Quick questions and (maybe) answers Hertford Memories thread

[MKM]

Written by you, me and Alex in 6's Upper Bathroom, Spring 1971, Mary! For the Sixth Form Entertainment.

I don't remember writing that! Was it the same year as Asbournella? There was a mournful solo by the heroine:

"My sisters bully off so hard it really isn't true,
and when I try to tackle them they always follow through"

Then the chorus, swaying gently in time to the music, sang:

"Don't worry Ashes, we love you just the same.
It doesn't matter winning. Simply play the game".

In due course the Fairy Godmother arrived ("On hire from Graveson's") and sent Ashes off to the ball, in her wincyette nightdress.

[icomefromalanddownunder]

What makes it worse, is that it is almost certainly ARSON !

As one commentator phrased it through tears, 'Mass Murder' !

Hi Everyone

Not all of the fires (there are several) were started by arsonists - some were lightening strikes and others were just part and parcel of life in Oz. Back before white man came and started playing with Gaia, small(ish) wildfires would traverse the landscape on a regular basis (still do in less inhabited parts of the Northern Territory), taking out the undergrowth. Now, when possible, these fires are quickly put out, the undergrowth builds up, so when a fire takes hold, it really takes hold. Then there are the plantings of highly volatile, non-native trees, such as pines.


One survivor talked of houses exploding around her. Why? Because of the large gas tanks that many houses were equipped with for gas cooking in areas where there is no piped supply.

Jess, my daughter, lives on a dead-end dirt road. There are, um, 8, I think, properties on the road, two of which will be entirely indefensible when (and one day one will) a fire comes through there. They are surrounded by huge, aged gum trees - very beautiful, but extremely dangerous. I lived on the property for two years and tried to get everyone together to formulate a survival plan - rendezvous point, which properties we could try to defend and which were beyond our capabilities. The fire service will no longer attend properties on dead end roads, as a crew was lost in the Ash Wednesday fires in the 80s when they were trapped on a dead end road, so we will be on our own apart from the water bombers - assuming that they could find water to load up with. However, no-one really gave a toss 'Ah, she'll be right mate .............'. Last year there were two small fires close by, and a newly moved in couple (lots of money, lots of alcohol consumed, and he tried to shoot Jess' cow, but, fortunately, is a crap shot. OK, she's was munching through his vege garden, but it wouldn't have been so desireable if we hadn't donated trailer loads of horse poo to make the veges grow so well, and all he had to do was yell at her and tell her to go home. Er, where was I? Oh, yes, well they tried to organise everyone again, but egos and testosterone got in the way, so still no concerted plan.

Sorry for the rant - emotions are running really high here at the moment. It's particularly hard because we know that it will happen again, that no lessons will have been learnt (stay and try to defend? go and risk being trapped in the car? when is it too late to go? where to go?).

As for the arsonists - very few are caught. I would like those that are to be made to dig graves for the victims, clean bed pans of the hospitalised survivors, and wash bandages used to treat the injured animals and humans ...........

xxxx

[J.R.]

I heard today a man in his 30's has been arrested and charged with three offences.

[Angela Woodford]

I don't remember writing that! Was it the same year as Asbournella? There was a mournful solo by the heroine:

"My sisters bully off so hard it really isn't true,
and when I try to tackle them they always follow through"

Then the chorus, swaying gently in time to the music, sang:

"Don't worry Ashes, we love you just the same.
It doesn't matter winning. Simply play the game".

In due course the Fairy Godmother arrived ("On hire from Graveson's") and sent Ashes off to the ball, in her wincyette nightdress.

The "Trudge Up to Ashbourne" song was a vigorous chorus effort round about in the middle of Ashbournella. Now I've got it on the brain... There was also a slightly rude School Uniform song.

I know Nellie used to remind us to "Follow Through"after thwacking the hockey ball (probably together with accompanying clump of mud and grass) but was this a movement of the stick? Or a lunge in the direction that one had hit the ball?

I was the Fairy Godmother in a tarted up version of the First Eleven team dress, but with fairy hair whitened with baby powder. It was like a choking snowstorm as I bounded about. Fortunately, the rubbery stud thingies on the soles of the boots added uplift to every leap I performed - far more then when sunk in the cold turf of the dreaded hockey pitch.

I've forgotten who played Ashbournella herself!

[thamesmudandbarges]

Does anyone remember Janet Sussex and Helen Winter from Eights? I have fond memories of being selected by them to help do team teas. Do you remember the privilege of being asked, as a 2nd or third former to accompany a sixth former to make team teas for visiting cricket, or netball etc teams?

[MKM]

I remember that the cakes were much better than the ones we normally had. I never played in a team, but sampled the cakes when preparing tea for others. There were big jugs of orange squash as well as tea to drink.

[kerrensimmonds]

Janet Sussex is now a doctor in Hampshire and I see her from time to time. Helen Winter has had a very interesting career and now lives in Australia.. but she did a tour of Europe in 2008. She and her husband Keith visited me in Chichester in June (it was lovely yet strange to see her again, totally unchanged.....apart from the hair colour) and she was prominent in our joint 60th birthday celebrations in London last July! She did join this Forum but I don't think has contributed very much. Are you watching, Gen?!
How time flies.
My most painful memory of Team Teas (at which I presided over many in my last couple of years) is showing off by throwing a rock cake towards the ceiling of Dining Hall. It came down unscathed.. accompanied by a clump of plaster........
ooh dear

[thamesmudandbarges]

I'd love just to say hello again to Janet Sussex - she was my crack! Somewhere amongst my treasures (probably in the loft) I still have a memento of Janet; she gave me a bright, shiny, new penny a proper old penny, not one of the new, midget variety) as an end of term present, which I immediately transferred to a cotton-wool cushioned empty lozenge tin (or somesuch) and covered with sellotape as though it were a diamond of the rarest quality! Oh, how I loved her! I have kept it for 45 years or thereabouts.

Ah, but that was in the days when loving one's crack of the same sex was seen as natural, and with hindsight can be viewed as a totally innocent introduction to heterosexual love. These days, no doubt, I would be considered a lesbian if I admitted that at the age of 11 or 12 I loved another girl. How very sad!

As the mother of a larger than average brood (just the nine - and all by one husband) I can testify to the totality of my heterosexuality. But I look back with fond memories on the fledgling feelings of love that I felt towards Janet Sussex. They were pure and innocent and very much a stepping stone to the feelings of love/sexuality that one experiences for one's beau/husband.

[J.R.]

That's such a sweet lovely post, thamesmudandbarges

[Ajarn Philip]

That's such a sweet lovely post

The words 'sweet' and 'lovely' in one JR sentence - are my eyes deceiving me? Ease up on the medication, JR!

[englishangel]

I read that too Philip and you have put my thoughts so much better than I could.

[J.R.]

My true persona is NOT as it appears on forums.

Ask anyone who has met me, OR people in the footy world !

You COULD be pleasantly surprised.

[MaryB]

Going back about 2 years on this thread, 3s went to chapel in an order prescribed by the mons at the beginning of each year, designed to ensure that you didn't sit next to anyone you might want to talk to... or anyone who might make you misbehave (it was a difficult design exercise, as I recall from the once i did it....).

But did anyone else have tea lists - at the beginning of each term the whole house produced three table orders (placements I suppose) putting themselves and their friends on the left hand table, away from the 6th form on the top table and the housemistress on the right (Miss LilianThomson, known as Lil), and their enemies (we don't sound a very nice lot) in the least favoured positions. A list was then picked at random each day, and everyone (in theory, but what if you weren't popular or were new?) would get an equal share of good and bad places over the course of the term. My worst memory of this is of a day in the LIVth when someone had put me on the top table, presided over by Christine Barnett, and my newly fitted brace fell out of my mouth and into the baked beans. If I were Munch I would remember what Christine said - but there is only merciful oblivion.

Now I come to think of it, the number and variety of lists at Hertford was the best preparation possible for my current life as an Anglican curate, trying this week to organise 50 disparate people into 5 or 6 Lent study groups with people they do want to talk to, whilst ongoingly sheepdogging the rotas of readers, intercessors, chalice assistants etc.

[Jo]

Going back about 2 years on this thread, 3s went to chapel in an order prescribed by the mons at the beginning of each year, designed to ensure that you didn't sit next to anyone you might want to talk to... or anyone who might make you misbehave (it was a difficult design exercise, as I recall from the once i did it....).

But did anyone else have tea lists - at the beginning of each term the whole house produced three table orders (placements I suppose) putting themselves and their friends on the left hand table, away from the 6th form on the top table and the housemistress on the right (Miss LilianThomson, known as Lil), and their enemies (we don't sound a very nice lot) in the least favoured positions. A list was then picked at random each day, and everyone (in theory, but what if you weren't popular or were new?) would get an equal share of good and bad places over the course of the term. My worst memory of this is of a day in the LIVth when someone had put me on the top table, presided over by Christine Barnett, and my newly fitted brace fell out of my mouth and into the baked beans. If I were Munch I would remember what Christine said - but there is only merciful oblivion.

Now I come to think of it, the number and variety of lists at Hertford was the best preparation possible for my current life as an Anglican curate, trying this week to organise 50 disparate people into 5 or 6 Lent study groups with people they do want to talk to, whilst ongoingly sheepdogging the rotas of readers, intercessors, chalice assistants etc.

Hello Mary, I just about remember you as another Scary Senior From Another House - nothing personal of course, CH was just so hierarchical that I was scared of just about everyone older than me, especially if I didn't really know them.

We had a tea rota in 5s that was done, I suppose, by the VIth form, that mixed everyone up and you moved a place to the left every night. So you were always between the same people, but opposite different people all the time. There was a new rota each term. Wednesdays and Saturdays were a blessed relief, when we were allowed to sit together in forms, and "bag" parts of the table, including the top table if you were a big enough group. Sunday I think was just DIY supper in the kitchen.

[MaryB]

Ah yes, Sunday. I got into serious trouble in my last year when Lil had left and we had no housemistress. Other houses had "running tea" on Sunday which meant you could go and get it from the kitchen and have it where you liked, but 3s had always had proper formal sit down tea. So we decided to takew advantage of the interregnum and introduce the running tea, and DR came and found us having it and said we had No Right and she was Disappointed In Us. I don't think that was one of the occasions when she took off her glasses and chewed one earpiece whilst looking reproachful, but the effect was the same. I wish I'd learnt to question authority earlier - I was far too conformist for far too many years and even as a manager prone to think I'd got it wrong, whatever it was.

Scary senior, Jo - well maybe - but our generation was puny in comparison with the scary seniors of the mid and late 60s. They were giants in those days!