Punishments involved sleeping on the ‘haunted’ landing

RosE PRInCE, cookery writer

I WAS ten when I began my first term at Hatherop Castle School in 1972. With only about 120 girls, it was a small boarding school in a Victorian castle in the Cotswolds, complete with a tower. But there the resemblance to Malory Towers ended.

Hatherop was a fashionable school, but neither progressive nor traditional, only eccentric. We wore no uniform. Girls swished down panelled hallways wearing everything from midi-skirts with cheesecloth peasant tops to their mother’s baggy hand-me-down tweed skirts and twinsets.

We had few proper teachers. Latin ended when the dashing young classics master left after an alleged affair with a sixth-former; maths, taught by the Chaplain’s wife, petered out because she preferred to read us novels.

We spent hours learning to sew. The climax of these classes was the summer fashion show on Open Day. Junior girls took to the catwalk in nightdresses they had made, senior girls in handmade bikinis. Totally inappropriate — my father didn’t know where to

look. We slept in ‘ dorms’ and behaved appallingly after lights out, knowing the school was watched over by a slow-moving matron with a leg injury.

But when you were caught there was no detention. It was worse: you spent a night on the haunted ‘red landing’ — a huge dark hall with a camp bed and a cabinet of antique Chinese dolls staring at you. It was terrifying. Hatherop girls rarely went to university — we joked that Oxbridge was a ‘town up north’. No Hatherop girls became scientists or Olympians, but we were great chatters and readers which led, in my case, to a writing career.

To be an old girl is like belonging to a very unconventional club — I have no regrets.