Rosalind

Rosalind’s education

I grew up in South Norwood in South London, which then was a respectable, albeit not posh, place, and attended the local infants and juniors on Cypress Hill. I have few memories of my early school life. 

However, my parents greatly broadened our education. They thought that my brother and I needed more to interest us than we would learn at school. They had a deliberate strategy of not teaching us the fundamentals which we would cover at school, since they thought this would make it more boring when we reached the same content at school and were taught it at mixed-ability class speed. So far as I remember, the “top table” at junior school just got to do extra maths books. 

My father won a scholarship to Trinity around 1930, but his mother was worried that they would not be able to afford the uniform and extras, so instead sent him to John Ruskin. There was a chest of books in the corner of my bedroom which contained the class prize and maths prize for every year he was there (I believe he wasn’t allowed to win more than one subject prize). I think it was very boring for him – there were some good stories about making stink bombs and other mischief.

Hence my parents’ plan was to interest us in wider topics, to complement school. One of my few memories of infants ‘school is of learning how to spell diplodocus, so that I could write an account of a holiday trip to the Natural History Museum. The Geological Museum and Science Museum were also favourites (not the V&A, sadly, nor do I remember any art galleries). Horniman’s Museum was also a regular haunt – all those politically incorrect stuffed animals!

My father read the New Scientist – I vividly remember him explaining plate tectonics to us – a fascinating theory which was developing when I was a child. And there were long discussions of the latest theories on why the dinosaurs died out.

We were collectors. Stamps, of course – in those days there was a stamp shop in South Norwood which regularly received our pocket money. I remember Dad spending my pocket money for weeks ahead on some particularly exciting stamps – I didn’t resent this, so I expect he let me off some of the debt he had got me into or treated me to a quarter of sweets to keep me going. I had a small geology collection with one fossilised sea urchin, which was a great treasure and which I still have. We went to Chapman’s Pool in Dorset once with hammer and chisel to find ammonites in the shale.

There was a period when we spotted and identified trees – learning the shapes of the trees and leaves and the bark – I couldn’t do this now. We identified birds, something I have re-learnt to some extent during lockdown.

For a long time, I collected pub names – this was in the days when every name came with a history – before they were renamed the Slug and Lettuce and the heritage was lost. There is, for example, a Jolly Sailor in South Norwood, which derived from a brief period when there was a canal locally – Norwood Lake was built as a reservoir to feed the canal. Norwood Junction station was originally called the Jolly Sailor – you can see why they renamed it!

I have always loved history. We used to visit stone circles and burial mounds on our holidays. The Iron Age village at Chysauster in Cornwall was a particular thrill, imagining how people lived there. There was an excellent archaeology program in those days, called Chronicle, which I think was shown at 10.30pm or something like that. In the days before videos and catch up, my parents used to put me to bed and then wake me up to come down and watch Chronicle – very exciting!

I read a lot throughout my childhood – all the children’s classics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; then some of the easier adult books like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh; then on to Dickens and the Lord of the Rings and so much more.

The time came for me to move on to secondary school. My parents could not afford school fees, but happily I won an assisted place at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich. This was fortunate indeed, since I was undoubtedly a nerd, not good at hiding it, nor talented in repartee or humour to deflect bullying, so things were beginning to get uncomfortable as the class reached the age of 10. I got out just in time – that assisted place changed my life for ever.

From then on, I got the bus to Herne Hill and walked to JAGS every day. I found JAGS enormously exciting when I started. I still remember the ostrich egg displayed in a Biology lab. There was a pond which was set up as an ecosystem for us to study. There were wooden desks with lids (the big question was whether you had Ben Murphy or Pete Duel’s picture inside - anyone remember Alias Smith and Jones?).

So, then my education proceeded more conventionally – I couldn’t get out of bed late at night to watch Chronicle anymore, I needed my sleep. JAGS opened exciting new windows in the ways that a good secondary school should. I think the one formative experience was the sustained effort needed to catch up. Subjects like Maths and English were fine, but it took me the entire 5 years to O level to catch up in French – not aided by my lack of talent for accents. And thus, my education proceeded through O levels and A levels – largely happy and conventional.