Mitcham May Queen

A Memory of Mitcham.

I took part in the Mitcham May Queen Festival for years while I lived in Mitcham, and even after we moved to Streatham, I was still allowed to take part. It was fun, I put on a nice dress and paraded around Mitcham carrying paper flowers, there was even a carnival as well, complete with a fun fair which I always enjoyed. There was even Maypole dancing which I always enjoyed watching. One year we even went to visit a hospital ward and gave out sweets to patients. During another year, I even made it to one of the flower queens, forget me not, I think but I can't be sure, my dress was blue. I even had attendants holding my train. Another year I was one of the May Queen attendants , which meant that not only could I wear a short purple velvet cape, but it also meant that I was also allowed to sit, or rather stand on the May Queen float itself. I enjoyed the May Queen Festival as there was nothing to learn, no lines or movements or dances (which I was never very good at). At the time I was doing quite a lot of activities including Indian dance, music and even ballet. I was never very good at any of them, so I enjoyed the May Queen Festival, as it was simply treated as a nice day out where a lot of little girls seemed to have fun, parading around the streets of Mitcham. They even had horses pulling the May Queen float (of course you know what that meant, and we had to walk behind the float!). I think that very little girls dressed up as fairies, which I started out as well.

In the United States they have girls competing to be Prom Queen or Homecoming Queen in high school contests, but, I think, they're usually for slightly older girls, probably sixteen or seventeen years old. In American books like the Sweet Valley High series (which everyone read when I was at school) or television programmes or films, they're always portrayed as quite competitive, or girls who are always much more academic or intelligent, condemning them as shallow, popularity contests. Of course they turn out to be right.Sometimes they could get carried away in their attempts to do away with their rivals, and be voted as Queen but of course that was just fiction, and it was meant to be entertainment. In fact, I think in the second to last episode of the first series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ( the episode was called 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind) there was actually a May Queen contest, which the most beautiful and popular girl won of course the character was Cordelia Chase; the viewer even learned that Buffy herself was voted a May Queen (or something similar to that) before she became a Slayer. Of course, the contest turned into something much more sinister, when an invisible girl tried to take revenge on Cordelia. Of course I wouldn't wish that on anyone here! Every time I used to read about it or see it on a storyline in an American programme or film I was reminded of the May Queen Festival and was glad that it was never that competitive or that nothing sinister ever happened to me or anyone there. It seemed to me that whoever was picked to be one of these queens was automatically doomed to have something terrible happen to them. Of course the Queen in question was usually a popular, beautiful and unsurprisingly shallow, mean and not very nice person.
Of course, I hope it's not that competitive in real life. I think that even in Britain some schools are starting to introduce things like end of term proms, so hopefully they're much less dramatic in real life.