School Reunion

There has only been one school reunion that we know of, and that was about ten years ago, when Friends Reunited first made it possible to get in contact with enough people to make it worthwhile. I didn’t go: I lived a long way away, I had a small toddler. I was tired and fat and pregnant. I was working 70 hours a week. I was too scared to go.

It’s not the sort of school to have an Alumni Association (no-one would even know what that meant, Latin has never been on the curriculum) and there isn’t a newsletter. The school itself is unrecognisable: after the third arson attack it has now been completely rebuilt, and the photographs I’ve seen look so gleamy and modern I had to check they weren’t computer-generated visuals. After its long history as a secondary modern, it became a comprehensive just before I started there and had a brief flurry of academic success with its small new sixth form. Now however it’s a sink school again: only 22% of pupils left with the requisite 5 GCSEs last year.  Poverty of ambition is just one of the many poverties to strike the region.

There wasn’t the hoo-ha about which secondary school was best, not where I grew up. It was a very small town, or a big village, I’m not sure, and everyone automatically went up to the same seniors. Nobody thought of getting a bus the eight miles into town to attend the grammar school (undeniably a better school but now also a comprehensive), and no-one went away to private school. You’d have to have gone away to board, there weren’t any private schools at all within travelling distance. Leeds Grammar was a good hour away on the train, with a twenty minute bus ride to the station and another twenty minute bus ride up the hill at the other end, not realistically possible on a daily basis.

People of my age fall distinctly into two groups: those that stayed and those that went. Most of my year left school at sixteen: the boys generally went down the pit or took apprenticeships, the girls to various jobs in town. Several girls were pregnant by the time they left, a number more by the time our little group of twenty-two geeks had finished our A levels two years later. The miner’s strike was some months old by then and the town’s economy was already completely fucked.

So some of us couldn’t afford to leave, and some of us couldn’t afford to stay. First Friends Reunited and now Facebook tell me that the exodus from the South Yorkshire coalfields is rivalled only by the Irish Potato Famine. Well, I might be exaggerating, but only slightly. And once you can’t be where you belong, you might as well be anywhere, so classmates are in California and Canada and Australia and Andorra. Most of us, however, have stayed within travelling distance of the place we still call home.

The previous reunion was clearly going to be mostly for the people who stayed around. This one in November, however, appears to be aimed at the wider diaspora. Teachers are being wheeled back out of retirement, there will be a tour of the shiny new school, the launch of a newsletter. I scent the possibility of a call for funds too, although perhaps I’m just jaded by the incessant requests for money (enormous amounts proposed, most recently £500 per month for 5 years) from my Cambridge college. The gathering already has its own Facebook page, and the discussion boards are lively with plans. It is even rumoured that The Gents might play.

School was fine, but I wouldn’t say I remember it as the best years of my life. (In fact I don’t when that period would be, I need to give it some more thought). Being a violin-playing, specs-wearing, freckly swot who arrived half way through the first year when everyone else had already settled into their friendship groups turned out better than you might have thought. I had some nice friends, a handful of whom I’m still in touch with, and we had some laughs. There were excellent teachers with an infectious passion for their subjects (physics excepted), and a strong interest in music due to the excellent colliery band. Sure there were bullies who forced us all to suffer regular random punches, kicks and smacks around the head, but they didn’t pay me any more attention than anyone else, so that counted as a blessing of sorts. Later, the new sixth form meant small classes, six in my largest group, which I believe accounted for the good results we all achieved. The escape route of a university place was also a great incentive to studying hard.

I’m not sure how a reunion now would turn out. The pecking order would certainly have changed. The cool girls have turned into raddled single mums with too many children and not enough money. The cool boys are fat blokes with nicotine-stained fingers and lines of bitterness etched too early into their faces. It’s not a wonder: work has been a struggle across the whole area for the last twenty-five years.

My big fear though, is that somehow despite my outward success (at least in comparison to the people who still live in the village) I will still be completely uncool. I suppose it’s the ultimate manifestation of my Impostor Syndrome. I have (with the help of my submarine protection-mechanism) been able to reinvent myself and convince the wider world at large that I am smart, successful, and if not sexy then certainly more attractive than I was at school. These folks will know for sure that there’s been a mistake. How could that skinny ginger nerd have gotten so jumped up?

There’s another problem too. I’m not sure how long the evening will last, and I’d be frightened to go to the toilet in case Renetta and Michelle slam my head into the paper towel dispenser or burn me with their cigarettes. My bladder might burst, and purely on the basis of preserving my health I think I might have to decline the invite.