School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 1

In order for everyone to benefit from the same anonymity that I enjoy, the names of people and places have been changed. Rather worryingly, the events have not, and happened exactly as described…

It's 9.15 am on an average autumn morning in 1975, and aged 11, I've just started at Hardley Girls School. We're all in the hall for assembly, and have to stand in rows representing our house groups, with the shortest at the front, and the tallest at the back. I'm the shortest in my year, so this puts me right at the front, directly under the gaze of the headmistress, a Mrs. Norma Le Crosse. She makes her appearance up on the stage and it's immediately apparent that she's fallen asleep on a sun-bed over the weekend. The heat emanating from her glowing red face threatens to scorch the wall at the back of the hall. I bite my lip in a desperate attempt not to laugh, and try frantically not to catch her eye. The three years that we have to spend here before we can escape to Hardley Upper School are going to be a long time passing.

The most agonising assemblies were the ones where the names of the girls who'd incurred cookery fines were read out. Each week in cookery class, if a girl didn't have a suitable dish for whatever the concoction of the moment was, she could borrow it from the school. If she didn't bring it back, she'd be fined half a pence a week, and the longer she'd left, it the worse it was for poor easily amused me.

"Sheila Blige" the headmistress would announce sternly. " Half a pence!" As the fines mounted up, the veins would stand proud of her neck, and her eyeballs would bulge from her face, owing to the sheer gravity of the situation. By the time Wilma Titzgro had been fined two pence, I'd have my face covered with a tissue, into which I'd be making strange snuffling noises. I was hauled up a couple of times myself after accumulating fines totalling one whole penny, but no-one ever dared get as far as two and a half pence - given the fuss that the headmistress made of it all, we were left in no doubt that it was probably a hanging offence.

It was hard work being able to see the ridiculous in almost everything, but the teachers were used to me, and some would even sympathise. "Another cold?" they'd enquire teasingly as I shuffled out of the hall, holding my tissue to my streaming eyes. The first month I was there, one of them had cause to tell me off for some misdemeanour that I've long since forgotten. Unfortunately, she'd adopted Mrs Le Crosse's 'This Is Not As Important As I'd Like You To Think It Is' tone, and I began to giggle. This only made her worse, which made me laugh even more. I was practically in hysterics by the time she'd finished. Three years later, as I left the Girls School for good, she told me that she didn't know how she'd managed to keep a straight face that day.

I was never the type to go looking for trouble, but it usually managed to find me, and for better or worse, pride just wouldn't let me walk away. One day, another girl challenged me to a fight. Bluffing like crazy, I took her up on her generous offer, and as I expected, she instantly withdrew it. Unfortunately, this event seemed to open up the floodgates - perhaps it was the lack of testosterone in the place that made some of the girls try to compensate by adding in some masculine-type aggression, perhaps they were just big bullies with all the brains of a garden bean, but hardly a week seemed to go by when I wasn't involved in some kind of punch-up.

Mostly I came out on top, and can only remember ever having to explain away one black eye ("I walked into a window, Mum" - dead original!) To my relief, this phase came to an abrupt end when I tangled with Bess Tavoided. She was enormous, but clumps of her hair lay on the table like trophies by the time the teacher came along to break up the fracas. This incident earned me a reputation as One Not To Be Messed With, but only now, years later, am I prepared to reveal that the tide was about to turn when the teacher intervened - one more minute and this fruitcake would have been crumbs…

Because we went to a girls school we got used to the ignorant comments from those who didn't, which went along the lines of 'You're all going to turn into a bunch of dykes', etc. In the unlikely event that attending a certain school can affect the sexual orientation that you're born with, I'd say that going to Hardley Girls School only made us more desperate to get our hands on the male of the species than ever we would have been otherwise. To compare us to the Belles of St. Trinian's would have been an exaggeration, but everything in trousers was considered fair game - from the sexually harassed window cleaner to the poor visiting French teacher, who ended up climbing out of one of the aforementioned windows in order to escape a mob of hormonal girls in the first flushes of puberty. Needless to say, I was not involved!

Disaster seemed to follow me everywhere I went in that place. Each week I'd break my egg on the way to cookery class, until my mother hit on the bright idea of breaking it first and putting it into a container. This was all very well until I tried to open it and found that she'd almost welded the lid on. Summoning all my strength, I gave it an almighty tug. I was holding a lid-less container sooner than I thought - and egg-less too. It had flown over my shoulder, and straight onto the girl who was standing behind me. Needlework was no better. It took me a year to make an apron, and I was probably the only pupil at the school ever to need unpicking by the teacher, after embroidering a dressing table mat to my skirt. She'd never have believed that I went on to become a dressmaker!

Opening my exercise book one evening to do my French homework, I discovered that the teacher had scrawled an illegible comment in there. My entire family struggled to decipher it, to no avail, and so the following day I asked her what it said. She shot me a venomous look and read 'Your writing is like knitting…' The music teacher was just as strange. One morning she came breezing into the classroom, full of the joys of spring, pointed at the fading posters of worthy looking composers on the wall, and said excitedly 'You know I've been telling you for ages that one of these chaps is still alive? Well. Benjamin Britten's dead!' Erm, whoopee…

All good things must come to an end, as must worse things like a three-year stint at Hardley Girls School, and it was with much anticipation that we let its doors close behind us for the last time. After all, the upper school had boys - it was bound to be better there. Wasn't it..?

School Daze - Girlie Learning

School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 1

School Daze - Hardley Comprehensive, Part 2