Back To School
I walked down to the corner shop the other day, past the school near my house that was pretty much deserted during the covid lockdown, but suddenly Boris Johnson has decided that children are perfectly safe from all ailments so now it’s buzzing. I don’t know how it’s even possible to fit hundreds of little humans into that small school building but my only guess is that there must be more rooms underground. Every time I walk past groups of manic children on their way into school holding footballs and wearing clunky shoes, I feel extremely intimidated because it takes me back to when I was an acne-ridden teenager, dragging my bag on the pavement as I walked into school every day for years and years.
I heard a beautiful Marathi poem called “Mala punha ekda tari shalet jaichay” and it made school sound like a really wonderful experience, if you can look back on those days with utter fondness then you are extremely lucky. If you are me however, then like most things you will have a mix of opinions and a mix of emotions. School was pretty epic in the sense that I didn’t have to worry about wasting money on petrol or making sure that I don’t get fired from a job. I had actual summer holidays that lasted weeks as opposed to now where I barely get four weeks of annual leave. But then there’s the other side of school, the bit where I had to wake up early and be in school before 8.30am (even if class registration was at 9am!), or the dreaded swimming lessons followed by a double lesson of history. I feel far surer of myself now than I ever did as an awkward and shy kid, and I am sure there are some of you who will be able to empathise.
School for me started in India where I would go to a little nursery called “BlueBell” in Mumbai in my crisp yellow shirt and blue shorts. Shortly after moving to the UK I went to a similar nursery except this time I had to wear a little white and red dress and start learning the English alphabet. English at this point was totally alien to me so it took me a pretty long time to get past the fact that “ae” is for apple and “eee” is for elephant. It made no sense to me at the time, sometimes it still doesn’t.
Primary School
Year 4 to year 6 were the best years of my school life, there was no exams (no exams that meant anything real at least), there was only playtime and easy peasy schoolwork. History would be learning about the Romans or the Aztecs, Maths would be multiplication squares and mental arithmetic, it was a genuinely fun time to learn things. My school was called “Park School for Girls” and yes you guessed it, it was for girls only. I would look forward to every day at this school because not only were there no smelly little boys to worry about, but I was good at my subjects, and when you are good at them you start to enjoy them.
A typical day at primary school would start with class registration where we had to stand up and say “Good morning ma’am”. When I think about it now, it sounds like a scene out of Matilda. We had these creaky desks that opened where we stored our books, and our toys and of course, our chewing gum (that was strictly forbidden).
I still don’t have a clue why teachers ban chewing gum in school, or why adults scare the crap out of children by saying it will stay in your stomach forever if you swallow it, or it will stop food being absorbed and you “won’t get strong”. Just like the chewing gum rule there was also the rule of “no colourful hairbands allowed and only plain gold studs in the ears for jewellery”. I still remember coming into school wearing my prized butterfly clip and Mrs. Parker yelling “Natasha! Remove that at once! Honestly! You are breaking the rules!” – just to be clear I hadn’t robbed a bank or got caught with cocaine, I had just worn my butterfly clip (that I never got back from her after it was confiscated).
The best thing about primary school was obviously break-time. When that bell rang, I was able to erase everything I learned from that reading lesson, swing open the classroom door, leap out and play some random game with my friends. We threw our school blazers in a heap, tied our hair up with our boring black hairbands, waited for the headmistress to go into her office and then finish off our game of dodgeball or rounders with the tennis ball we had found in the sports locker room. It’s amazing to think how much energy I had, leaping around and doing leap from jumps, I can barely finish off twenty minutes of Zumba without pulling a muscle nowadays.
Some of my fondest memories were of my primary school lunches. You always knew which parent made my lunches for school. If it was made by aai I would normally get a little bowl of pasta or a nice batatyachi bhaaji sandwich, and normally accompanied with some cucumber or an apple (that I would trade with one of my friends for a marshmallow or two cubes of a chocolate bar). If it was made by baba…oh dear…now I truly believe that men have incredible potential when it comes to cooking, but if my baba made my lunches, they would consist of ketchup sandwiches and three fruits. If I was lucky then it would be sugar sandwiches (yes just butter and sugar) but always the extra fruit because “fruit is good for you”. The thing is I didn’t really mind too much about the lunches being good or bad, I had already figured out what was the best time to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night to eat whatever I wanted anyway.
As the years passed on it started to become apparent to me that I would have to start studying “seriously” and that exams were starting to mean something. The dreaded 11+ exam is something that all 11-year-old children in the UK have to suffer through if they want to be accepted into a grammar school or a private school. I studied for this exam from the age of 9. I’m not joking, people always think I exaggerate this but it is true, Indian parents don’t mess about when it comes to exams.
Thankfully I passed the 11+ entrance exams with flying colours and had a choice of going to one of two1 schools, a very well reputed grammar school for girls called “Woodford County High School for Girls” or another well reputed private school called “Bancroft’s School”.
I chose Bancroft’s School.
Why?
The school looked like Hogwarts and I thought the school uniform was really pretty. Bear in mind as an 11-year-old my brain hadn’t fully developed so my decision-making capacity wasn’t exactly strong.
Secondary School – A New Image
I’ll tell you one thing – buying school uniforms is extortion. Regardless of school fees I have always thought that this should INCLUDE school uniform. But no not for Bancroft’s School. I had to buy everything from the burgundy coloured sweater to the socks to a hockey stick for sports lessons. The lady at the uniform tailor shop could have told me it was essential to buy a horse for school lessons and I would have done that too. All I knew was that this was secondary school and I wanted to look like all the other children, I wanted to be the same as everybody else.
I had no idea what to expect at this school but I can say with absolute confidence that I was not prepared for the first day at all. Park School was an all-girls school so there was never really any point where I had to genuinely think about my appearance, as long as I was showered, well slept and presentable I was ready to go to school. Bancroft’s School however was a mixed school and the girls here looked completely different, they actually looked like girls. They were all pretty, they had sleek hair, some of them even wore pink lip gloss (at this point I didn’t even know what lip gloss was), they just looked beautiful.
This was the first time in my life that I felt genuinely ugly. While most of the girls in my class looked like they were future supermodels, I had glasses, side burns, a slight monobrow, I was definitely not slender and the worst part was that I was wearing socks and my hairy legs were showing. I was a yeti in school uniform. A few weeks later the dreaded face acne started which didn’t help. I was now a pizza-faced yeti in school uniform. I wasn’t Natasha top of her class at Park School for Girls anymore, I was ugly new girl at the good school.
Boys
I didn’t even know what boys were until I got to Bancroft’s School. I didn’t hang out with boys; I didn’t have any male cousins living near me so there really wasn’t any opportunity to speak to a boy for whatever reason. I was suddenly thrown into a situation where all my classes would be with girls AND boys and for some reason it made me terribly uncomfortable. What made me more uncomfortable was how everybody else seemed to be fine with it, and totally at ease. They were loud, they would always be running around or playing cricket etc. The thing is, I didn’t really know what to even say to them. I slowly started to feel more and more self-conscious about my appearance being in a new school a nd now having to spend days side by side with the opposite sex. I was scared of them. I had no reason to be, but I suppose we are always scared of things we don’t understand when we are kids. Like Maths.
School Work
The dreaded homework. School was the time where I was the most productive. Why? Because I would get homework from EVERY teacher in every lesson nearly every single day! And I even did it! I don’t know how I would feel if seniors at work would give me homework every day, would I do it? Would I get a gold star? Who knows.
Sometimes it would be finishing off the last four questions from the end of the trigonometry chapter in Maths, or “make notes” on a chapter from Shakespeare’s MacBeth that we were reading during English lessons. The weird thing about homework is that I would understand everything during the lessons at school but the minute I came home I wouldn’t remember a thing I had learnt – at this point I would ask aai and baba for help, and thankfully they always saved me. The work was never a problem at school because I loved being a little nerd but what was worrying was putting my hand up to answer a question from the teacher. My teachers would always say “Natasha is a great student and always well behaved but she is incredibly quiet and shy, she needs to engage more in class.” I never knew what to really do about this feedback, the minute a teacher would try and make eye contact with me in class to ask me a question I would actively avoid it by dropping my pencil on the floor and picking it up or just looking the exact opposite way. It was a reflex. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer to the question but there was that constant fear of “oh no, I have to talk now and not get scared.” A very “deer in the headlights” moment. Even now if my Latin teacher walked into my house and asked me a simple question, I guarantee I will just stare blankly out the window.
The most terrifying yet thrilling aspect of secondary school however was the exams. I can do exams because I know how to study – memorise. If you don’t understand something in school – it doesn’t matter, just memorise it. Don’t know how to solve a maths problem? Just memorise the steps then. All of the memorising combined with solving past papers was a formula for success, if I ever have children this is exactly how I plan to make them spend their evenings. They will thank me I’m sure of it. Eventually. Exam time during school really showed our characters in school, in good ways and bad ways. For example, there were the people who would genuinely prepare for exams, quietly do the exam and then never talk about them again until results day. Then there were the other kind of people who would stand outside the exam hall saying “I haven’t revised a single thing” when they had basically eaten the entire syllabus. They would do the exam in total silence and then come out of the exam hall looking miserable and say “I definitely failed that”, until results day when their score would show 99.999999999%. I am convinced that these devious people have probably grown up to be politicians or serial killers.
Girly Girl
Exams were easy to deal with, so was homework, but I was still unhappy with my appearance. It’s a really tough time being a 12/13-year-old girl, especially when everybody else seems to be doing it really well so I decided it was time I did something about the way I looked. I didn’t want to stay looking like a hairy gremlin with frizzy hair and glasses forever so I tried makeup for the first time. I still have trouble with makeup, there’s foundation, powder, lipstick, eyeshadows it’s pretty overwhelming. The first time I put eyeliner on I looked like one of those Mughal Emperors except they did their makeup a little better than I did. I tried to wash it off only to make it much worse and I ended up looking like I had been punched in the face for the rest of the day.
It was shortly after my eyeliner episode that I discovered hair straighteners. I never understood how my hair looked like a frizzy explosion on my head while so many of my classmates had dead-straight hair until I realised that it was from straightening their hair every single day. I begged aai to buy me some and after an hour of trying to figure out how they worked I straightened my hair into long, luscious, straight strands. The problem however was that I straightened my hair in such a way that it lay flat on my head and made me look like a small Indian mop with eyeliner. My plan really wasn’t working well and I eventually abandoned my effort to look like Kate Moss, I instead resigned to wearing Vaseline for lip gloss and brushing my hair hoping it would stay in place.
Parents’ Evening
This day should be called The End Of The World. For you who never had to experience this – parents’ evening is a day in the year where the parents of each child come to the school to talk to each teacher essentially about how well or how rubbish their chid is. As a determined teenager I would do everything in my power to prevent my parents ever finding out this event but the teachers were smarter and they would email every child’s parents about it “just in case”. Out of all my teachers my Arts teacher was definitely the best, he would always say something like “Natasha has a lot of talent, and she genuinely enjoys the subject” but it’s Art, so it doesn’t matter to any parent. I would try and steer my parents away from talking to my Science or Maths teachers because they would always come out with the familiar “Natasha is a great student but she never puts her hand up or engages in class”. I distinctly remember one Parents’ Evening where I physically pulled my parents away from my Maths teacher but it never worked. I was never as good at hiding things as I thought I was.
Sports
Who else here has absolutely no hand-eye coordination? That was me in school. I could barely catch a ball let alone finish running around the track on the school field without pausing to catch my breath. I think I am just one of those people who was not meant to be sporty, I prefer my feet firmly on the ground where I know I am safe. I have to give credit to my very overweight sports teachers for trying to get everybody motivated to play a game of hockey or tennis, at least they are trying. But just like exam time, sports lessons bring out a different side of children’s’ characters. There were people like me who would try to get through a sports lesson without overexerting themselves or risk breaking their neck but then there were the other kind. The kids who would turn into aggressive adrenaline fuelled monsters particularly during games of hockey, where they had an actual solid wooden stick to smash into a person’s face.
I recall one sports lesson in particular where we were halfway through an intense game of hockey and I was supposed to be blocking one of my classmates from scoring a goal. I am not kidding when I say this but her eyes were bloodshot and she was snarling at me and her fluorescent pink mouth guard made her even more terrifying to look at. She started to charge forward swinging her hockey stick in the air like a Viking warrior ready to trample anything in her path and I just ran for my life away from the goal towards my friend where I knew I would be safe. As I said, I wasn’t exactly sporty and I take pride in the fact that I never used my hockey stick as a gigantic sword on people.
What would I tell my younger self about school?
Stop worrying about what people think of you. That is a really heavy sentence to say to a teenager, I know if I said that to a younger version of myself, the younger Natasha would roll her eyes and not take it seriously at all. It’s true though, I spent far too much of my time at school feeling petrified of everything.
I would say throw away those ridiculous hair straighteners and stop playing about with makeup because years later when you have a job you won’t have figured out how to use them properly anyway so quit now and save yourself hassle.
I would tell her to stop carrying every single subject book in her bag! I used to have a habit of keeping all twenty books in my rucksack and carrying this mountain to every lesson rather than visit my locker during breaktimes. Sometimes I feel like this is probably what has given me lower back problems now.
I would tell her to concentrate more on the subjects she enjoyed rather than the “strong subjects”. I would hold her tight and stop her crying when she felt like she wasn’t as good as her peers. I would tell her that there is so much more than school out there waiting for her. So much more than Parents Evenings and Chemistry exams. I would ask her to be patient with herself rather than worry about why her moustache keeps growing or why she has one massive eyebrow rather than two. I would tell her she is beautiful every single day.
The question remains however – do I like being an adult? I mean, I don’t really have much of a choice now as we haven’t invented a time machine just yet (but I am hopeful). I like who I am I think that’s a fairer statement to make. I genuinely like who I am now, and I like who I have become which didn’t ever seem possible when I held the world record for being the shyest child in the universe. It’s a cliché to say if I had my time over I would do things differently in school because I have no intention of putting myself through spelling tests and ketchup sandwiches again. What I miss however is the simplicity of things from school. The silliness, how everything was new, the chatter and the laughter. I particularly miss sitting at the back of the bus on Wednesday afternoons to get to the chicken shop in time for a “£1 box of chicken and chips”. I still smile when I think about playing tag or stuck in the mud in the playground during twenty minute morning break times. I still feel proud when I got the top marks and a little gold star in my creative writing test – from time to time when I walk past the school down my road, I still tend to quietly think to myself “mala punha ekda tari shalet jaichay”
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