Carole Gibson (now Carole Hart)

I was at Trinity from 1959 to 1963.  I never made it to the fifth form and left at the end of the fourth year.  The photos show me trying on my uniform when I started at the school.

I am now living on the Costa del Sol with my husband Bernie, we have been here ten years!  We moved to Cornwall first where we ran a little B & B. We loved it but it wasn't big enough to be profitable and he had always wanted to move to Spain so eventually I relented.  We live East of Malaga between Nerja and Torre del Mar, in an apartment just across the road from the beach.  Lately I have become a bit restless about being here, it is not so much that I want to go back, I would just like to have the option, but property is rock bottom and not selling, so I feel a bit trapped.  The weather is fabulous for much of the year, but terrible in the Summer, which is made worse by the hoardes of noisy Spanish tourists taking over our little town.

I have written three books in the last three years, two of them published.  The first one is called Leaving England and it documents our move from Northampton to Cornwall and all the experiences we had in setting up and running our little B & B.  The second one is a novel set among the ex-pats of the Costa, called Not Joined Up (surviving retirement on the Costa del Sol), which uses observations made during our time living here.  The third is called "A Girl's Best Friend" which is subtitled "A Northampton Childhood".  I have just finished this and I am dithering as to whether to have it published in paperback like the others or go straight to Kindle.  The first two are available from Amazon and Play online.

On reflection I have decided that the only thing I learned at Trin which has been any use at all was Latin.  This may seem surprising, but it is true.  I have used it when I worked amongst the medical profession, when I was a very keen gardener and when I learned Spanish.  Nothing else has been any use to me except in the Pub Quiz department, where I manage to remember odd trivia like Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny, the Capital of Australia and the chemical symbol for Argon.  Come to think of it after the first year I don't think I learned anything at all, and yet I was still considered a possible University candidate.  Most of the time I spent at Trin I was miserable, I don't think I ever connected with the place.  I liked singing in the choir, I really liked Mr Chester (as did all the girls), and I liked dancing, but the majority of the lessons were either boring or incomprehensible.  I absolutely detested hockey and netball.  The only proper teacher we had was the one who taught us history and I don't remember her name.  Lessons with Taffy and Tarquin (Mr Bennett, Latin) were always more concerned with keeping order than imparting knowledge.  In English we never seemed to get past Scene One in Henry V, and were expected to read the most boring books, it put me off reading for years.

For somebody artistic like me it was a nightmare having to choose between Art and Music.  I was in the language stream yet I still had to do Phys and Chem (surely the hardest of the sciences) whilst the Science Mob did Spanish and Human Anatomy.  That didn't make sense to me.  The one thing that really got my goat though was the fact that the fabric of the school and its playing fields was more important than we were.  We could be sent out to play hockey in flimsy aertex shirts and freeze to death but if there was danger of "damaging the pitch" we were kept indoors.  If human blood would have improved the surface of the hall floor, somebody would have been sacrificed so that it could be used as polish.

I also thought that the moth eaten gowns that the teachers wore were pretentious, as was the way that they always seemed to be copying a Public School, with houses that meant nothing to anybody.  Still, that was just me, I suppose.  When I was fifteen I got a job and left.  Gunner interrogated mum and suggested that she was forcing me out to work for my wages.  I only got four quid a week.  I never regretted it for one minute.