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Things I wished I hadn’t learned…and things I wish I had.

I don’t know about any of you, but never have I been asked in an interview, ‘Alison, tell me about your rope-climbing skills?’

          At school, climbing ropes was the key issue. You were ‘in’ if you could shin up a rope to the ceiling of the gym and ‘out’ if you couldn’t.  I was ‘doubly out’! Not only could I not achieve this most ridiculous task but I also refused to even try.

          When instructed to climb a rope I remember quite clearly saying, in the tone of voice which only an insolent teenager can manage, ‘Why on earth should I climb a rope? I’ll never have a job where rope-climbing is a must!’

          It will come as a complete surprise to you that in fact I have never ever climbed a rope. Now if ‘she’ had tried to reach me how to climb down a rope, I might have been slightly interested. Who knows? In my teenage fantasy I might have thought that one day I might want to escape from a prince’s clutches.

          That brings me on to sex: quite amazing that a girl of 18 should leave school not knowing about sex or that men had ‘appendages’!  Our sex lesson, so my friend now tells me, was a study of rabbit biology. What?  How? Well, that message certainly passed me by.

          We had a film show twice a term - great excitement although, to be honest, the films did jump around a bit. One film I recall had Dirk Bogarde in the Spanish Gardener. Like most girls I had a signed (!) photo of Dirk in my desk… the film was very dull then we realized that chunks had been edited out. Watching this film on TV many years later I realized that the story wasn’t about a garden at all.

          With hindsight, it is clear that the school was obsessed with sex. If two girls became ‘too’ friendly one would be moved to another house…before you have visions of child-swapping, I should add here that I was at a Boarding School. No one ever told us why it was deemed wrong to have a close friendship with another girl.

          We had to give our own books to the house mistress to be inspected for suitability and I still have books with the initials WW inside the cover. I guess these were all certified sex-free!

          Cookery, hey I can cook fish on a covered plate on top of a pan of boiling water. Yummy (ugh). I learned how to scramble eggs until they passed through the solid stage and became watery again. That takes some learning.

          Learning to dance was bizarre. Being tall, I had to learn to dance as a man. That proved very rewarding in later life, in the sense of watching the look of horror on men’s faces when they realized I was a ‘man’ and they had to dance backwards.

          Of course there were things I learned and have used all my life. Reading music, singing and art. 

          However I wished I had learned about changing light fittings, men, how a car engine works, men, self-defence, men…need I go on?

Alison

  Have another point of view?  Email us with your own story.