was never that far, and
always in England, even if Dad was abroad. Never the threatened foreign posting. Even more frustrating. However, Penny’s Mum ran a pub, Patsy’s lived in a caravan and Ellen’s had a farm. So the thrill of novelty was complete! Ellen’s Dad let me wallow in the cow shed, plenty of mud, and her mum let me spend hours collecting eggs, often from out of the haystack, so usually too old and horrid to eat. But I was a very willing help.
Girls playing ’Jacks’. Georgie (Georgina) Vawser. She had a sister, Jackie( Jaqueline), also a boarder Photographs by Catherine Acons from her days as a boarder at Our Lady’s Convent, Loughborough, 1956-61, aged eight to 12-years-old. PUPILS, both boarders and day girls, came from all sorts of backgrounds,and countries.
Buthena Albashir Albana ,(apologies, surely not written that way, but sounded like that to my young ear), came from what was then Persia (Iran), I think.
There were young ladies from Goa, in India but from Tanzania by this time.Tanganyika, as it was then,was where the African convent house was.
My best friend,a day girl, Krystyna Trybocka,was Polish as were a few girls. She was born in a refugee tent outside Loughborough but her family was housed locally by the time she was at school.
She had two brothers,Yanosh and Bogdan, I stupidly thought he was ‘Tobbogan’, being born in winter. Like many, her father was an ex - Polish Airforce man.
I found her story quite exotic, not understanding most of the painful saga at first. She was my sole allowed visiting friend when I was in long sickness isolation. We were ‘Fish and ‘Chips’. So sorry we lost touch. Then there was Jacqui Hutteman, who was of Dutch parentage, but also Jewish. How was that, I wondered. I later of course understood their shattering history.
Jacqui and I would practise our French verbs together with such force that my brain rings with them to this day. Our marks with Mamselle shot up!
Students