Saturday 15th June 2024…6.15am and the alarm emits its offering. “What on earth is that?” I wonder. “Ah yes, to school this morning, just like sixty years back.” …except the journey this morning would be significantly longer… as it would be for most of the thirty attendees of this Grand Reunion.
There was a great cohort of OEA members in attendance too…twenty of the thirty and we are all hoping the ten OEs who are not OEA members will redress the situation before too long and join. If not, we tried (three of the committee were in attendance)!
Perhaps The Summer of 24 will be remembered in the same (weather) vein as The Summer of 76… but for opposite reasons. Dodging the downpours became a feature of the afternoon with a trip between The Hampden Hall front doors and The Refectory, previously known as The Gym, leaving us like drowned rats (exaggerated). Never mind, an excellent meal was indeed the reward. The Hampden Hall was set up for Exams…that really did re-kindle the memories. (And… did the fact that I had a recurring dream post the event of not having learnt my lines have something to do with the visit?)
The school looked immaculate with a new coat of arms emblazoned above the front portal. We congregated in the library where Tony Jones had assembled an inordinate amount of memories for us all to view and where we set about reading each other’s name tags in order to share memories, where that was possible. Thence a tour of the school which was great until disorientation took control and we had no idea where we were or what the location we were now in used to be. So much important work has been done to the edifice across the student generations that have followed us fortunate chaps down the drive/across the bridge.
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Along the way we saw superb facilities for music…the Parents’ Choir was rehearsing, …sports, theatre, food appreciation; digital classrooms that are populated by fewer pupils than in our time and without the chalkboard rubbers often used in violence in previous years; the chapel…ah the chapel…unchanged in decades apart from the removal of some pews doubtless so that now it can be used as a classroom too; the art rooms and then even the former prefects’ studies which was a slightly eclectic part of the tour bringing back not so wonderful memories for some and indeed reminding us that we were in a Victorian building. They are used as Head of Year offices now and very cosy they are too.
We then visited the most excellent sixth form block with fantastic facilities for socialising and for private study.
Time for some further weather dampening as we headed outside to the fives courts and a walk around the pitch. But hey, fives courts they are no more. It’s now an extra gym. My afternoon colleagues informed me that a wall had been built at the back of the courts which meant some kind of illegality could happen no more. (I know not what, of course).
The tour finished in the gym, which we of a certain vintage would class as new but it is of a few years now…and that had a number of us wondering how we might start afresh in life… with an instant realisation that those thoughts only belonged in dreams.
We were all exceptionally grateful to the team who produced the event…Anna Cuthbertson, Tony Jones, Shaun Andrews and the prefects who helped show us around. They were all most courteous towards us and the enthusiasm from one of the prefects for the finest team in the land…Fulham FC… shone through. Indeed as she plays for them.
And finally… to Rob Milne who greeted us so warmly with fine words of welcome.
One word to describe the atmosphere at the school? HAPPY is the word that I select. How brilliant that pupils can be happy at school. As in life, and not always possible, happiness should always come first.
I’m minded of the professor of Happiness, Mr Ken Dodd and, as he put it, the title of his favourite song, “There were tears on my pillow when you left me, but the rest of the bed was OK.”
(I don’t know why I added that incongruous paragraph at the end…but hey, I did !!)
Andy Bryce, Marlborough 63-70