AOSA CENTENARY HISTORY 1841 - 1941

Appendix
PERSONAL MEMORIES OF THE GIRLS’ SIDE
Collected by M. Sophia Wells

Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Appendix

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Helen Purcell (Mrs. Bell), 1897-1900

The thought of going to Ayton for the first time recalls a picture of a small round-faced girl, who was myself, walking from the station to the school with my mother and sister one sunny afternoon, or was it morning? I don't remember. I do remember that I was wearing a new blue dress and was so excited that I couldn't walk straight but kept making excursions round mother and Mary rather like a young terrier puppy. Poor mother, it must have made her feel a little sad to have me so frankly delighted to be leaving her for the first time. Children are sometimes very brutal.

I had sobered up when we reached the village green there were no houses between the station and the Little Ayton road in those days, so my giddiness was not observed, and rang the bell of Mr. Arundel’s house. We were admitted into a wide hall and then into the drawing room with frilled chintzes on the chairs, and Mr. Arundel came to us there. The rest of the day is a little vague until the awful moment when mother and Mary said ‘good-bye,’ and I was left, feeling a very small minnow in a very large sea.

Louie Trundle and Eleanor Dixon were new girls, too, and as we had known each other for some time we hung together that first evening and watched the others. Such a lot of girls and such a noise!

All of a sudden a girl burst into the schoolroom; she had just arrived and rushed round greeting this group and that group and generally stirring things up. We decided, in our wisdom, that we did not think we should like her, she was quite too noisy.

She turned out to be Mabel Watson of Norton and, as all who were at school in 1897 and 1898 know, quite one of the nicest girls in the school. I often remember this when I judge people hastily and I laugh at myself.

Even the first evening at school comes to an end, and we went to bed. Oh! that night, such a lot of beds with such very red blankets and nowhere to take one’s clothes off except in the middle of a lot of strangers! Just before the lights were turned out Ada Little and Amy Beacham came from the Old Bedroom to say goodnight to the new girls. They didn't know how comforting that kiss and tuck in was to us lonely ones or how much we admired Ada’s long black hair and Amy’s red hair. Amy Beacham always wore a bunch of flowers when she could get them, and somehow they never wilted when she wore them!

Need I mention the fun we had playing hockey and cricket(?) especially when Miss Wells started four hockey teams amongst the girls -The Blues, The Whites, The Reds and The Greens, and we started to play real hockey and matches with other schools. When I see the girls playing over here in California dressed only in short sleeved blouses and exceedingly skimpy shorts, with their long pink legs twinkling all over the field, I think how hot we must have been in our long sleeved serge gym tunics which came down to our knees to meet our long black stockings. Still we had lots of fun and we played a really good game. I liked to play hockey best, I was always a bit scared of cricket-too slow. Probably I did not play well.

This brings me to the Old Bedroom and how dignified we felt ourselves to be when we were promoted to it from the New Bedroom where the little girls slept. We were not very dignified, I fear, and got into many pranks. We did one very naughty thing from a grown-up point of view but it was lots of fun.

We felt we needed exercise after going up to bed and so took it in turns to climb from the end of a bed on to the rafters, crawl along the big middle one and jump down on to Lavinia Hughes’ bed. When the bed began to sag in the middle we decided to stop.

Who remembers the spiritualistic meetings we used to hold? We never raised any ghosts. I so well remember one time when we had pushed three beds together and all sat round on them holding our knees with our arms and gazing at the ray of light which came in at the open door. Presently Ada Pelton-Klondike, the American girl fell over and lay still pretending to be in a trance. I, being responsible for the séance, couldn’t have a girl in a trance on my hands so I smacked her, hard. She came out of it and wept and all the girls called me cruel and unfeeling, which I thought very unjust. I don't know who felt worst, poor Ada or I. We went to bed after that.

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