Mrs. Brenda Hotard: After WWII- School Life

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

 

AFTER WWII: SCHOOL LIFE

When we recovered, it was slow from the war. The family was still poor. Thank heavens for good schools! My sister and I both excelled at school and loved school. We loved school. I would die rather than be prevented from going to school, so often when I felt like I was maybe sick, I wouldn’t let my mum know because I wouldn’t want to stay home. School was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. My sister was a year ahead of me, of course, and the schooling was excellent in London in those early years. We really were progressed rapidly from the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the early age. That is my impression.

By then, I was definitely always into acting, dancing, and entertaining. I knew that because I was always performing at home. If uncles and aunts would come over, I would perform something—sing a song or do a dance. I found in school—other than the academic part, which was always fun and the fact that I was always, from day one very athletic—that I would be selected to do the narration for any of the major productions that required a narrator. It was always, “Well, Brenda’s going to tell the story.” So I did all the nativity plays—any play or production that needed a principal speaker. And I usually had a speaking role in any play.

We did one about “raggle-taggle” Gypsies, and I remember standing up there. We took that to competition actually, in London. **Announces strongly:**

Away with the raggle-taggle Gypsies, ho!

(We laugh…) That sounds like so much fun! It was fun; it was very fun. It was the tale of a wealthy family’s daughter who was lured away by a gypsy clan passing through.

That was at the elementary school or the grade school. My teachers there were very strongly encouraging my mum to allow me to pursue the arts. Of course, my mum didn’t know what “the arts” really were. My parents had no concept of really “the arts.”

At age eleven, for every child in the English school system no matter where you lived up and down the land (Scotland too, I believe, and Wales), you took a very important set of examinations called the Eleven Plus. Everyone took it on the same day throughout the land. My sister and I had no idea what this was all about really; we were just told it was the Eleven Plus or scholarship exam. We would “sit” and answer all these exam questions and hand this examination in, which was not unusual. We did that all the time, but these were all graded by an essential examining body of the entire land. The standard was uniform and equable wherever you lived.

A small percentage, I guess “the most successful group” if you like to put it that way, were given the opportunity to go to a “Grammar School.” The Grammar School was a school of the highest learning standard and expectation. (We didn’t even really know what the Grammar School was; we didn’t know the meaning of these terms.) Then, you might go instead to a “Secondary Central School,” which would be the next lower category. You might go to a “Secondary Modern School” if you did not do as well on these exams. The Secondary Modern School was something like a trade school. The Secondary Central School was the school in which you could transition up or down if you happened to be a “late bloomer” or become less interested over time. We thought it was a wonderful system!

Well, my sister was offered the chance to go to The Burlington Grammar School for Girls. It had always been a fee-paying school founded in the sixteenth century as a church school. It happened to be a stone-throw away from our house. We were aware of it because we would see these Burlington Grammar School girls. They would have these really spiffy velour hats, and their uniforms were rather nice. We would see them being dropped off by cars. (My parents never owned a car—not from the day they were born until the day they died.)

So my sister got to go to the “Burlington” because that very year, the Burlington was required by the London County Council (the governing authority of all the London schools) to open to eligible grammar school students coming from surrounding areas, no matter what their means. We could ordinarily never have afforded to go to that school. My sister was in the first wave of this new system.

The next year, I got to go to the Burlington as well. So we were both there, and that was when our education foundation really deepened because they offered foreign languages (Latin, some Greek, French, and German) and a curriculum that we could never have imagined. They also offered all manners of sports. There were two specially qualified sports mistresses, and we played every sport in the book (field hockey, gymnastics, tennis, netball, rounders, and all the track and field sports). We had a field day every year in the summer, which was an outdoor event with all the running and track and field events. It opened up a world that we would never have had the opportunity to experience had we not just happened to be arriving at that Eleven Plus when all those changes were happening.

My sister and I have both talked about all this and have said how fortunate we both were to happen to have been brought into this excellent system. It sounds like a college. It sounds amazing! It was just wonderful, and the music… Of course, I was so interested in the music, and the music teacher, whose name was Ms. Godden, and I became very “good friends.” I got to sing a lot of solos, and we did lots of competitive choral work within an intramural network of schools, which were all at one time public schools (the equivalent of US private schools). They were all top-notch schools.

(To be continued in following sections…)