It was me. Running for a bus. Why do I do it? It's ungainly, and most often futile. Bus drivers in this area evidently go on a course to teach them to look ahead and ignore the sweaty door-knocking of tardy passengers. Probably something to do with health and safety or just simply sheer bloody-mindedness. They probably take a course in that too.
A far cry from the days when you ran for the open corner at the end of the bus, grabbing the ivory webbed pole, and stretching every sinew, resisted the contraforce of the swinging satchel on your shoulder, while you hauled yourself on to the platform. It really was a triumph over g-force. We were living dangerously and didn't even know it. And that was before we took on a virtually spiral staircase to the upper deck where you would be met by a carpet of cigarette butts and a haze of blue tobacco smoke. Forget passive smoking. A short journey on the top deck, you'd have inhaled five of your five a day, fags not fruit, without so much as striking a match.
We were told by our secondary school Head that we should not wear red knickers because we would be enticing men when we went on to the upper deck of a bus. Well, at least, that was what a girl several years ahead of me told me. But it made sense to me on the basis that going upstairs on a double decker gave anyone and everyone easy visual access to underwear. It was after all, the advent of the Mini skirt and a model called Twiggy.
We rolled over our skirts at the waistband to bring up the length in the cloakroom before leaving for home. We placed our octagonal berets on the back of our heads so that you could just see a few points from the front. We put on white lipstick. Yes, white lipstick, which made me look like Dracula's Bride (According to my mother. I didn't know who Dracula or his bride was, but thought she must have looked fab.).
Did we look great? Probably not. We complied with uniform regulations while we were in school and gently rebelled on the way home.
Yesterday there was a report about a head teacher in Bletchley who said that tight clothing emphasises the "heftiness" of larger pupils. Said that tight trousers or short skirts were unflattering and made them prone to bullying. She's right, they are an unflattering fashion choice. But school uniform is, actually not about choice, it's about uniformity. You either embrace it as a school and maintain smart standards, or you reject it entirely. This Head teacher has, however, fallen into a sizeist trap. Everything you say these days is subject to the scrutiny of whom you stand to offend, whether overlarge or underweight. And the world and his dog is ready to jump up and howl if you tread on fat toes or skinny toes. ( I can currently provide both, by the way.)
Where I beg to differ from Mrs Jones is that she wants girls to look "modest and demure". Now that is something entirely different.
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