Little Iota

Here is Iota. This is me, aged 5 or 6. In my blue stripey school uniform summer dress. I remember this photo being taken. I remember squinting into the sun, and I remember not liking that bunch of flowers. Does it show? It must have been in the days before the great industry that is school portrait photography had got started. I remember the teacher Miss Nunnerly taking the photograph, and bringing an envelope to school with money for her for the prints. Enterprising Miss Nunnerly!

We lived about a mile from that school, and in summer we would walk home, taking a short cut across the orchards you can see in the background. Those orchards were all cut down, a few years after this was taken, victims of the ‘Common Market’, and the way it favoured imported French apples over homegrown English ones. That was how I understood it at the time, but my guess is that it was less to do with the market price of the apples, and more to do with the subsidies available to farmers for change of land use. I remember the sound of the chain saws, and how sad we all were. I still miss those orchards, when I’m at my mother’s house, the same house I lived in as the little girl in this photo, and take the dog for a walk over the open fields which replace them.

What else can I tell you about Iota, aged 6? I was good at reading, and I loved spelling tests because I always found them so easy. I was a slow runner, the slowest in the class, and hated any sport or game which showed this up. I was the youngest in the year. My best friends were Catherine and Sophie, and at playtime, we would teach each other ballet and gymnastics from the classes we went to. I always felt my ballet class was rather superior to Sophie’s (Catherine was the gymnast), as we wore BLUE leotards. Sophie’s ballet class wore pink, and even in those days, I rebelled against ubiquitous girly pink. I thought pink leotards were just too insipid and twee for words. What's more, my blue one had a SKIRT. Another point which made it clearly superior.

When I was 8, fate and the school dealt me a cruel blow. They divided the year in half alphabetically, and Catherine and Sophie were in the other class to me. I thought I’d be unhappy for the whole year. I think perhaps I was. I hated my surname with loathing, and then felt guilty for doing so. I missed my friends in class terribly, but I knew it was tactless to berate my parents for the name they had bestowed on me. Loyalty to friends battling it out with family honour. It's the stuff of tragedy.

There was another girl at that school, in Chesham, Bucks. She was two years younger than me, and in all honesty, I can’t remember her at school. I know a lot more about her life now than I did then, though we haven’t met since those early childhood days. I’ll tell you who she is in my next post…

Postscript: 9-yo tells me that this picture looks like 5-yo.

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