School haze

I went to an all girls school from the age of 5 and 3/4 to the age of 16 and 3 months. Then I went co-ed.
People assume a lot of things when you tell them that but unless you've been to an all girls school, there are some things you don't get. Having been to both sorts, I can clarify that they are world's apart.

You don't get 'sisterhood' like you do at a girls school anywhere else. And I dont' mean the stuff of boy's fantasies like pillow fights, pseudo-lesbian kisses in the toilets blah blah blah. I mean this: You could despise a girl at school (and her friends, cliques are huge in all girls schools) - and girls can be the meanest things on the planet. Come Saturday and there's a school disco at a neighbouring school, you see that girl being argued with or picked on by another school, you stick up for her. Because she's one of your own.

And some hundred years that's the same. On the good old facebook today a friend wrote about seeing a girl we went to school with down on her luck. A few hours later and 47 comments later and there's offers left, right and centre on help for this woman and her family. We don't know who she is, just that she's an old girl.

And that's something I'm proud to belong to. Might be a bit sappy to say but it's truth nonetheless.

Amusing antidote of sorts: my schooling was done in South Africa. The girls school I went to is quite well known. I'm in England now. When my mom had her stroke she went to a rehab unit in a neighbouring town. One day, a nurse comes to me and tells me there's an old dear who is from Cape Town, could I go and say hello as she's heard my accent. Off I trot and there she is: this grande dame - all of about 80 years old (So there's several generations between us if not more).
She immediately quizzes me, where did I grow up. I say Kenilworth. She asks what school I went to: I tell her Wynberg Girls. She tosses her white cap of hair and looks down her nose and says 'Young lady, I am a RustyBug'. Holding back a giggle I retort: "Well we all have our cross to bear". RustyBug being the terminology for another girls school in Cape Town of which there was some rivalry. It amuses me, because our paths would never have crossed, her being that much older, we were now in a different country. But still, she wasn't going to give an inch to a rival school.