Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Angela Woodford wrote:The UV room - where we were condemned for "classrooms" - not that you'd remember that, Mary!

True - cleaning the whole house's black shoes was more my kind of punishment.

I don't remember doing Jane Eyre, but I do remember that classroom - we had it in the UIVth too. I remember being taught French there by Miss Mercer - we had failed to learn any before that and she was brought in as a last resort. And I think we had the classroom at the opposite end the following ye...

Yes, Eileen was in 3s. She and Mervion Hunt arrived the year after us, both from South London (Eileen lived very near King's College Hospital and may well have gone to Macaulay Cof E Primary in Clapham - along with Carolyn, or am I dreaming that?). Her father was indeed a linguist and her mother was...

We used to re-enact the battles of the Punic War on the Meads under the direction of Mrs Toplis - the Battle of Cannae occupied a particular meander of the Lea and we did Trasimene too. And we drew them out in our history books with Roman movements in red and Hannibal's in blue.

You had to wear slippers or you got long, vicious splinters. The dorm floors were indeed pale, unsealed boards, probably made more splintery by being scrubbed. Ouch.

Um.... its a future infinitive..... is it futurus esse? Was there a construction that went "I say myself to be about to be"? Odd how these things lodge in the brain.

Once, when turning down a request from my parents for something - possibly a night away for a family event (triumph of hope over experience even to ask),DR removed her glasses, sucked meditatively at one earpiece, and pronounced "the thing is Mary, you're the apple of their eye". I went aw...

I feel a weird longing to forge (geddit?) my way through "Bran the Bronze Smith" again. In my mind, I'm looking at the extra-narrow-fitting navy-and-white court shoes of Miss Champion; feet tapping impatiently below her table as somebody stammers over the word "coracle". Her whi...

Hello Amanda. Kafka....? Really...? I'm sure we didn't have anything like that in 3s, although Eileen Downing was very much into Mervyn Peake Miss R (aka SWSNBN - see separate thread) read The Nonesuch to us too. I'm sorry to say that it left me completely cold - little did I know that it would beco...

Mary - I am not sure whether Carol was your Senior Mon. Hilary Evans, 6s, was a Senior Mon in 5s for the Autumn term of 64 and the Spring term 65, then left to take up a place at Norland College, returning to sit her A levels in the Summer. You're right, Katharine: it was Hilary and Jean. I wonder ...

I'm sorry to hear this sad news. I admit I haven't given her a thought for nearly 50 years, but wasn't Carol a Senior Mon(itress) in 5s for its last two terms as a junior house, coming over from 3s to help manage us? The other one was Jean Sulston, also from 3s I think.

"Own gloves"must have come in right at the end of your time Katharine - in 1964 they were definitely on that pathetically short new girls' list of things to take with us. I co remember the thinness of Sunday gloves at the finger tips - the way I could feel the wool in each stitch - and the...

Katharine wrote:Angela, being in the Flat and also being a Prefect were NOT synonymous when I was at CH.

They definitely were when we were in the UVIth - for that year if no other.

For some strange reason I have also hung onto 'The Nun's Story' Is it a green Pan with Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch looking respectively demure and sultry on the cover? Mine was my mother's and has fallen to pieces somewhere along the line... very sad. That book has a lot to answer for: "Sis...

Yes, it's true that we all had different betes noires (?), though some seem to have been more uniformly noire than others. I suppose the depth of pain and bitterness that many people feel is the result of the cut offness and hothouse intensity of the whole Hertford experience and our consequent vuln...