Baroness Deech,

Crossbench peer

Leaving school – perhaps there is no other ritual in life quite like that one. A sudden leap from childhood to adulthood, from the very well-known into the unknown, from daily ritual to irregularity; from peer companions to all ages, from uniform to fashion, from top-down control to self-control.

The final chapel service, the singing of the Foundation Hymn (“Praise the Lord for Our Foundation, for the ancient house providing shelter ‘neath her kindly wing”).

Well, not in my case. On that final day we were allowed to wear our own clothes for the only time in eight years; we appeared in lumpy, often homemade suits and hats, trying to look grown up.

The headmistress, a woman of the utmost unsuitability for the charge of teenage girls, a woman who had never lived in the real world herself, told those of us who had yet to find a university place – “girls, you may go anywhere you like but not the LSE, a hotbed of radicalism and free love…” (I went, but that’s another story.)

Then the presentation of a traditional leather-bound leavers’ gilt-edged Bible. But not for me, the only Jewish girl. Years of being made to eat bacon and go to chapel, culminated with: “You won’t want one of these,” she said, “you are a stiff-necked people and we won’t take any more of you”.

Forty years later the then headmaster heard my story and sent me an inscribed Bible. It made me weep.