The Teenage Years from the Archives

I was going to post a really interesting blog, with recent photographs, and great prose! However, things have conspired against me, so I have dug in the archives again, and made a collage of what are roughly my later teenage years.

I have to admit I was a rebellious and sulky teenager! My parents, bless them, were of the era before the war, daughters did as they were told, got home at the times they had said and definitely didn't bring home the most unsuitable boy-friends!

But by the late 1950's, us girls tried hard to break out of that mind-set and do things differently. Probably like all teenagers everywhere.

The photo with the bell tents is our Guide Camp in 1947. This was a very hot summer, and also the year of the Polio outbreak, which meant we could not go swimming in a public pool. I have at the back of my mind that public pools were closed. But we did go down to the coast, and paddle, with our Guide uniforms tucked up.

There is also a family group with some friends we met on holiday one year. Every year my parents would go for two weeks to Cromer, in Norfolk, on the east coast of England. There we would hire a beach hut, which sat on the promenade in a row with others. It was quite big, with deck chairs, a table, and big double doors which would open right back. It was handy for changing in and out of bathing costumes, making cups of tea and munching on a bit fruit cake my other always made to bring with us. She and my father could sit in there, out of the wind, which was forever a feature of the East Coast, comfortably reading, dozing or doing the crossword! Every time I smell methylated spirits I am transported to that beach hut and the little methylated spirit stove busily boiling a kettle for tea!


The top right is a photo of me as a 2nd year student at University. In those days we were a far cry from today's students. Jeans hadn't been invented (well, not for females, anyway!) and jumpers and skirts were the norm. (I looked particularly tidy that day as my parents had come to visit!) Numbers at of students were far below today's thousands, and I think my days as a student were probably some of the happiest of my life.

The other photos are various - our school hockey team, my friend and I with her french pen-friend, and a lovely holiday she and I took Youth Hostelling for three weeks across the south of England.


Again, like my earlier photos from the archives, it seems like a distant country, where we once visited and marvelled at the strange customs and dress of the inhabitants.

Wish I was thin like that again, though!