The Scene is “The Quad”.
Leafy, quiet, the sound of tennis balls softly hitting the parched earth of the central grass. The trees rustle and the girls chatter. From the distance comes the sound of lunch time choir practice and the muffled yells of the CCF regiment marking down the walks.
And then, shattering the peace…
“PULL YOUR SOCKS UP!!!!!”
Oh how we raged. Those foul teachers and their obsession with our socks. Oh the cruelty of expecting us to wear them pulled up, covering our shapely shins and humiliating us in front of the boys and demanding we wear them spoddily high when fashion and our hearts longed for them to be rumpled around our ankles.
How we gloried in a rumpled ankle.
Perhaps the greatest sense of community engendered in my school was the way we would whisper back over our shoulders as a teacher came towards us, down a corridor, around the corner of a path.
“SOCKS!” they would yell and backwards down the ranks would mutter the repeat.
“Socks, socks, socks, socks…”
Somehow it never seemed to occur to us that they must have laughed constantly at our frantic efforts to pull them up before they reached us and the lines of brazenly hopping girls as they stalked by.
Bless us for trying hard to be different and rebellious – by all doing the EXACT same thing.
****
I’m currently battling the teen mark 3 (she’s not actually even a teenager yet, gods help me) who is engrossed in outwitting me in the ‘shortest tie ever’ competition.
The school rules say there must be 5 stripes visible below the knot. There is a certain amount of debate in how much of the top stripe must actually be showing, according to not-yet-teen-3.
Not with me there isn’t. I’m really not interested in letters home about rebellious daughters and their uniform. It’s bad enough she wears one at all.
Some people wear them with only 3 stripes, apparently.
Tell it to the hand, because the face ain’t listening, I say.
Every day, EVERY SINGLE day, we have a conversation about tie length. EVERY DAY she forgets to make it longer again on the walk home after wearing it shorter after she leaves the house. So EVERY DAY we have a conversation about tie length.
At least we all pulled up our socks before the teacher got to us.
****
I drove past the local academy yesterday; not the one dd3 goes to but another one with a more relaxed uniform policy. Every single girl had their socks pulled up as high as they could go. Presumably they are non-regulation, far too long, far too high up the thigh socks.
Oh, how square we would have thought them.
LOL ~ at our local high schools most of the girls wear trousers, so socks don’t seem to be an issue (as far as I am aware). Ties on the other hand might be! I also know that skirts, when they are worn, have to be a certain length, but almost all the girls give them a turn over at the waist ~ I guess with a quick tug they can be reset to regulation for prying teacher’s eyes!
At my secondary school we had a ‘colour dress-code’ (navy blue, black, grey & white in any combination) and still it was tested by the pupils. “You mean bright, luminescent blue is not acceptable sir? I am sorry!” Even my mum pushed it, much to my humiliation. The year I started there, the dress code said ‘plain shirts’. To my mind this was a perfectly clear instruction and would have been happy in cheap white shirts, but to my Mum a repeated pattern was still ‘plain’ , so she spent a small fortune, that she could barely scrape together, to kit me out in a uniform she liked (pin stripped shirts), but that I was certain I would get into trouble for ~ and I did! She had to go beg the head to let me keep wearing it to the end of the year because she couldn’t afford to buy more. The worst of it was, it was all from Mothercare (I was little) and my peers thought this highly amusing. By the second year she had lost interest, handed me some cash and off I went to buy my own (probably from a Primark equivalent, like everyone else I knew).
The trials of uniform ~ so glad not to have that to deal with 😉
That’s a really weird uniform policy! I’ve never heard it before.
Ha! We did the tie thing – really short and skinny end rather than fat end tied. We also used to have skirt length checks so did the rolling up thing. The year I was 15 I had an ankle length pleated skirt which buttoned up the side though so I was sort of following the rules but would have it unbuttoned to mid thigh so it slashed when I walked.
And socks! Remember slouch socks? With actual bands of elastic sewn in so they properly slouched 🙂
Why am I not surprised?!?!
Clip on ties FTW. OK so DS2 managed to lose his out of the bottom of his school jumper in the car park on the way into school this morning (someone handed it in and thanks to my “embarrassing” obsession with naming everything he got it back) but we don’t have any of that fat/thin/long/short nonsense! Instead I just have… ooo DS2 again… who wears a jumper all year round, even in hot summer, so he doesn’t have to tuck his shirt in.
Oh this did make me laugh! In my day you either wore your tie short and fat or the wrong way round and long and thin. I could never keep up! I did used to roll my skirt up and up and up though and by the end of the day it was practically a belt. Oh dear! Ha!