NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Forty years ago this academic year, Sevenoaks welcomed girls into the Lower and Middle School, eight years after the Sixth Form had become co-educational. Julia George remembers being one of those pioneering new girls.
complete a full Sevenoaks education – all the way from Junior School through to the Sixth Form. We were also the inaugural cohort to sit Kenneth Baker’ s new-fangled GCSEs.
But those milestones were still a long way off when I arrived in January 1985. After a miserable half-term at an all-girls school in Brighton, I transferred to Sevenoaks, joining Year 2 a term late. I arrived in a snow-packed Kentish street, dragging a trunk full of Black Watch tartan kilts, bound for my new home: 38 High Street, a temporary boarding house presided over by Mrs Fay from the reprographics unit. Homesickness descended immediately. I lay on my lower bunk that first night, regretting every decision that had led me there, while Alex – my new roommate on the bunk above – ploughed noisily through several bags of Monster Munch after lights out. She casually offered me a pack. I churlishly declined.
Julia and her friend Clare Opposite page:
Top: September 1984, taken by Simon Starling( OS 1986)
Centre: Girls outside the Library, 1984
Bottom: The newly opened Sennocke House, January 1986
Thirty-five years ago, in the summer of 1990, I left Sevenoaks School for the last time. My final act as a student was sitting a History A-level paper. I returned to my little red Peugeot 205 parked in the Duke’ s Meadow car park, where hours earlier I had been frantically tossing handwritten notes on the unification of Italy over my shoulder. It worked. I secured solid grades across my three subjects and became the first in my family to go to university – reading English at Cambridge, taught, among others, by the brilliant and terrifying Dr Germaine Greer.
That summer marked another first. Along with my friend Alex Purves I became one of the first girls to
Alex was cool. Cooler girls would arrive the following September, but for now, Alex dazzled with her tousled blonde crop, her healthy disregard for rules, and her effortless ease with boys. Today, she’ s a Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of Classics in LA. We caught up recently for a drink in Tonbridge and agreed, laughing, that I had been a bit of a square at school.
Once the homesickness faded, life at Sevenoaks opened up. I shared number 38 with four first-year girls: Charlotte, Clare, Senam and Tanja. There were also half a dozen third formers, including Susannah, Alexis and Nicole. Coming from a heavily male-dominated prep school, being one of just five girls among 80 or so boys in the year wasn’ t the shock it might have been.
My strongest memories of that first year at Sevenoaks include‘ laps’ of the lawns and pond behind Manor House, PEB with Nick the Vic, a misguided conviction that all the new girls needed to sew something( aprons, badly), discos, frosted lipstick and a hopeless crush on my dear friend Nic, now Director of Wildlife Health at Toronto Zoo, but at the time more interested in his remote control car than in me.
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