The days of ‘92

A recent article on the Fairfax webpages profiled a group of school pupils preparing for the annual ball.  Here they are, dressed up and excited, as featured in the main shot of the article.  There is also a series of four- or five-minute videos, which I confess I haven’t viewed. It would be an exercise in nostalgia, which, as you’ll see, doesn’t sit completely easily with me.

To the Ball

My high-school ball, or formal as we called it at the time (“balls” were for the posh schools) was nearly seventeen years ago, a literal half lifetime.  I wore a dress my mother made for me, from a wedding-gown pattern.  I chose the fabrics: crushed velvet for the bodice and sleeves and a black background with red rose-print for the skirt.  I wore my mother’s jewellery, and possibly her shoes too.  Though my skirt was full-length, I wore patterned black stockings which I saved for years, until they no longer fit.

Before the Ball

The word that those who saw this photo typically used to describe me was “innocent”.  By any standard measure, I suppose that was true, but I would add others: tired, drugged (my relative thinness a side effect of this), apprehensive.  It wasn’t the ball that bothered me, but life more generally.  This had been the last day of final-year exams, which I hadn’t sat, and it wasn’t clear whether or not I would be able to go to university.  For that matter, I wasn’t terribly sure what kind of commitment “going to university” would be.

In the weeks after this photo was taken I had the worst summer of my life, and made a fairly good fist of ruining it for those around me too.  At the time of the photo, however, it wasn’t clear where my mood was going to go, and I had hopes that the cessation of all the routines out of which had sprung my troubles might mean some measure of peace.

Despite the conservative cut of my dress I felt on the night the picture of form, favouring prettiness over glamour which I mostly spurned (something that served me well when the following year as a student I adopted the random sartorial layers of light grunge).  I imagine many if not all of my friends felt the same.

The evening itself was a falling off of hopeful scales, however. I can still remember the moment, climbing the stairs to the town hall Limes Room (the previous year’s leavers had allegedly been banned from Noah’s for drunkenness, necessitating a different venue), and hearing my classmates profane bantering (to which surely I must also have contributed?) and being struck that we were not, after all, transported people; sophistication eluded us as fastly as the suburbs held us.  There would be none of the magical otherness for me, at least, that gave Cinderella her window on to a different world, a better life, and even then (on the tipping point of atheism) I reflected how this was because there was no window at all: we were what we were.  Still, look at us there, all young and cautious and gracious and hopeful.  By minor miracles of Facebook connectivity, I am in contact with almost all these people.

Days of '92

All that I wanted by that time in my life would come to me in the next seventeen years, though of course I wanted it not later but then: music and movies and art and drama and travel and lovers and adventure and mental wellness.  Sometimes I thought of what I wanted as a kind of recognition, a validation maybe, but I see it now as something far simpler: learning to live with myself as well as others. I had already all the validation I needed, except that it was inaccessible to me.

I’ve lost, for ordinary purposes, some of the things I had then, among which chiefly I rue some version of how I looked at the time: thick hair and slim profile.  Looks I suppose are the gifts of being seventeen, which none of us cherishes much, except as a function of the mighty narcissism that propels us into the world.  I’ve been thinking on all of this as my friends pictured within add images from our shared past to their Facebook profiles, and as I organise my coming wedding, the older grown-up’s second shot at dressing up.

Tagged as: ball, photos, reflection