5 Decades of School with M&S
I’m buying school uniform. I’m in Monkhouses, the shop I only visit once a year, to queue, and queue, and queue – or so it feels, to a ten-year-old desperate to cling on to the last days of summer. The shop feels vast, though I know it must be ordinary, in its ordinary precinct location. It smells of newness, and stiff, shiny leather shoes. It fills me with apprehension for next week. When I ‘left’ school in 1983, this was the motley take on our uniform. As long as it was some kind of brown, with some shade of cream, it passed. …