TBM Connect

The Cheap Bridal Dresses students in our year. We were, I’d say, as curious as ever about her, but we all sensed that to probe any furtherabout what she did with our work, whether there really was a gallerywould get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet.
The topic of the Gallery, though, still cropped up every once in a while, so that when a few years later Tommy started telling me beside the pond about his Discount Evening Dresses odd talk with Miss Lucy, I found something tugging away at my memory. It was only afterwards, when I’d left him sitting on his rock and was hurrying towards the fields to catch up with my friends, that it came back to me.
It was something Miss Lucy had once said to us during a class. I’d remembered it because it had puzzled me at the time, and also because it was one Discount Wedding Party Dresses of the few occasions when the Gallery had been mentioned so deliberately in front of a guardian.
We’d been in the middle of what we later came to call the “tokens controversy.” Tommy and I discussed the tokens controversy a few years ago, and we couldn’t at first agree when it had happened. I said we’d been ten at the time; he thought it was later, Teenage Party Dresses but in the end came round to agreeing with me. I’m pretty sure I got it right: we were in Junior 4a while after that incident with Madame, but still three years before our talk by the pond.
The tokens controversy was, I suppose, all part of our getting more acquisitive as we grew older. For yearsI think I’ve said alreadywe’d thought that having work chosen for the billiards Long Prom Dresses room, never mind taken away by Madame, was a huge triumph. But by the time we were ten, we’d grown more ambivalent about it. The Exchanges, with their system of tokens as currency, had given us a keen eye for pricing up anything we produced. We’d become preoccupied with T-shirts, with decorating around our beds, with personalising our desks. And of course, we had our “collections” Prom Dress Cocktail to think of.
I don’t know if you had “collections” where you were. When you come across old students from Hailsham, you.