MY SCHOOL MEMORIES GDST Life 2022/23
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SCHOOL MEMORIES Dr Sandie Okoro, Senior Vice President and General Group Counsel of the World Bank talks about politics and punk at Putney High School.
“I think the school actively encouraged us to explore this melting pot of movements and emerging cultures.”
I started at Putney High School when I was 12, one term after everyone else in Year 7, so I was the only new girl that day. What I remember, apart from being the only black African girl in the entire school, and having a new rubber with “My Biggest Mistakes” printed on it - which I thought was really cool - was the incredibly warm welcome I got. Sarah, one of my closest friends today, invited me to sit next to her, and by the end of the week, I’d been invited to my first Putney High School class birthday party. It was quite a beginning.
My Putney years, during the late 1970s and early 80s, were an exciting, important time in history when there was a lot happening, from the miners’ strike, to the Falklands war, to Margaret Thatcher’s government and the anti-apartheid movement. And I think the school actively encouraged us to explore this melting pot of movements and emerging cultures. Reflecting a lot of what was happening societally, the 1970/80s was also an exciting time in music. I was into punk rock, and an avid fan of some of the leading punk bands of the time. At school, we pierced each other’s ears, tore holes in our clothes so that we could “fix” them with safety pins, dyed our hair purple and punked up our uniform as best
we could. Other girls were skinheads or into Ska, but the point is, everyone was into something and identified with a movement somewhere. I’d arrived at Putney very politically aware, even at the age of 12, and got involved with the anti-apartheid movement, which is how I met another of my great friends, Fran. Fran and I would go on anti-apartheid marches together and would get into trouble at school because of it. Not that Putney was against us supporting the antiapartheid movement: they just didn’t appreciate us “defacing” school property by sticking our apartheid stickers on all the school lights. Predictably, the stickers melted, we were obviously the culprits, and were duly summoned to Miss Smith, the headmistress. I went into ‘lawyer’ mode, and argued that no-one could prove beyond all doubt that it was us, but Miss Smith was not convinced. Secretly, though, I think she quietly approved. The school had lovely gardens, with lots of benches where we’d get
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