“Well, you’re very brave. I certainly wouldn’t have done that”, a friend and fellow Labour councillor told me. In the end, I escaped relatively unscathed, perhaps even enhanced and enriched by the experience. So what was this momentous decision that I was being congratulated for acting so courageously in taking? It was actually attending my old school reunion as the class of 1990 met up in the building where we spent so much of our formative life last week.
With my school being in Ealing, where I am now deputy mayoress, I was attending in my official capacity. With chain and borough crest round my neck, I was asked to say a few words from the lectern of the same hall I had taken part sometimes grudgingly in school assemblies in the 1980s.
Part of the incentive to attend was a guided tour of the building. I’ve been reading Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory recently for my six-year-old’s bedtime story and at the start the eponymous hero and whole town are constantly wondering what goes on behind the gates at Willy Wonka’s premises. I went away for my degree and lived in Manchester and Strasbourg along the way, but have boomeranged back to my hometown, unlike others who had made the journey from across London or even in one case all the way from Canada. Although the school is no longer on my daily route, as I live on the other side of the borough, I do on occasion pass it and with new bits added to the original facade and old bits having been demolished, like Charlie I have wondered what was going on behind the gates. The closer I get to the building, a weird sensation of being 14 again hits me: a sinking in my stomach mixed with warm feelings for the good old days too.
My oration included one section that was slightly risqué. I quoted Philip Larkin and his well-known observation: “They fuck you up your mum and dad”, and then the well-worn cliché associated with the same period of the lifecycle: “School days are the happiest of your life”. I told the assembled throng: “The truth is probably an amalgamation of both, or at least somewhere equidistant between the two”. I’m not sure how well that went down with the head teacher who introduced me. And at some point in recalling our time at the school, I called us inmates rather than pupils. Oops.
We know that one’s education is a major predictor of life chances and school is an institutional structure that moulds us all. No matter what one says of universities – and I’ve spent all my post-1990 life in places from Cambridge to Kingston via Manchester and Strasbourg – they are not attended by all and the three years of a typical degree are dwarfed by the many years you spend at school. Despite every undergraduate’s quest to reinvent her or himself, it’s school that sets the pattern. I suppose I’m fortunate that the one I went to was more character building than character destroying.
The class of 1990 present were, in terms of current occupational status, a mixed bag. We had two doctors, a personnel officer at the Treasury, someone who runs an eyebrow-shaping business, as well as stay-at-home mums. Among those who addressed us was the careers teacher scoping out anyone who might want to join the roster of alumnae to speak to current pupils.
This type of exposure is all good. I remember going to one on how to be a journalist by John Sergeant, who in those days was just an appendage of Mrs Sergeant, our head of sixth form, as far as we were concerned. I also remember hearing Phil Portwood, the then Labour candidate in the old Ealing Acton seat, considered to be safe Tory in the pre-New Labour era, coming to do a talk, which helped convince me to join the party. The redrawn Ealing Central seat has just gone Tory again, having been Labour since 1997. Like me darkening the doorway of my school again after 20 years, the constituency seems to have gone full circle.
The trip down memory lane was welcome if a bit disorienting at times. The temporary huts we were taught in have gone and some impressive new building has sprung up since I left. My primary school nearby, which I remember as a slightly tatty thing in the late ’70s and early ’80s has also become unrecognisable in recent years and metamorphosed into a quasi-spaceship like construction. Such places were lucky to get in on the action when they did. With Michael Gove’s bungling over school building projects and wider cuts, there are dark days ahead for the educational sector.
All in all, it was a memorable day in what has been to date my most public engagement of most direct personal relevance since taking office. As the head girl of 1990 put it on Facebook alongside the seemingly instantaneously released photos of the event: “Great to see familiar faces and a relief that everyone was still similar (or nicer) than I remember.” As well as being a healer, time also has mellowing properties. Roll on 2030, I guess.
