Welcome everyone, to the#AtoZChallenge Blogging Extravaganza, where hundreds of bloggers publish 26 posts in 30 days, one for each letter of the alphabet, covering a myriad of topics!“Musical Memories” is my theme. Click HERE to see all posts and HERE to view the A to Z Blog. Please support our efforts by visiting, sharing and commenting. We have all worked long and hard on this project. Have fun and thanks for reading! ♥
TOMORROW, TOMORROW | #AtoZChallenge 2017 (T) Day 20 #MusicalMemories #dogladysden Share on X
The time: June 1969
The place: Boarding School, Switzerland
[See ‘A’ post for more details]
Excerpt from the last chapter of “Confessions of a Boarding School Inmate.”
[A memoir stuck in rewrite limbo.]
Time passed quickly and now it was down to the last few days. The girls were all excited and restless, wanting to go home for the summer. I was the only one not returning (we would be moving back to Canada in August) and it made me a little sad.Despite the obvious negatives of curtailed freedom and assorted torments, it had been a memorable, educational and fascinating year.
Mandy was feeling especially restive one night and started a pillow fight with Veronika, who in turn dragged me into it. This spread to the other rooms, then the remaining floors. Full scale “prison riot”!! All in fun, of course.
Or, so I thought!
In barged Penny and Heather (see ‘P’ post), who grabbed the mattress from my bed and threw it out the window! “How do you like that, bitch?”, Heather yelled at me, while Penny stood there and sniggered.
Veronika, Mandy and I were stunned. Are you crazy?”, Vero exclaimed. Whoosh! There went her mattress too, landing on top of mine. Just as Mandy was getting ready to smack Heather with a pop bottle, a harsh command broke through the chaos.
Fraulein Karin came storming into the room. “Who threw those mattresses out the window?” No hesitation this time. We three roommates chirped in unison: “Penny and Heather”. Of course, they said “Debbie and Vero”.I’m not sure why Mandy got spared, (her angelic face?) but she was banished to the ground floor study. This type of behaviour will not be tolerated! You’re all getting expelled”, raged Fraulein Karin.
Vero and I looked at each other in amazement. We hadn’t done anything wrong! Of course, the culprits continued to protest their false innocence. Fraulein Karin ordered them back to their room and left, without another word.
The expulsion meant little to me. I was leaving anyway, so, really, who cares? Ha! I got an earful from my mother on the drive home. She didn’t even consider the idea I might be innocent.
No, no, the entire rant consisted of “what an embarrassment to the family” and “how could I do this to her??!” Fortunately, packing for our move (see the ‘B’ post) soon overshadowed the “scandal”.
Playing on the radio that month was ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow‘ by The Bee Gees. An appropriate song, as tomorrow, would be much different.
More boarding school adventures on April 1st, 3rd, 10th, 19th, and 27th
Click HERE for sequential time line.
Did you ever have conflicts in school?
Looking forward to your comments!
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Dog Mom and (retired) Canine Innkeeper in suburban Toronto, Canada, known as The Doglady. Former corporate workaholic. Writer, photographer, digital creator. Animal lover, music fanatic, inveterate traveller. Eternal hippie/rockchick. History, literature and cinema buff. Hockey and soccer fan. Dedicated night owl. German/Canadian binational, multilingual. Let me entertain you!
34 thoughts on “TOMORROW, TOMORROW | #AtoZCHALLENGE (T) #MusicalMemories”
I was a junior that year and I don’t remember that song at all. Did it not make it to the US? Hmmmm.
Conflicts in school? No, my conflicts were all at home with a step-mother who made Cinderella’s look angelic (maybe like your friend Mandy? Maybe not quite THAT angelic). The only conflicts I had at school were which of the 30 classes I wanted to take were going to be squeezed into my 8 periods (early morning International Relations and after school team athletics, or marching band first semester). I could have graduated after my first semester in my senior year, but there were all those classes… Quite minor compared to yours (scholastically, at least). Have you decided to publish your adventures in Switzerland as an e-book? I’m looking forward to it.
Hi Mary; I don’t think this song was as popular in North America. The Bee Gees were generally much bigger in Europe back then….Actually, it made it all the way to #54 on the Billboard 100: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Tomorrow_(Bee_Gees_song)
So sorry you had the evil step-mother to contend with. 🙁 I do plan on publishing the stories, eventually. Trouble is, they only amount to ~4600 words altogether. I’m trying to figure out how to give them more substance without resorting to adding fictional events.
Boarding school ! Oh boy, I had the best time in there 😀 Thank you for taking me back to the old days xD
Little Heart Speaks
Boarding schools are interesting. Bet yours didn’t have bars on the windows, though. 🙂 Thanks for dropping in.
And I thought this was from ANNIE!!! LOL!!! You got me there…Wow, I restarted reading your A to Z backwards (did skip the U for now), so now, I don’t know the deal with the mean girls. Oh well, apparently, you didn’t know the specific deal either on that specific day. I can’t believe the teacher and the school didn’t even hear you and Vero out! Was it due to discrimination of a sort or were they just st*p*d?
“Treachery”
Oh no! Not that “Annie” song again! I just got it OUT of head after someone else mentioned it. LOL Here’s the back story about Penny & Heather:
I was Penny’s friend and involved with her brother, Nigel (see the “A” post) in the first semester. Heather arrived for the second semester (see the “W” post coming up). She became Penny’s roommate and Nigel, her object of desire. She hated me for being in the way. Stupid, because after she and Penny became friends, Nigel’s attentions slowly turned to Heather anyway and I was forgotten. ? She continued to harass me and likely poisoned Penny’s mind against me as well.
I couldn’t believe the school not listening to our side either, but in the end, I wasn’t coming back anyway, so it didn’t matter. Vero was scared about her mother’s reaction, having been kicked out of two other schools previously.
“The sun will come out tomorrow…” He he!!!
I read about Penny and Nigel and Heather. It was just not clear to me if Heather was into Nigel. The thing is, she had him already, so what was her deal? And Penny was such a pushover. Good riddance to Penny and Nigel!
Wow! What a story of the tossed mattresses. Quite the adventures you had at that boarding school. Have you ever seen the sixties movie “Trouble with Angels?” Your story reminds me of it. I saw it when I was a kid at a drive in theatre as my parents would take my brother and I with them for a cheap date and we would sleep in the back in sleeping bags. I remember being scared of one scene in it. When I saw it again when I was older it was no big deal.
I didn’t have any boarding school time but I was in the reserve and we were in barracks. I remember how we would bond with each other like family. Glad I didn’t have anyone hating me as much as those bitches Heather and Penny. Sounds like they were sure out to get you.
Gee, the Bee Gees sure are different singing this before they got into the disco craze and sang in their falsetto voices, eh? I must admit to liking their music and it did define my teen years in some ways. I only have to hear Nights on Broadway and I’m that lonely misfit kid in the cafetorium (auditorium and cafeteria) again sitting by myself while someone played that song on the juke box.
Thanks for the fun memories and music, Debbie. They sure get my memories going.
I remember “The Trouble with Angels” and you’re right about the resemblance. 🙂 Barrack life would likely have been somewhat similar to the boarding school experience. The back story about Penny and Heather is that I was Penny’s friend and involved with her brother, Nigel (see the “A” post) in the first semester. Heather arrived for the second semester (see the “W” post coming up). She became Penny’s roommate and Nigel, her object of desire. She hated me for being in the way. Stupid, because after she and Penny became friends, Nigel’s attentions slowly turned to Heather anyway and I was forgotten. 😛 She continued to harass me and likely poisoned Penny’s mind against me as well. Teenagers! LOL
The Bee Gees were huge in Europe from 1966 onwards. I much preferred their earlier music to the later stuff (falsetto voices make me grimace), with a couple of exceptions. “Nights on Broadway” and “Tragedy” were good. I was a loner “outcast” in high school as well but didn’t care. Most of my friends were older.
Hi Cathy–I remember “Trouble With Angels” (with Haley Mills, right?) “They” were terrible. I’m kind of very glad I never had such experiences.
Well, you finally hit a song that I don’t know real well. I still think, though, you should have pitched those two girls out the window. The fresh air might have done them good… that or the fall…
I don’t think this song got much airplay in North America. It was big in Europe, though. Yeah; it would have been fun to pitch the ‘mean girls’ out the window. At least they would have had a mattress to break their fall. 🙂
Was that your school pic? If it was, then you looked very different back then! :O
I’ve had minor conflicts at school. None like this though. But I went to a day school. And there are no mattresses to throw out of the window there, right? 😛
Yes, that’s a picture of me in my room at school. It was almost 50 years ago, so there are bound to be some changes. 🙂 The mattress issue wouldn’t have likely come up for most people. LOL
Debbie,
I don’t recall much in the way of conflicts at school but I do remember a girl everyone tried avoiding. Luckily for us, she attended a different school but she lived in my small town and on occasion would see her. Her whole family had a bad reputation for being trouble-makers or at least the kind of people on the wrong side of the track. In hindsight, I guess she had a huge strike against her and just didn’t know any better. I wonder what ever became of her and how her life turned out. Do you ever think about these girls from your boarding school days? Did you ever reconnect with them along the way? It would be interesting to know if they turned out to be better adults than they were teens. Thanks for sharing your memories and for your visit!
Some people are victims of circumstance, but if they have the inner strength, many do overcome their upbringings. I kept in contact with Veronika until we moved back to Canada, but that was about it. Writing these chapters did make me wonder how their lives turned out. I can only hope that Heather became a better person. Thanks for reading my story. Have a good last week of the A to Z!
I can’t believe I’ve never heard this one before. Thanks for introducing me to it. I’m really glad my parents couldn’t afford to send me to boarding school.
I have mixed emotions about the experience, Susanne. At the very least I can say it was unique and educational. 🙂
P.S. My parents couldn’t afford it either. I was there thanks to the largesse of my German grandparents.
You has such an eventful year – I’m not sure boarding school would be my kind of a fun way to spend a year of the tumultuous teens but it certainly turned out to be a great time for you!
If nothing else, it was a unique and educational experience. Great to meet students from all over the world!
Conflicts? HAH! Today it would be called bullying, the teacher would be sued for discrimination, and the girls (it was always girls!) would probably sent to a counselor!
The years I remember as being the worst were 1963-64 and 1966-67.
The 1963 year was terrible. When the school year started, I was really excited about moving “upstairs” to grade 5 with a certain Miss Carley. (how I grew to hate her during that year) Moving up to the second floor of St. Mary’s Catholic School was a step in “growing up”. The students on the second floor were considered “adults” compared to those from grades 1 to 4 on the first floor– grades 5, 6, 7 and 8. But I had the misfortune to end up in class with a highly discriminating teacher. There were perhaps not more than 10 Italian students in the whole school, two were in my class…a certain Enzy Boncore (beautiful Sicilian girl) and myself.
Well, we were the recipients of all the malice that Miss Carley could muster up…there was never anything that we could possibly do right. Think that I was continuously being “punished” because I never finished copying what was on the board on time…and I was NOT allowed to ask anyone to lend me their notebooks to make up for what I had missed. Between Enzy, my cousin downstairs, Johnny Esposito and myself, we spent more time keeping St. Anthony and St. Francis company in the hall, then we did in the classrooms! I remember once she “punished” me for not having the proper kind of school bag! Of course, my parents were not aware of any of this…and I did not complain at home—it just wasn’t done. The fiend didn’t even tell me I had some of the highest marks in the class! I found that out when we moved and I went to St. James!
The other year I had a hard time was when I came back from Italy, went into grade 8. Of course, having been away for a year, the people with whom I had sort of made friends two years earlier were either gone (people seemed to move with great ease those days!), or had shifted into different groups. So, I was left to fend for myself. And much as I was outgoing, there must have been something that kept me from having “real” friends. Anyways, again I was “different”. And this was enough cause to be the cause of jokes and snide remarks….I remember there was a group of three girls, among which there was an Italian girl, who never lost a chance to make fun of me… my hair, my “dark” complexion, my weight ( I was definitely not overweight), the way I spoke (bookish–I had been away from English for a year, after all!), the way I dressed, even the way I answered questions in class. These three were always ready to pick on me. And God forbid some boy ever spoke to me…that would make my day simply hell. I remember one day I was walking home…must have been February, there was snow on the ground, but the sun was shining. I was walking home along Wildwood, and the trio was behind me, chanting awful things, making fun of anything under the sun that had to do with me. I remember just not being able to put up with it any longer, so I threww my school bag down and just lashed out at them…I think it was the only time I was physically violent. It would be nice to say I beat the shit out of them…but I didn’t. They were three, I was single-handed, but I did do some hearty hairpulling, biting, scratching and kicking. How I hated them..and to this day, I can’t hear their names mentioned without a twitch of something snagging in my memory…
So, conflicts? I would say so…..sublte, needling discrimination—the worst kind.
By the way…I have to thank you for introducing me to most of the BeeGees’ songs! I liked them a lot, already, but thanks to you I really got to know many of the songs that weren’t played as much on radio.
Also please excuse omittences and typos, my computer is acting up today…I type and the whole sentence appears a few seconds later when it’s too late to correct LOL:
My pleasure, Bianca. 🙂 In the 1960s, The Bee Gees were much bigger in Europe than North America, so I was privy to more of their music while living overseas. I didn’t notice any typos.
It sounds like you were subjected to the same horrible xenophobia that plagued me in elementary school (in London, Ontario), Bianca. I sympathize! So much worse when the teacher does it, as well 😮 Good for you, for fighting back! I just withdrew into myself. It’s incidents like these that turned us into the strong women we are now, don’t you think? 🙂
Hi Debbie – it never happened to me … but I can believe it easily enough: it’s near enough to remember difficult times. Yes at least you were going to Canada – one wonders whether Penny and Heather ever felt guilty – but they’re probably not worth thinking about … Tomorrow, Tomorrow – sounds just right … cheers Hilary
http://positiveletters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/t-is-for-turkey.html
Penny probably did feel a little guilty, given our previous close relationship, but Heather was a total bitch. Not likely, in her case. Definitely not worth dwelling on…♫ The sun will come out tomorrow…♫ Still have that song stuck in my head, thanks to Arlee. LOL
Who me? I’m innocent, don’t you know? I was a good student with good grades and avoided trouble at all costs. Graduated #24 in my class of 200+ students. It was in college and the following years after that I started to sow my wild oats.
I was innocent too, Mary, but got the boot anyway! 😮 🙂 Sounds like you were a model high school student. The college years were wild for many people. I missed out on that whole experience but had other adventures.
When I started into this post all I could hear in my mind was Annie singing “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I love you tomorrow. It’s only a day away.” I barely remember that BeeGees song–haven’t heard that in nearly 50 years. And I’m still hearing Annie singing in my head.
Arlee Bird
Tossing It Out
Gee, thanks! 😛 Now that ‘Annie’ song is stuck in my head and I never liked it much. LOL
I think the Bee Gees song was a bigger hit in Europe than in North America.