Jennifer Levitus (CLARKE 1968)

“Not many people get to have a second innings at the school they went to, and many would see it as undesirable but for me I realise it has been a precious gift. I remember vividly, seeing the black stockinged girls in their royal blue box pleats mucking around after school down by the Longueville Baths when I was a youngster in the 1950’s and always fancied the uniform. And I knew that SCEGGS was where mum and her two sisters had gone to school. I used to look at the old photos of them with my grandmother, outside David Jones, wearing their school uniform.

That SCEGGS is in my DNA can perhaps be mathematically verified. If the collective number of years is tallied up it goes like this: My mother Marian Aspinall and her two sisters Neroli and Deirdre attended SCEGGS for seven years each, my father’s two sisters Margaret and Jean Clarke for three years each, my sister Prue for five years, Penny and Libby Gilkes my first cousins, six years each, their aunt Anne Gilkes for six years, then in 1996 in Jenny Allum’s first year as Head, my daughter Laura entered Year 7, for six years. During all this time mum was on the Old Girls Union Committee and according to the records was “one of the longest serving members for over 25 years” Finally, I have clocked up 23 years if you include my time as a student.

That gives a grand total of 104 years for us all! Members of my family knew all the headmistresses of SCEGGS except the first, Miss Badham.

I loved SCEGGS from my first day, despite being threatened with a “card sign” for lateness to class. I felt right at home and spent six years jumping out of bed to get to school early. I loved it all; the lessons, the swimming pool, the netball, the 60’s uniform, especially the soft royal blue felt hat in winter. And above all, it was the friendships made, which endure today, and the camaraderie. We had so much fun! I was taught by a veritable “old guard” of teachers, renowned either for their brilliant eccentricity, for putting the fear of god into you, or for being truly hopeless and letting us run riot, or just for being as old as Methuselah. I still have the photo of Ms Flynn, (Ms Plynn because she had no teeth) one of those old ones, surely in her 80’s dictating notes on a bench at the Zoo on a Biology excursion in Year 12 with us all sitting at her feet laughing, notebooks at the ready. How times have changed! Today’s SCEGGS teacher is a very different breed!”