The 11-Plus Phrase Manchester High Could Not Stand

Miss Thomas could not stand it. I went straight to the fridge, where our list of WOW WORDS was held up by a magnet from Whitby. “Undulating” was on it, in my handwriting, with a star.

She could not bear fussy writing of any kind, Perry said, and kept telling her classes that punctuation belonged to a sentence and was not something added on afterwards for decoration. Her exam advice, given two lessons before O-levels, was briefer: “Always appear to answer the question,” and failing that, “stick to your own angle.”

Our daughter’s practice composition that week, set by me, was called The Journey. It began on a hilltop. I will not tell you what she saw from it.

Not every Manchester High girl wanted the panorama. In the school’s alumnae magazine in 2023, Lynn Soens wrote about her friend of 74 years, the actor and writer Vanessa Walsh, née Rosenthal, who had died the previous July. On Wednesdays the girls went to the Field to play hockey or cricket, and Vanessa did one thing at school that was “very wicked!”: “Unbeknown to the gym teacher she would just hop on the bus and go to the Central Library! Nobody ever knew but me!”

Vanessa went on to work as an actor for 55 years, acclaimed in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and in The Importance of Being Earnest with the National Theatre, and 28 of her plays were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I would not want to say which Wednesdays did that. But nobody is crediting the hockey.

I have taken “undulating” off the fridge. Our daughter asked why, and I explained that an English teacher at Manchester High could not stand it. She asked when that was. I said before O-levels were abolished, which she took as a technicality, and put it back up with two stars.