I attended Vita et Pax (Life and Peace) primary school in Southgate. On my first day I remember feeling very sad as I arrived, because my cousin Mikey who was a few years above me had walked me to school and promptly left me outside my classroom door. As I walked inside I saw all the other children being hugged and kissed goodbye by their parents. I'm not going to lie, to this day I still begrudge my parents for not taking me to my very first day of school and I swear to god I'm going to hug and kiss the hell out of my children when I take them. Anyway, I soon cheered up as I saw my friend Matthew who had been to my nursery school and my teacher announced that we were going to be watching The Lion King (my all time favourite).
I'm not sure how to say this without coming across as insanely immodest, but throughout my primary school years at Vita I was consistently top of the class at pretty much everything - especially french, music and reading. Looking back now as an extremely lazy and unmotivated student, it's hard to believe I'm the same person; my parents always proudly tell me the story of how my teacher called them in specifically to tell them in hushed tones that at four years old I had the reading age of a ten year old. I was in French club, music club, speech and drama club and reading club; I played the lead in most of the school plays and after we moved before my last year there, the headteacher told my parents I would have been chosen as Head Girl.
My first best friend at school was an Irish girl called Caitlin McIntyre; until she moved to Ireland in Year 3 we were inseparable. To be honest the only real memories I have of the time we spent together were when we were naughty, which was pretty frequent particularly in my first few months at school. We had a habit of running around the playground, picking up other people's jumpers left on benches and throwing them in the outdoor bins. We were never caught, but the headteacher once mentioned it an assembly and I still remember looking gleefully at each other and whispering 'that was us!'. My parents were also called in during my first year because we had picked up another lovely habit of filling out mouths with water from the drinking fountain and then spitting it at other children. After she left I guess I didn't really have a best friend, but I had a good group of friends and I remember always feeling popular, loved and fulfilled. Sigh, what happened?
Well, we moved out of London. When I was 10 years old my mum was offered a new job in Windsor, and a couple of weeks before my 11th birthday we moved to Ascot in Berkshire. And oh wow, was it a change and a half. Being so used to the vibrant, multicultural hustle and bustle of North London, walking down Sunninghill High Street with my mum on our first day there was a massive shock to me. The main things I remember noticing were a distinct lack of any race or ethnicity other than white people, and a lack of cinema/shopping centre/swimming pool/ all the things I had come to take for granted being within a 10 minute walk from my house.
My first day of my new school, St Francis, wasn't much better. I was bullied for my accent, bullied for having curly hair, bullied for having no friends yet (yes, on my first day), bullied for being clever and bullied because, well, I was the new girl. It's hard to explain but there was just something different about the children in London and those in Ascot. My classmates in Ascot, although the same age as the friends I had just left, were coarser, cruder, already growing a sense of what I can only describe as 'bitchiness'. They swore more, they knew more about sex (on my first day one of my male classmates shouted 'Jack wants you to suck his dick!' at me, something which I had literally never heard of before), the girls were already starting to wear make up and style their hair, the boys talked about pornography and the size of their dicks.
I think the bullying for my curly hair and being called fat within my first week strikes me as interesting now. In London I went to a pretty diverse school; there were black children, Muslim children, Greek children, fat children, thin children, disabled children... and it was literally never commented on. It wasn't even something I was particularly aware of; so coming to a new school and my appearance being immediately commented on really confused me at the time. I was like, what is your point?
Things gradually got better; I eventually made some friends, I still excelled in the first part of my year there but by the end I was being sent to the headteacher's office every other day for some rebellious act or other. I guess I was just rebelling against the situation, rebelling against being forced to become self-aware and conscious of my body at 11 years old, rebelling against growing up in such a negative environment. I really think that if I had stayed in London I would have become a completely different person.
No comments:
Post a Comment