FAMILY MATTERS by Jude Dobson

Recently, I went to a reunion of third formers from 1980. One of the women rightly recognised that it has been 30 years since we had trooped in through the gates of Epsom Girls' Grammar so she thought it was perfect excuse to bring us together again.
She did a magnificent job. What started with an email to half a dozen people she knew snowballed via someone who knew someone else who knew someone else, to become a group of 50 or so.
The last school reunion I went to was for my husband's primary school in Wellington some years back. We used the occasion as an excuse for a family weekend away. The kids loved seeing where their dad had spent his school years; where he parked his bike, what classroom he was in, which tree he sat under for lunch, along with all the stories of who his friends were and what they got up to were lapped up by the next generation.
In hindsight, I should have passed on the Saturday night gathering as, invariably, these parties are where the schoolkids of old all reminisce and, as the partner, you are completely spare to the conversation. I even had a few false starts with people saying they didn't know I'd gone to Plimmerton School, others thinking we must have been in the same class even, only for me to have to inform them, before they got too far into their memories of teacher X or Principal Y, that I spent my childhood in an Auckland playground.
The EGGS get-together was an informal affair at a partitioned-off section of a bar and just for the "third formers", not their other halves. It was a wise move as, that way, conversation could be focused purely on life at EGGS in 1980 with someone of a shared history (if you could hear them over the music).
As I drove there with the old school friend I'd looked up but hadn't seen for years, I said I reckoned I could only recall about four or five names from the 1980 file in my brain.  She, however, managed to rattle off a good few names on the short drive which made me feel completely hopeless.
As it turned out I surprised myself. I managed to recognise half a dozen or so with the help of name badges and a glance at the year-book ever so helpfully brought along by someone who'd kept one. Wish I had now, too.
It is an interesting exercise matching up the 1980 13-year-old with the 2010 43-year-old. The couple of girls I thought might grow up to be doctors actually did. The self-confessed rebel/naughty girl grew up to be a deputy principal. I would not have picked that one. Mind you, she too thought it a hoot as she stood up and bellowed at everyone to be quiet for a speech, saying she now had the authority as a DP.
One woman reminded me I was in her sixth form accounting class. A lot of good it did me. I went nursing the year after. Some light relief from the chemistry and biology might have been my thinking at the time? She said she remembered me playing practical jokes in the classroom. Yes, I must have been truly focused on accounting. She obviously was because she's a practicing accountant.
At the reunion we learned a couple of our former schoolmates had died, which was sobering. Of the rest of us, most now had kids old enough to babysit. Some had none at all. Some had started late and were still in sleepless nights mode. Some had girls at the school the same age we were when we went there, which seemed a little scary to us all.
Time had evaporated on us. The chemistry teacher seemed not to have aged, nor did the  principal. As much as I had loved Latin from her teaching of it, it was still beyond me to remember the school song in Latin which, even after a few wines, or maybe because of them, many of the "old" girls did.
Thirty years goes by quickly. It doesn't seem we are that "old", just "girls" still. Well, in mind anyway.