After a year of purely academic curriculum, we had to get down to the serious matter of how to become a woman or a man. There was some cursory sex education – a film ‘A sister for Susan’ – which seemed to miss out many of the salient points. We were never allowed to see ‘Growing Up’, even though it was made in Birmingham. The film included masturbation scenes and became a cause célèbre. Fully cognisant of the dangers of idle hands, our school distracted us with manual labour: woodwork and metalwork for the boys, and needlework and Home Economics for us girls. These practical subjects were the real key to our development into correctly gendered adults.

So we started with needlework and were introduced to the instruments of torture: Simplicity patterns that were never simple, sewing machines that were strangely recalcitrant one minute and zooming out of control the next, rulers, tracing paper, pins, needles. Our first task was to make an apron out of cotton gingham in the colour of the House we belonged to. Despite its socialist aspirations our Comprehensive could not resist the model of the Grammar or even Public School, and so every pupil belonged to one of four Houses: Severn whose colour was cheerful red and whose members excelled on the stage and sports field; Mersey, cool blue and basking in the glory of association with The Beatles and Cilla Black; Thames, sunny yellow, with all the splendours of Oxford and London beckoning; and last, in everything, my House, sad green Trent. While the other Houses held assemblies in the main building, where civilised Humanities subjects were taught, Trent’s base was the science block, also the location of the main school toilets. The Housemaster’s rallying cries, the quotations from Kipling, all fell on deaf ears, since our noses were assailed by the evil combination of rotten egg fumes from the Chemistry labs, the odours of the boys’ urinals, and the lingering stench of burning from the sanitary towel incinerators. I so fervently longed to be in Severn with my best friend Janet that sometimes I broke the rules and fled to the pure air and uplifting ambiance of the Severn assembly. But in needlework there was no escape, our teacher Mrs Wallimara had a list, so green gingham was my lot, and my badge of shame. The aprons were mostly machine stitched, with embroidered decoration on the pocket and bib. After several weeks of laborious hemming and decorative cross stitch, we emerged like checked butterflies, ready to be released into the kitchen.

The first few Home Economics classes were a lot less taxing than needlework. First of all there was quite a lot of drawing and copying – the diagram of the perfectly balanced meal, collages of fish and eggs and meat cut out of magazines, to illustrate protein. When finally we started cooking Mrs Wallimara seemed to have the measure of our capabilities: week 1 – tea and toast, week 2 – scrambled eggs on toast, week 3 – poached eggs. So far, so good, especially as we were allowed to eat the results. Then Mrs Wallimara tired of toast and leapt forward in the syllabus to the complexities of shortbread, fruit cobbler and Victoria sponge. We had to lug baskets of ingredients into school, along with our satchels and P.E. kit, and then lug the baked goods home again to our admiring or long-suffering families. Getting a basket full of fruit cobbler and your satchel upstairs on the school bus with the boys down below leering and jeering and trying to catch a glimpse of your knickers was no mean feat. Despite this, cookery had its – mostly sugary – satisfactions. Just as we were getting the hang of it, Mrs W. switched us back on to sewing. We were to make a simple, sleeveless summer blouse, and to this end Mrs W. took our measurements, commenting as she did so on our state of development. The more curvaceous girls received an approbatory smile, and sometimes a discussion of bra sizes, while the rest of us were condemned by a resounding ‘Not much here’ or ‘here’s a flat one’. The resulting garment was forever tainted with this humiliation, and soon consigned to the rag bag.

The apron, on the other hand, proved indestructible, and has accompanied me to every kitchen I have cooked in since. It has the status of a relic, as if the soul of the girl who made it has left its trace on the checked fabric, now thin with age, and another, deeper pattern lies under the cross-stitched initials, etched out in green and white sylko.

 

At eleven, again photographed in school uniform – now a navy tunic, red and white striped blouse, school tie – my eyes are downcast, and there is the faintest trace of a smile on my face. I have long hair, and a fringe, dark blond. I am holding a little white dog, clinging on to it for dear life. This time I have no illusions about going to a new school.

Because of my failure to shine at primary school, and their native suspicion of posh places, my parents had not put me down for the Girls’ High School. Instead they selected our town’s comprehensive school, one of the first in the country. I was put in form 1D. My mother assumed that the streaming was alphabetical, and that I was in the fourth class out of six, but in fact the school’s system was more subtle. Each year a secret word was chosen: in ours ‘dix ans’, reflecting the age of the school. So I was in the top stream, to my parents’ amazement. My ‘11 plus’ results had apparently surprised everyone. My mother thought I would not last long in the top class, and when I struggled with my first maths homework, she assumed it was the start of my descent to my rightful place.

But my teachers were idealists, who believed that education could bring about social equality. They seemed to think that like everyone else in 1D I could benefit from a grammar school style education, and because they believed that, I thrived. I began to learn French. The teacher, Miss Lewer, gave us all French names; mine was Lucille, who I imagined as a more confident, prettier version of myself. Miss Lewer said I had a good accent and asked if I had ever been to France. She was surprised when I replied in the negative. At the end of term there were exams. I had no idea how to prepare for them, but taking them taught me that you just had to learn stuff off by heart. Once I realised this I had more or less cracked it. My marks got better and better.

My success was still tinged with terror. My cousin Peter had died, when he was six, and I was nine. I grieved alone. In those days in my kind of family children did not go to funerals, and nobody talked to them about the loss. A few weeks before his death, on one of their visits to us, his mother recounted a new set of ailments that had befallen my poor cousin. Peter and I were playing in the vicinity and I heard every word. Perhaps he did too. I remember very distinctly thinking ‘it’s too much, he can’t get better now’. Perhaps when he died I thought I was in some way responsible, because I had given up on him. In the final instance I had given up, despite all those times when I had tried to distract him from his sufferings with fairy stories and games.

When Peter died I gave up ballet and begged to be allowed to stay at home on Saturday mornings. I dropped out of the Christmas show, giving up my role as one of the ponies pulling Cinderella’s coach. The other pony just had to do it on her own. Even though this was very awkward, no-one could persuade me to go back to rehearsals.

Then I became convinced that I was going to die too. I read a story in the Readers’ Digest magazine about a little girl dying of liver cancer. I was sure I had the same symptoms. At night I would run into my parents’ room, because my heart was beating too fast. My father would say wearily, ‘tell me when it stops!’ My mother took me to the doctor’s and told him I was ‘suffering with my nerves’. A light sleeping medication was prescribed to stop the night terrors. My parents got the little white dog for me, and took my picture in my new school uniform, as if the dog and my education might save me, and perhaps they did.

Regis School Uniform, 1964. The old coal bunker has been replaced by a ‘verandah’, ideal for drying washing….