One of the strangest parts of growing up in a Royal Air Force family was the sheer number of different schools I went to. This was an inevitable consequence of having a father, whose job involved being posted from one end of the country to the other. In addition there were sometimes postings to another country, although ironically these were always the longest duration. Within the UK, he was usually posted at least once a year, sometimes more frequently.
By the time I was due to start the first of my two ‘O’ Level years, my parents had decided that enough was enough, particularly as he was due to be posted to Belgium, and I was sent to a boarding school so as to provide me with some stability for the final four years of my education. This was to be my thirteenth, and final, school.
I started at St. Margaret’s at the beginning of the second term of the Lower Vth Form, which is the equivalent of the current Year 10. The dormitory I was put into, which was also shared with the IVth Form girls from the same school house, was a cavernous, rectangular room with old-fashioned metal framed beds arranged in two rows along either edge of the room, with eight or nine beds to each side. There was an oak-panelled partition running down the length of both sides of the room, behind the beds, though they didn’t extend to the full height of the dormitory. They must have been about six feet high and they were partitioned off at right-angles to the wall creating a small space, or cubicle, behind each bed which was about four feet square and had a curtain on a pole in place of a door for privacy. Each contained two drawers and a small corner cupboard for the storage of your clothes and other personal belongings. On either side of the door into the dormitory were two separate wooden rooms, known as horse-boxes, which were occupied by the Dormitory Prefects, members of the Lower VIth Form, who were there to keep order at night.
There were several large windows along the long walls, one shared between two cubicles, and one enormous window at the far end of the dorm, in front of which stood the only radiator in the room. We always used to sit on that windowsill, huddled together around the radiator, which provided the only source of heat to the dormitory, although it was such a small radiator, in such an enormous room, that its heat didn’t even extend as far as the first two beds at that end of the dorm, which were approximately four feet away. Because it was so cold, each dormitory had a large box at the end near the door, containing several spare blankets which were rough and scratchy and which we therefore eschewed as additional bedcoverings in favour of the long, warm, woollen cloaks which made up the outer layer of the school uniform, rather than the more usual overcoat.
We used to spend all our break times and evenings in the dorm, but it was strictly forbidden to be up there during lesson times, even if you had a free-period. We had a free-period on the day in question so naturally we wandered off to our dormitory rather than to the library where we should have been and which was, unfortunately as it turned out, located immediately underneath our dormitory.
If we had gone to the library as we should have, we would have been gainfully occupied with ‘prep’(or homework), or reading, but because we had nothing to actually do in the dorm, we became bored after about five minutes and so had to find something to entertain ourselves with. I cannot for the life of me remember which bright spark had the initial idea, but it was seized upon by all of us immediately as brilliant. What we decided to do was to remove all of the spare blankets, and then take it in turns to be wrapped up in them all by the other girls. The idea was to time how long it took to free ourselves, and whoever did it in the fastest time would be the winner.
My friend, Fiona, who was quite tall and fair – it wasn’t till we were adults that I noticed that she was a true beauty – very clever, but totally scatty, was the first to volunteer and we proceeded to wind as many blankets as was physically possible around her to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.
Suddenly the most horrendous crash made us all jump, and we turned to look, no doubt with expressions of a mixture of guilt and horror, at the heavy oak door to the dorm. This had been opened so suddenly and with such force that it had slammed against the wooden wall of the horse-box making the loud crashing that had stopped us in our tracks.
Filling the entire doorway was a vision to strike fear into the bravest of school girls: Miss Hassel (yes really). Never had a teacher been so aptly named. Miss Hassel was the school’s Latin teacher and Librarian, and she was extremely strict, she was the most feared teacher in the school, apart from possibly the Headmistress and physically, she put me in mind of the wrestler Giant Haystacks in drag. She was extremely tall and broad and always wore a tweedy skirt-suit, with her grey hair scraped into a bun, and she seemed ancient, so she was probably only around fifty. The scene from the first Harry Potter film where Hagrid bursts into the hut on the rock in the sea always reminds me of the moment when she burst into our dormitory.
She gave us short shrift and sent us packing to the library. We went as fast as we could get ourselves out of the doorway as we had got away with only a telling off, which was better than we could possibly have expected and it definitely wasn’t worth risking more of her anger by dawdling. We scuttled into the library with Miss Hassel right behind us, sat down around the nearest free table much to the obvious interest of the girls already in there, pulled out our books and did our best to look like the studious girls we were expected to be.
After a while I thought it would be safe to raise my head from my books and looked around the table. Then it hit me. I must have gasped or something because my fellow miscreants all immediately looked up at me.
‘Fiona!’ I hissed as quietly as I could. ‘Where is she?’
The others all glanced around the table and looked back at me, eyes wide, and without another word we all jumped up, swept our books willy-nilly into our bags and left the room, breaking into a run as soon as the door had closed behind us and sprinted up the stairs and back into the dormitory. And there we found her.
Apparently, when Miss Hassel had burst into the room, Fiona had managed to jump to the side so that she would have disappeared from view down the side of the horse-box and somehow Miss Hassel had not spotted her as she did so. She had continued to bounce along between the wooden wall of the horse-box and the adjacent bed and then through the curtain into the owner’s cubicle. The drag from the curtain, had unbalanced her as she went through it and she had toppled over and ended up wedged at an angle across the width of the cubicle and that was where she was when we found her.
Being completely wrapped in the blankets with her arms clamped to her sides and unable to bend her body, she was totally powerless and could do nothing to extricate herself from her predicament. When we arrived, she was very hot which had made her scarlet in the face and she was also, understandably, extremely cross. My overriding memory of this is that she looked just like the illustration of Tom Kitten being made into a pudding, in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Needless to say, the rest of us took one look at her and collapsed into fits of laughter which didn’t help either Fiona’s situation or her mood in the slightest and this delayed her escape even further as we were completely helpless for a while until we recovered ourselves. When we did finally managed to drag her out from inside the cubicle, which was no mean feat in itself, and unwrap her, her she flounced off in high dudgeon and didn’t speak to any of us for ages, but despite all this I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my entire life.
Poor Fiona; she did forgive us eventually and we are still friends to this day.
Befuddled and sinking 