Happy Days At Denford Park

A Memory of Denford Park (Training Coll).

I spent three happy years at Denford - the nuns loved us to pieces, and I felt that they always acted in our best interests (though maybe nowadays one might frown at some of the 'best practices' of those days ... but fashions change ....).
Sister Mary Ben driving a tractor as we picked potatoes in the autumn, picking snowdrops for Covent Garden Markets in February, roller skating, playing in overgrown bomb craters (magical - really!). Sister Mary Peter's library, our gardens with Sister Mary Anrew, roast potatoes, bread and cheese, but junket - juck. More privileged pupils had riding, dancing and tennis lessons, but I never felt disadvantaged by not having any of these 'extras.' The nuns inadvertently instilled us with the basic principles of feminism long before it became trendy. It was an all female world (except for ancient Father Darcy and Othello the handyman) and we absorbed the feeling that we (future women) were capable of doing whatever we aspired to: and all this in the 1950s!
Those three years changed me from being an insecure, academically awful child into a confident teenager, who went on to university and do OK in the world.

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