That 'back to school' feeling

No heels above two inches. No patent leather. No fancy adornments. And definitely no sling backs. This was the Sixties and Seventies after all… Then there was the blazer. You’d thrashed it to death the school year before. Buttons had been torn off, pockets had come unstitched. There were unknown and unmentionable stains from the chemistry lab, and if you were a bit too above yourself, smears of nail polish where you’d been experimenting in the girls’ toilets with the latest shades shown off in Jackie magazine.

Not to mention the beret. That had been slung in the back of a cupboard on the day you broke up and when you eventually turfed it out, there was a hole in it where you’d cut off the little sticky-up thing so you could pull strands of hair through to create a mini ponytail.

There were also little holes on the sides where you’d pierced the fabric with hair grips to keep it set precariously on the back of your head. For the trick was to make sure you couldn’t be seen wearing the beret face on, just in case you happened to bump into some lads from the boys’ grammar across town.

If you were posh your mum would drag you to the school outfitters to get a new blazer and beret, not to mention those god-awful shoes. If you weren’t so posh you’d be marched down to the school gym where the second hand school shop was busier than the local bus station at home time and all its wares were laid out on long wooden benches or hung off the pommel horse.

School uniforms...

Either way it didn’t matter, because squeaky clean new or respectably reconditioned, that blazer would be kicked around the cloakroom from day one, for heaven forbid that you looked anything like a New Girl.

But the one thing that was bearable in the last week of the school holidays was the ritual trip to the high street stationers – WH Smiths if you were posh and Woolies if you weren’t – to get supplies for the coming term.

I don’t know what it is about girls and stationery but it’s always been a bit of a thing. I’ve lost count of how times over the decades where I’ve discovered another self-confessed stationery junkie.

And when we’ve done with the exclaiming at finding another with a penchant for pens and drilled down into our closet obsession, it invariably turns out that we come from a distinguished long line of stationery cupboard monitors in primary school.

Back in the back-to-school visit to the stationery store, the first thing of great import was the pencil case, closely followed by the fountain pen. Osmiroid or Platignum? Dark or light blue cartridges or black? If you were being really daring and had pocket money to burn you might even go for turquoise ink and take private bets with yourself as to how long you could get away with writing English essays in it.

I once bought brown ones for use solely in history essays because I reckoned that gave them well, a sense of scroll style history, but they didn’t last long. For it meant I needed two fountain pens for a start, and the last school year’s model leaked… After that it was the ruler. A six inch one was fine, because you only used it for drawing straight lines under essay headings or shorter straight lines at the end of sums in maths.

A clear plastic Helix job was just about okay, but having a blue or a pink or a purple plastic ruler – now that was really something. Because you could bring it out of your brand new pencil case with a flourish, and it was also very good currency in the ‘will you be my friend’ stakes. As in the classroom whisper of ‘you can borrow my ruler if you want…’ Aah those were the days… They say your school days were best days of your life, and they were, up to a point. It was just those horrible shoes and that ridiculous school uniform that ruined them.