Fifty years ago

Fifty years ago, I was nine and three-quarters and in Miss Harvey’s class. The previous year I’d been in Miss Dickson’s. She was in her thirties, I’d say - a brisk, cheerful woman with those winged glasses fashionable in the 50s and very tidy, almost childlike handwriting. I liked her, though looking back I think she was probably an organised rather than a very motivational teacher. But she inspired confidence. And I was a good girl, quiet and shy but eager to please, with neat writing and good spelling.

But when I was nine our teacher was Miss Harvey, who had a big face, an amused expression and a deep voice with an English accent. On the first day of the school year, a new girl whom I’d been told to look after asked me a question while Miss Harvey was talking. I whispered an answer. Miss Harvey asked me my name and told me that I was "obviously going to be a trouble-maker". I was completely cowed and thought from then on that this was her view of me. So that was the whole year ruined. I expect that Miss Harvey actually forgot what she’d said to me about ten seconds after she’d said it but I didn’t realise that at the time.

That was the year I stopped doing my homework – not because of this incident, I don’t suppose; just because it was so boring – and didn’t really start working again at school till my final, pre-university year. I just coasted along, cushioned by my ability to read quite fast and to write, spell and punctuate accurately. I had a reasonable memory and was good enough at sums. However, I lived my life anxious that someone would notice my lack of diligence, though no one ever seemed to. My reports tended to say that I lacked confidence. This was true, but mainly because I hadn’t done the work and was having to improvise quite a lot.

At home, when I was nine, we lived in a bungalow which had had two bedrooms and a toilet built into the attic space for my brother and me. My bedroom had a long window overlooking the garden, which was quite big (by British standards) with lawns, flowerbeds and apple trees. My passion for gardening started there. I loved to tilt lupin leaves so that raindrops ran down the grooves and gathered in the centres, shining like jewels. I used to bury my face in carnations and pinks to drink in their fragrance. And lilac blossom – blissful scent, still probably my favourite. I loved the daffodils cheerfully piercing through grass beneath the trees; the furry beards of iris, their velvety petals and bright colours; the sharp yellow and orange of nasturtiums and the squeaky feeling of their leaves.

I was quite a solitary child, I think, though not actually lonely - just because there were very few children living nearby and I spent a lot of time reading or daydreaming or wandering round the garden. My brother was (is) two years eight months older and though we got on well, our interests were very different and I don’t remember our playing together. He knew a lot more than me about everything and was my main source of information about things that I didn’t necessarily want to ask our parents.

I attended a school in the centre of the town and so my school friends didn’t live nearby. My best friend at that time was Dorothy, who was to be killed in Brussels at the age of twenty-three when a car mounted the pavement that she was walking along. Dorothy was the class golden girl: blonde and pretty and sensible. She always got sent on any errands to other teachers – an enviable task, since the messenger got to wander about the empty corridors, looking through the glass panels at other classes. Though Dorothy was my best friend, I was aware that I was only one of her best friends: she was popular with the other children as well as with the teachers. She and I used to go swimming on Saturdays at the chilly public baths at Portobello. I think the water was slightly heated but the air certainly wasn’t, and we shivered violently when we came out, pulling our clothes over our not-properly-dried bodies in our desperation to get warm again. Then we would go to the cafeteria, which was empty and draughty, offering very little. But if we were lucky an assistant might come out from somewhere and sell us a hot buttered roll for two pence (or tuppence, as we called it). They were so delicious: white rolls (we always had brown bread at home) with the butter just melting. These post-swimming warming snacks were called “chittery bites” or in Standard English, “shivery bites”. Then we’d go up to my house or hers and play dressing-up. I still miss Dorothy and wonder what she would have done with her life. We stayed friends and I got a letter from her the week before she died, telling me how much she was enjoying life in Brussels. She's for ever twenty-three while the rest of us... are not.

Fifty years… how unimaginably old my nine-year-old self would have thought the fifty-nine-year old version if she’d met her. Older than her mum; not much younger than one of her grannies; older, much older than Miss Dickson and Miss Harvey. And yet - still the same person in most ways.

So: what were you like when you were nine?