Feb 15

Memory Lane

By AnnK 3 Comments

Last week the London Wool Company (at the time I didn’t know the owner’s name) tweeted me ‘I just had dinner with the Anstocks’. Well, I don’t have any friends in the knitting world called Anstock. Surely this wasn’t a reference to Peter Anstock, the lovely boy who used to sit opposite me in Chemistry classes nearly 30 years ago? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him since!

It was!

‘Wow!!’ I answered. ‘Did he tell you how naughty I was at school?’

Luckily Peter doesn’t remember me being naughty at school*. I found him among my Facebook friends where we chatted about his lunch with Amelia (the London Woool Company owner). She had mentioned Ravelry and he remembered seeing me post about Ravelry. It’s a small world…

I was delighted to discover Peter has uploaded loads of old pictures from our schooldays. Here’s one of me with another classmate — Paul Wignall, who was clearly overjoyed to be next to me! ;o)

And OMG, the hair!!! :-O

Despite various troubles of the kind many children know at school, on the whole my memories of life at Royds Hall are very happy. We were a friendly bunch, and had lots of fun together, including lots of great extra-curricular stuff, and most of our teachers were great, with a few notable exceptions*. We have a year-group reunion approximately every 5 years, and occasionally the school itself invites us back for special occasions.

Thus it was that in September 2011 me, my twin-sister, my brother and his wife all once more walked through the marvellous front doors (the ones only 5th-years could use in our day) to help celebrate Royds Hall’s 90th anniversary of becoming a school (originally it was a Victorian mansion, then an army hospital during the 1st World War).

Here is the magnificent entrance, with it’s blue plaque declaring this was where Harold Wilson spent his grammar school days (it was a measly comprehensive by the time we were pupils there!)

And here are Marie and I in the quadrangle:

It’s a beautiful building huh?

Now I’m driving again (I wasn’t able to from August last year until very recently due to health problems) I hope to get more photos for you of the beautiful stone buildings like this that fill the Yorkshire landscape.

* I once overturned my desk in French and told the teacher (deputy headmistress — think Professor Umbridge) that she could stick my pen up her…

 

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