Fond Memories
I have so many good memories of Primary School. And then High School came up over the mound and swallowed my childhood whole.
Primary School was this bizarre microcosm of society. As kids we’d only ever observed the adult world. So, in Primary School, we of course reflected everything we thought we knew, from movies and the like, in the most naive way possible. Children playing at adult society. We had gangs of kids who were so bad because they’d go around chewing gum and dacking people. And then when someone truly was bad, well they didn’t know how to deal with it (for instance the reality of one guy smashing another guy’s head into a brick wall one day).
There were also popular cliques. I personally was in the second most popular clique. That’s right, we took the time to rate our cliques, that’s how many we had. It was as though our clique was a slightly sub version of the most popular clique. We even socialised with them, as though the boundaries didn’t matter, but we all knew they did. The popular girls even took it upon themselves to have boyfriends. This meant a kiss on the mouth in public, and that was it. Most would date for two days to a week, and that was considered long term. Just enough for the scandal to form. But some, who filled most of the schools gossip minutes on the grape vine, dated for months, and even ‘pashed’. Everyone, at at least one point said ‘they’re meant for each other!’. When they broke up, the whole school was divided along gender lines about who was wrong and who was right.
And then High School came. And suddenly, such naive ideas of love and relationships were gone. And the high standards were back again. Social hierarchy was king, or in my case queen. All girls schools are a whole new kind of politics.