Shirley the Girl Guide

Shirley the Girl Guide

I think I have written before about being a member of the Girl Guides in England when I was growing up.

I started at about age 7 as Brownie ( not the cake variety) and had a nice brown uniform and went by myself to a local hall where I joined with a lot of other little girls and played games, was taught all sorts of stuff and had a great time. I looked forward to going all the week.

The leader was called Brown Owl . I was a member of the Sprites group. Other Groups were the Elves, Fairies and Pixies. You can appreciate how little girls just loved all this. I can even remember the little song the Sprites had to sing every meeting as their opening song.

“ Here we come the sprightly sprites,quick and helpful like a knight”

When we were about 11 years old we flew up to Girl Guides, By then we were used to marching in line ; we had learned all kinds of clever stuff and we had had all kinds of events. We had a “Flying up ceremony” where our big sisters, the closest Girl Guide troop came to our meeting with our families and we were welcomed into the troop. It was a big event.

I loved being a Girl Guide just as much as being a Brownie. The uniform was mostly shades of blue but one of the great things about it was that each guides' uniform looked different. In Guiding a lot of the time was used in learning all kinds of skills that would help you later in life. For each skill you passed you would get a colorful badge which you would sew on your uniform. There was great competition to collect as many badges as you could.

Due to this competition I know how to tie all kinds of knots( well I did at that time), I managed to swim 100yards( I don't think I could swim 10yards now), I was great at starting a camp fire with just two matches and somehow I managed to organize and cook a 3 course dinner for a family of four. It was just amazing with the limited resources that were available just what we did.

There was also lots of fun times. We put on shows and went to camp and marched in parades. We took great pleasure in passing on our skills to the younger girls

I ended up with being a first class Girl Guide and the photo because it looks like a professional photo must have been the photo I had taken when I got my final badge. L was so happy that day that I had finally got the badge.