It's impossible to equate Dick's High School Days with mine. His would involve a young man in his late teens, whereas my 'higher school' - called the Grammar School to me, began when I was 10 and finished at 16. The school itself covered seven years of schooling. Forms 1 through 5 were the normal school time and you could graduate (or what we called matriculate) at that time, but then you could go on to what was known as the Lower 6th and the Upper 6th.
These would be the equivalent of the first two years of college here. Mine was slightly different in that I actually went there six years, but the last year was forced by the fact that I had reached this at the age of 15 instead of the compulsory 16, so I was not allowed to take the exams that would have allowed me to matriculate. Instead, I had to hang around the school for a full year and take the exams at the end of it. They did play around with my courses though to an extent and I was able to take some of the lower 6th courses.

The above are my two ventures into the dramatics. I would love to tell you how great I was, but unfortunately in the Student Prince, I was supposed to be the lead and I chickened out and ended up in the 'band'. I did slightly better in the Spinsters of Lush, but I was the only one who forgot their lines once in the middle! Obviously a career on the stage was not in my future.

Sylvia was my best friend. She and I were very close and did everything together. Sylvia came from a broken home and liked the solidarity of my family life. She came from a town in England and we didn't meet up until our first year at John Bright Grammar School. The system of the time was to take all the students who had passed the scholarship I talked about in another blog, and they divided those into three groups according to the scores on the test. The top one third were known as the A group, the next as the Alpha group and the next as the Beta group. Each semester (we called them terms) you would be shuffled up and down depending on the grades you maintained, so you were always been taught at the level of your peers . The A's would be given harder classes than the Alphas and they harder than the Betas.

Sylvia and I were both in the A's and stayed there throughout our years in school.

During one of the school holidays in my last year, I went to London on vacation with my parents. We met up with Mair while she was there on a work loan program with her job with the civil service. I fell in love with London and knew one day I would end up there, but didn't know how.

The final exams were rough. No matter how well (or poorly) you had done in the years leading up to them, none of it counted towards the final matriculation. It was three weeks of examinations - covering all the subjects you had taken - History, Geography, whichever science you had pursued (Biology in my case), Art history and appreciation, French, Latin, English, English Literature, Math, Algebra, Geometry and Calculus. History for instance would be tested on the five years of learning - in our case 1066 to the present time - and there was no knowing in advance which period the questions would cover. Each exam was 2 to 3 hours long. I think the American system is much easier to handle where once you pass something, you can move on to the next!! But I made it, and I was a young lady of 16 now looking to what I wanted to do with myself. I would have liked to have gone on to college, and actually had two of the top 'masters' at the school come to my house unexpectedly to try to persuade my father that I should go to college, but my father was adament. Going to college was a 'waste of time for a woman' - she did that and then married, stayed home and raised babies. So I didn't go - instead I tried to get a job locally, and in the mean time took the Civil Service exam. I passed and was placed in the standings to be hired by Her Majesty Inspector of Taxes. I got the news in November, and I was told that I could wait until the following spring when they expected a position to be vacant in Llandudno, or I could go to London and start in the January! Guess what I did...............