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Penelope Shuttle

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Houses: Nightingale, Fry, Bronte and Curie

I was in Curie,
though I’d have preferred Bronte -
the arts not the sciences my forte,

but I had much fondness for Fry;
as she toured the foul prisons
I felt the romance of it,

her goodness
like a clean starched apron
wrapping her,

I was there with her,
being kind to the degradant
and the savage,

sailing along at her side
down
dank dark corridors,

their stench much improved
by the wafts of dry protestant virtue
we brought ....

I helped her bring her light to the dark...
And although
our netball team

beat hers time and again,
I still liked her the best.
Of all four,

Nightingale I thought least of,
her lovely name sang not to me,
I can’t think why,

unless
it was that I had room in me
for only three heroines, max.

But later,
long after school,

I liked to think of her
shipwrecked on her invalid sofa,
furiously thinking,

but doing nothing, nothing, nothing ... .
It’s on the cards for any of us,
to just come home, like her,

from somewhere
terrible and extraordinary,
and give up -

though hardly an example to the girls.

Page(s) 50-51

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