Read a newspaper article about school. Choose from the list A–H the sentence which best summarizes each part 1–6 of the article. There are two extra sentences you do not need to use.

1. They were more interested in the school’s past than its present.
2. In many ways they behaved just as they had done 20 years earlier.
3. Despite all that had happened, everyone seemed quite happy and satisfied.
4. Many of the women said that they would attend.
5. They were doing jobs that the school had not expected them to do.
6. The head teacher met them to welcome them back to school.
7. Once they had eaten it was as if they were schoolgirls again.
8. Anne’s aim was to let them know about her achievements.

Back to school

Nicolette Jones attends a school reunion and finds that times change, people do not

(1) When Anne Bechar set out to find the 80 or so women – myself included – who were at Leeds Girls’ High School with her until 1979, it was, she admits, because she had lots of good news she wanted to tell them. ‘I wasn’t very academic at school, and I felt I was a nobody,’ she says. “Now I have lived for years in Paris and eight years in the Middle East, I have a family and I run a successful business. I feel that I am somebody.”

(2) Anne’s detective work resulted in the tracking-down of all but a dozen of our ex-classmates. Then we received our invitations and 44 of us, astonished by the realization that we had been old girls for 20 years, agreed to show up for a lunch. Another 20 sent news, good wishes and apologies.

(3) So, once we’d had our hair done – and wondering whether we would recognize each other – we assembled in a dining hall that made us think of cabbage and sponge pudding. By the end of lunch it could have been 20 years ago; it was like a bad episode of soap opera in which everything that had happened since was a dream.

(4) It was not simply that in our own eyes we were unchanged. It was that we had gone back to the roles of two decades ago. Bryony, our head girl, who is now a doctor, asked kind questions with exactly the grace towards younger girls that made her popular then. Anne was told off by her friend Ruth for talking down to her, exactly as she had done at school. I showed off. We had become 14-year-olds in 37-year-old bodies.

(5) The school authorities, who had arranged a tour of new buildings for us, found us uncooperative. We didn’t want to see the new language labs and the new music block. We all wanted to see desks we sat at, we all walked along the corridors we had regularly raced down and talked in, and remembered. We wanted to meet the ghosts of our childhood selves.

(6) We were amazed, though, at the well-stocked careers room. In our day, careers advice was a teacher who mostly suggested nursing and secretarial work. Her limited imagination had not had much effect. Among us were doctors, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists and laboratory technicians. Diane, who was enough of a rebel at school to break the rules about wearing make-up, is now a beautician. Mandy is now a school governor. And I became a journalist.