The Best of Times

I was the only boy in an all girl class & loved it -

It is the 1970s again & my Catholic school  St Joseph's Convent ( which was also a convent)  again! This isn't reminiscing though but an event that would interest a sociology or child psychology researcher.

In 1979 we were all in the second year of Mrs Lyons ( there are pupils from the Convent who read this site). We were met by our teacher with  her fashion styling that Margaret Thatcher appeared to later have purloined from her & our headmistress the fearsome Sister Theresa.

 There was nothing aggressive about Sister Theresa, but we knew she carried a cane & she was an imposing presence. We didn't know how much the boys in her class & 50 years earlier the girls she taught loved her as she made sure all them received the best education, and that she remembered just about all of them.

The  purpose of our teachers blocking our progress to our classroom, is that we didn't have a classroom.  The water tank had burst overnight & drenched our Victorian wooden desks.

So we were to be assigned to other classes. The problem was the class was to be sent to lower years and the teachers would have to teach two classes in the same period.  The 24 of us were divided off into the lower age group of back to Mrs Lonsdale, the girls class of Mrs Taylor & the kindergarten class presided over by Sister Antionette & someone else.

The least academic & most unruly boys were sent to the 4 year old  class. Their outspokenness was immediately replaced by embarrassment when they were surrounded by kids less than half their age.

So everyone is sorted out
Except me!

For me, Sister Theresa looked through her spectacles  & told me to go to my age group, the all girl class of Mrs Cullen. "You're friends with some of the girls &  you learn" or similar words my old nun said.

She was right I was friends with some of the girls who had come to my birthday parties, often made more sense to me: they weren't obsessed with football, and since the age of 5 I had adored   a girl of the same age named Nina.
Mrs Cullen was a scary figure. Over 60, her hands resting on a walking stick and afflicted with rheumatism, the only contact boys had with her was her booming voice "What are doing?!" and variations thereafter.

"Sister Theresa told me to come here", I said to the aged teacher shrouded in a heavy brown cardigan at her desk in the bottom left of her classroom by the window. My trepidation towards Mrs Cullen, given every strident outburst  I had seen, was replaced by surprise  as it transpired that Cullen was a patient, skilled and calm teacher. She had a similar style to our headmistress Sister Theresa.

For  at least 6 weeks we  remained in our allotted places. None of my classmates in our formerly all boy 9 year old class were pleased sharing a class with pupils aged 4 to 7.

Whereas I was very, very happy.

I had one of the finest teachers I have ever known, classmates who were not obsessed with football, sport, or whatever else. And classmates who for the most part  I was on good terms with.

In fact it was the best time in any of my education.

Finally we all regathered in our classroom on the first floor of the boys block. Back to Mrs Lyons obsession in finding any excuse to slap young boys, What was more offensive was her middle class affectations & trying to brain wash us into the 'respectability' of working in a bank!

This experience would be of interest to social psychologists or sociologists as being the only boy in a class of 24 girls is very rare, or just about unheard of!

Jung- that Synchronicity stuff, you predicted this?

(The main article on the history of St Josephs Convent, Sidcup, is the one article listed under 2015)

Looking to retrieve the census for Hatherley Road and my French nuns convent, St Joseph's Convent, one of the first images that appeared for 1901 was the following. Unexpectedly it is for Devon, not Sidcup. Then it gets stranger. This 1901 page for Devon is for the Soper family, the very family that my father, Edward,  spent part of the Second World War as an evacuee  and had such happy memories that he remained close to the the family decades later.  He showed me around the area in the 1980's and where his school used to stand in Totnes in Devon, long since demolished, as is my convent.

Mystery of the Red House - Sidcup

Sidcup again, a strangely special place in the 70's as it combined parts of rural England with the urban, without the excesses  of the urban world: grime and a hectic atmosphere.

Up to around 1978 a large detached mansion stood proud about 50 yards from St Lawrences church, away from the High Street. An incongruous relic from the Victorian age when Sidcup was a series of detached houses set amoungst the countryside. And, had that vista survived it would now be a tourist attraction protected by National Heritage. But from 1905 onwards the developers hammer & an equally heavy handed vision has decimated the elegance of the earlier era, Good ol' days is usually a myth.

This big red house: standing surrounded by 3 storey flats from the 1950s it glared out until a weekday morning I was on my way to St Josephs Convent and witnessed this gothic edifice biting the dust. It was being torn down by mechanical diggers, it's death rattle made sonic by it's flesh coloured wood breaking through the blood red paint job.  It appeared to be an entirely wooden structure.

That I remember this so vividly from the moment I saw it conveys the powerful presence this house cast over its neighbours.   And I know no further details about it!  I would  love to find as many details as possible or photos of this most iconic building in Sidcup.

This was the location  & what now stands in it's place.  I could be slightly off the location, 120 Main Road Sidcup

I ADORE Glauca Pendula trees, that is the shaggy looking one on the right, a variation on the Alaskan Blue cedar.Should / when I am fortunate enough to have that rose covered cottage in Cornwall or East Sussex it's one of the species which shall be sprouting everywhere, Couple of oaks naturally too. English not American oak!