Countdown is on to 'big' school reunion... and I can't wait / Sue Plunkett column

But it’s not just any old reunion. This one marks a ‘big’ birthday in 2025 for the 100 or so pupils that were in my year group back in the day, St Hilda’s RC High School for Girls.

Thanks to social media the reunion hostess, who is something of an organiser extraordinaire, has managed to get around 70 girls on board so far. We have a venue booked with a DJ, decorations, supper… the lot. It’s going to be a night to remember, we hope. We have been sharing photos and stories of the five years we spent at the school... the happy, the sad, the bittersweet.

Friends, who have not seen each other for decades, have re-connected through the group and it’s wonderful to see the joy this has brought them. We held a ‘mini’ reunion recently, about 15 of us getting together for afternoon drinks and, once we had caught up on the past 40 odd years ‘news’ including kids, jobs, marriages, divorces, births and deaths, it was just like being back at school. We all chatted non stop and memories of our school days came flooding back.

Sharing old school photos brings home to you just how fast life goes. I wasn’t very academic at school. English was my best subject but I struggled with the rest and had to work hard to scrape through. I was particularly poor at Maths and was placed in group studying Arithmetic and Statistics.The teacher was always late and the other students used that to mercilessly pick on me in class.

They called me ‘stuck up,’ not realising my aloofness was actually fear of them as there were some of the toughest girls in the school in that class. The tormenting ramped up after I returned from a trip to America with my mum. It was not common place back in those days so they thought I was some entitled rich kid. That could not have been further from the truth. I stood my ground against the name calling and hair pulling and in the end a couple of those girls became my friends and one even said she was going to vote for me to become head girl!

Those times taught me about resilience, even though I didn’t know it at the time, and I would never let them spoil memories of my schooldays where I made friends with girls I still see today. And while some former students have made it very clear, some in a rather rude way, that they will not be attending the reunion, I will be there with bells on, and perhaps a bit of leopard print too!