My school, the ‘Virgin Megastore’

I announced on the BBC documentary last night that my boarding school in Buckinghamshire was referred to as the ‘Virgin Megastore’ because we never had sex and we weren’t entirely sure what sex was, or how you did it. ‘Don’t look at them, girls!’ trilled a particularly Victorian housemistress when we had builders on the grounds one summer. Were the builders were going to impregnate us with their eyes, I wondered. Maybe that was how you did it?

Whatever. Someone tweeted me after the documentary to say what total balls that nickname was, and that actually the school was referred to as ‘whores on the hill’. News to me – although the school is admittedly on a very steep hill.

Anyway, the point of this entire ramble is to show you the picture below.

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I am currently moving house and I found one of my teenage diaries this weekend. WELLINGTON SOCIAL!! refers to the dances we had periodically with boys’ schools. Going to Wellington was always particularly traumatic, because we would be bussed there – all Vanilla Impulse deodorant and blue eyeliner – and then have to walk into the sports hall with boys lined up on either side, shouting out numbers and rating us out of ten. ‘Four!’, ‘three!’, ‘two!’ etc. It wasn’t a highpoint for me. I clearly remember not being asked to dance with ANYONE, which is completely tragic considering how excited I seem to have been. But it’s probably because I didn’t look a single boy directly in the eye in case I got pregnant.

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