And here's the Gym.
It hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can tell. Those of
you who know me may find this surprising, but the Gym has some
very happy memories for me.
When the School
was new and the weather was wet,
(and I bet this doesn't happen any more), the gym was
used by boys and girls together for Ballroom Dancing (and English
Country Dancing too, which wasn't so much fun. A lot of
that turned out to be Scottish, which ain't at all
English, accompanied by Jimmy Shand's Teeth Grinders,
which wasn't exactly music).
Not at all like Joyce Grenfell's stately galleons,
we sailed across the floor, the boys in holey green singlets
and baggy shorts, the girls in similar (see-through) singlets
and green knickers, and in each others' fairly intimate embrace. Not
a bad lesson at all for a wet Wednesday.
Ballroom was never like this. In fact, the whole
idea's now been turned on its head. Ballroom is no longer
a social skill, it's a sport, and therefore well beyond the
pale.
When it wasn't raining,
girls did gym in here while boys did something else (usually
cross-country running in my case, since I was (and am)
the worst and most unwilling sportsman in the whole history of the
School. Now, you see that door at the back? It
leads to a store room, and there's another door from there
onto the playground outside. So if we could cut short our
'run' (modular map-reading helped here) we could sneak into the
store room and peep through a hole in this door to watch the girls,
in their strip as above, doing their graceful athletics.
Lovely. |