I was an alien among placid English girls certain of their destiny, which was marriage and money. Credit: Fairfax Media via Getty
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As children across the country head back to school, we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.
It was not a school for Jewish Feminist social democrats, or really – if knowledge is your goal – a school at all. It was, rather, a hushed house for women in search of rich husbands. But we did not know this, being children.
It was very pretty because prettiness was the most important thing: a crenellated white Strawberry Hill Gothic house on Richmond Hill. The Good Schools Guide blithely calls is a castle. It isn’t. A castle is a defensive fortress, not a house with ornamental battlements and if I had stayed there I would probably not know that. It was merely decorative and useless for defensive purposes. As we were.
Even in the late 1970s it was a relic, dedicated to upholding – and infiltrating – the British class system and to creating a particular sort of woman: decorative, pleasing, and ambitious in the most pointless sense: the geishas of Twickenham. Even now I wonder how many of them actually have jobs.
It was a tiny world, which sought to be no bigger – quite the opposite of an education. My class contained the daughter of a marquess who is now a duke and a girl who is now a world famous “socialite”. I was there by mistake. My father was the dentist to the headmistress and, on the advice of my mother – a working class Jewish girl from south London, who wanted me to go to Oxford University, and thought this was the way – he secured our admission, probably when she was at his mercy in the chair.
There were only two Jewish families in the school. We learnt that on the first day. The other Jewish family was the only other one to arrive with grandparents. So my sister and I were oddities from the start, although she coped better than I did, being kind and calm. When my uncle delivered us one day in a motorcycle and sidecar – he was a biker – it caused a sensation.
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