CBA to read? Let me read it for you. Skip introduction 2:30
On my way to Sainsbury’s to stock up on Marmite, I walked past a group of Oxford students dressed up for their ball. It took me back fifteen years to the time I had my school prom….
*Wavy flashback screen*
It was 2010, and the first woman, Kathryn Bigelow, had won Best Director at the Oscars for The Hurt Locker. An ash cloud was covering the sky from a volcano in Iceland, and Bruno Mars released his first single, reassuring us he liked us just the way we are.
Oh, her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look like they’re not shining
Her hair, her hair
Falls perfectly without her trying
Her stretch marks, her stretch marks..
And so on.
Our school was a quiet all-girls Catholic school tucked away in the corner of Oxford. We weren’t sporty, arty, or academic, but we were kind, wholesome, and could recite the Hail Marys off by heart, so that has to count for something.
By sixth form, most of the cool people had left, leaving a tiny year group of around 30 behind.
Over those last two years of school we created a hall of fame of men on the back of the common room door, shared our Twilight books and GHDS.
There weren’t many fallouts, except for the time K* tipped Hermione’s sea monkeys out of the window. She was not happy.
The prom (or as they elegantly called it The May Ball), marked the end of our school days before the exams began. It was the most anticipated event of our school life, and we had big ideas for it.
We had grown up watching American films of what a prom should be: mountains of fairy lights, a DJ, balloons, and boys. There was always that moment when someone entered the prom, and the room took notice because she was in a dress and had curled her hair.
“Oh my God, is that Stephanie? She looks so different with curly hair…“
In A Cinderella Story, Hilary Duff comes down the stairs in an old big white dress. Her presence makes Chad Michael Murray (the jock) go into a trance—forgetting all about his super-hot girlfriend in her thigh-high boots.
It’s exactly this Hilary Duff moment we are all aiming for at prom.
The May Ball committee decided our theme was going to be … magical wild garden. In our heads, we saw hanging ivy, fairy lights, and dry ice to make it feel like we were walking through a fairy tale land. The venue was the school lunch hall, and the plan was a reception on the lawn followed by a three-course school meal, and then the local DJ – DJ Pete – would spin some Black Eyed Peas for us to dance to until midnight…or 11:30.
Prepping ourselves for the ball was the priority. None of us were getting into Oxbridge, so revision was put aside as we planned our outfits. I spent weeks bouncing between ASOS and Topshop and every other shop on the internet, wondering what I could possibly wear to my school canteen. I ended up buying a dress with a sequin top and a white wispy skirt, that I had seen Taylor Swift wear on a chat show. If that wasn’t going to give me my Hilary Duff moment, I don’t know what will.
On the Thursday before the big ball on Saturday, I skipped P.E. to get a spray tan. The next morning in assembly, the P.E. teacher made an announcement asking me to come and see her after the assembly to explain why I wasn’t in her lesson.
After we had sung Ave Maria, I walked over to her—nice and bronzed—and apologised, but said I needed to get a spray tan for the ball, as my dress was very unforgiving.
She opened her mouth to say something and then gave up. We both knew I wasn’t going to be an athlete after all. Besides, the tan was making me look remarkably more toned than any of her badminton classes had.
The big day arrived and so did my hairdresser, who was also, conveniently, my boyfriend. (He had asked me out the summer beforehand when he was cutting my hair. Never did my hair look so good as when I was dating that man.) So he curled it in the kitchen, and then we went to the ball. My great friend Carrot (read about him here) was also with us. I was never not going to have Carrot there.
It was a warm, blue-sky evening, and we all looked stunning. Cabbage had made adjustments to her dress to make it her own, which is fitting considering she is now a fashion designer. Hermione was rocking the haircut that my boyfriend had given her. And Sausage wore a white dress with black roses that made her look like she could be in a Bond film…
It was all lovely… but there was just one thing missing.
Apart from one mixed disco with a Catholic boys’ school, we hadn’t done much socialising with the other sex, so boyfriends came few and far between. The turnout was 50 girls and 10 terrified boys – so it didn’t quite resemble the proms we had seen in the movies.
We took a zillion photos outside (yes, even before Instagram), and then made our way to the lunch hall… it was time to enter the ball. When we stepped inside though, it wasn’t quite the mystical garden we had dreamed of.
Someone on the committee (Sausage) had messed up, and instead of hiring a dry ice machine, they had hired a smoke machine. The hall resembled the set of a vampire movie, but not the vampire movie we wanted.
So we sat in the fog with our ten men, eating chicken off plastic plates.
I don’t remember much from that night as I drank a lot of cheap wine before Mrs. O refused to serve me anymore. I do remember, though, that the sequins on my Taylor Swift dress scratched my arms to death, and I also had a steep learning curve with tit tape.
I sent a video note to Sausage asking if she could fill in the blanks about the ball, but she couldn’t remember anything. It was fifteen years after all. A lot had happened.
An hour later, she sent another video. This time, she was standing in a very familiar dress….
“Guess who still fits into her ball dress?!”
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