Instead, I scoured through some old pictures and came across this, which is the class picture from our sixth form ball, in 1996. It wasn't a prom. We didn't use that word. And we didn't even have a Y11 version.
Some notables: on the right end of the front row, Caroline, and standing behind her, Beccy, in a dress her mum made for her (still love it). They were among my besties and we'd gone together. Third from the left in the teacher row, my long-suffering Latin teacher ("sloppy work") and, on her left, my endlessly patient, eternally cheerful and super-supportive form tutor, who Mother Hand still occasionally sees on the choir circuit in Portsmouth. The bearded man with glasses was my politics teacher.
This was a fun night but I was practically delirious. I'd suffered extreme sunburn the day before; flown back from Tenerife on one of those awful middle-of-the-night package holiday flights; got a taxi home from the airport to change and then on to school for the last day (I think my school is the only one that expected its leaver students to go back in for the last day of the school year); handed out yearbooks; been told off by the headteacher for not censoring the yearbooks (no faculty support = no censorship, was my point of view); had a laugh about how pointless the telling off was, coming as it did after I had left the school; got into this outfit and rushed off to the Holiday Inn. I was overtired and emotional and nearly burst into tears when Beccy's boyfriend made a mildly inappropriate comment. Luckily my boyfriend turned up later and we all got drunk and had lots of fun.
I think I might still have that dress somewhere. It was fabulously slinky.
No comments:
Post a Comment