Terms & Conditions

 I thought my time at a boy’s boarding school in the 1960s was pretty bad until I read this book. But reading it, I realised that I never had to contend with bedrooms so cold that hot water bottles that fell on the floor in the night were lumps of ice by morning. Or teachers that knew – almost literally - nothing. Or being told that qualifications were really a waste of time since all I’d be doing when I left school was getting married.

On the other hand... No, this is me talking about a book about girl’s boarding schools between 1939 and 1979. And it’s an eye-opener, onto a world of bad food, draughty buildings, seldom-washed clothes and snobbish headmistresses. It’s also a book about a school where you stabled your own pony before unpacking your trunk; a school that encouraged a love of books and the arts; a school that wanted its girls to succeed academically and made sure they did. It finds the good as well as the bad and isn’t afraid to do so.

It’s infuriating, shocking, upsetting. It’s fascinating and entertaining. It can also be very funny. As in this story about the headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies College doing her shy and shocked best to warn girls about a flasher in the town. She tells them of a nasty man who’s rather disturbed and says that they should take no notice of him at all before adding that she wants them all to wait until Mr Right comes along. To which the author adds that:

‘To the 800 girls in the hall, it sounded like ‘Mr Wright’. Who on earth was Mr Wright?’

Definitely a book of the year.