I keep having failed attempts to reboot my blog.  Unfortunately, it may have found new impetus from an entirely unwanted direction.  So just to cheer myself up, I thought I’d dig out something for this week’s Gallery – Vintage.

My father took this photograph of me (I’m the little one at the front) and my older sister and brother, just about to set off for school. It must have been roundabout 1960, when we lived in Kuala Lumpur.  Don’t you just love those school baskets?   We had cute little straw hats for going to church on Sundays.  And the sandals! I think the shoe shop was Batu Shoes.The car – a Zephyr, I think but I might well be wrong – is classic rather than vintage but let’s not quibble.

I’m not sure why I’m looking so cheerful in this picture. My earliest memories of school are of standing at the school door screaming and watching this car disappearing up the drive without a backward glance from my mother. When I first started school, I refused to go into class for several weeks and either played in the sandpit or went into big sister’s class.  There were two adjacent kindergarten classrooms, both with only three walls.  The open side had a sandpit and climbing frame right outside, so I suppose it’s not surprising I chose those over a desk.  Even at that age, we had desks in rows but I do remember that after break we all had to put our heads on our arms for a sleep. Further up in the school, there was no sleeping on the job and we had spelling tests every Monday morning – woe betide you if you got any wrong. We had PE once a week when we had to wear our games kit to school. If you forgot, you didn’t get to do PE. I tried my hardest to forget on a weekly basis but mothers’ memories are made of stronger stuff so I rarely escaped the ritual torture of PE lessons.

Being the slowest runner in the class is really tough; I’m still the slowest runner in the Thursday night running group, but the difference is that now I get great enjoyment from running  and I don’t care that I’m the slowest. Who’d have thought!