raised on shakespeare and slut-shaming
the tell-tale signs she was educated in a cult institution (an all-girls grammar)
The prime minister is planning to revisit Blair’s 1998 decision to prohibit the creation of any new grammar schools. Keir Starmer, the product of one which turned independently funded, himself, stands with the decision. At present, there are 163 left in the country, scattered around like remnants of an empire. The demand for hideous tartan and Latin aphorisms is rapidly declining. Today’s government plans to phase them out in favour of comprehensive schooling.
I think it’s a good conversation to be opened up. For anybody unaware, (I recently discovered most of my subscribers are American?!) I wasn’t studying comma placement for six years. A grammar school in the UK is a selective secondary school (high school) that only lets you in if you pass a standardised test called the 11 plus, although most of us take it aged ten. Many now have their own entrance exams on top of that.
They are typically single-sex, but there are a few that are co-ed. I went to a day school, however, some offer boarding, which is a separate fee since grammar schools are state-funded. Some grammars operate as selective faith schools.
We need to stop tying single-sex education and grammar education together because grammar schools stopped serving a purpose when technical ones were eradicated in 1973, but I believe single-sex education still does. 5% of students in the country attend a grammar school. I grew up in Kent, which has the highest concentration of them in the country. This is its only claim, which is quite a pathetic one, for nothing else happens there.
Is it wise to be socialising and educating girls and boys in separate environments? Or, in a generation vulnerable to doxxing (I just finished watching Adolescence), is it safer? It seems unfair to separate students from individuals who do not pass an extremely gameable test that doesn’t measure intellect but non-verbal comprehension, which is gained through paid tuition, so inaccessible.
When people think of grammar schools, I imagine they view them similarly to private schools. For comparison, 7% of students in the country attend private (fee-paying) schools. I wish. I wouldn’t have minded a swimming pool or toilets with a working sewage system.
Not even joking, the sewage pipes used to burst on a regular occurrence, we would stage multiple protests about our poor facilities under the campaign Smells like money down the drain. My nose is forever haunted.
Premeditated apologies since this is gross. But I am a journalist.
In another piece, I want to delve deeper into the classism that’s laced into the existence of grammar schools, because the critics aren’t wrong.
I can only talk from my personal experience about grammar schools. I don’t have answers for how we can accurately and longitudinally track the effects of all-girl schooling. I think there are benefits of socialising women separate from men, whereas I think men benefit from being around women because of the points I get into in a former post, where I discuss how misogyny and misandry are expressed differently in society.
When I meet people at university and they find out I went to an all-girls school, they become wide-eyed and laugh, How was that then? I freeze up. I find it hard to put into words or quantify something so integral and central to the person I am today. I know what response they want: Hell. Women, hey. We are some cold fucking bitches. Yup. Big, big meanies! Which, at times, yes, thirteen-year-olds from different walks of life crammed together like sheep in a pen, expected to get along under some warped authoritarian Lord Farquaad figurine, can be. But I felt a part of something at that school. Maybe it’s as simple as community.
In my childhood, aware I have only just emerged out the other end, I could recognise a moment I knew I would be nostalgic for whilst I was in it. I felt this during the pre-show jittered chaos of school productions, lying behind E-block on a warm summers day, that one friend who could braid doing everybody’s hair whilst we all made a ten-foot-long daisy chain before the caretaker would yell at us for picking them, in detention for chewing gum or having a ladder in your tights, arguing with your form tutor about why your mother hadn’t signed your planner; because she does twelve hour shifts Miss and simply does not give a fuck which homework was due in this week.
When you’re at a place you were legally required to be every day for eight hours in your formative years, you do not have the time or grasp to socially analyse the relationships you were forming. But, from 11-18, I was surrounded by girls who just got it, got me. It’s the most understood I have ever felt. Even more so than amongst my own family or in a relationship. I think if I went to a mixed comprehensive, there is no way I would have had the capacity to be as confident as I was. The way I acted was because I had the privilege to exist wholeheartedly and neurodivergent. Elsewhere, I would have been chewed up and spat back out. I am always shocked I made it out the other side without getting bullied, but it does not surprise me that it was only since I left school, I became more insecure.
Perhaps, I have just answered my own quandary. Society doesn’t exist in gender-specific vacuums, life is co-ed. I got the biggest slap to the face when I moved into university with boys (I lived with seven, it was the most intensive form of exposure therapy I think I will ever experience) and witnessed the casual misogyny they exerted every day. I always like to think if I ever had a daughter that she would have the same experience I did, but by then, they might have run them to the ground. My support does not lie with the actual institutions. I am not viewing my experience through a rose-tinted lens, my school was run the way I imagined Hitler Youth was. A lot of girls left for comprehensives because it was too much. I stayed, partly because my mother would have offered me up as a sacrificial lamb had I dropped out, but also because I wouldn’t have wanted to be outside of the sisterhood and camaraderie of it all. It made the madness worth it. Girlhood played out on (quite literally) a shitty campus.
So, if grammar schools do get burnt to the ground (my first suspect is a Pride and Prejudice obsessed head girl using Poppy Moore’s I<3LA lighter), then I want to bottle up my experience so you can spot us anywhere before we become an extinct breed.
Further proof, you’re a Lesbian!
The biggest stereotype attached to attending an all-girls grammar is that we are raging lesbians. The surrounding schools used to scream it on the bus or write borderline slurs on stick-it notes, which they’d attach to our bags (wait, maybe this was the bullying). I remember asking my mum when I received my acceptance letter if this meant I was a lesbian now, except I couldn’t pronounce the word because as a child, I had too many teeth for my mouth so spoke with a lisp, but that’s what they were all saying on the playground.
My best friend pulled a face when I revealed that we would be attending different schools come September and wished me luck and health like I had gotten the plague and the main symptom was homosexuality. We’re not all lesbians. I do know a lot though. Our year got deemed ‘the gayest’ in the school’s trajectory, with one in every three or four students being bi or full-swing. I don’t think the single-sex aspect brought this out, however. They would still be just as gay in a mixed school and probably less penalised for it. The struggle with being a lesbian in a girls’ school is that every prima-donna there now thinks they’re wanted. It goes amiss that gay women have standards too. Although I was reading a memoir where the author explains how one evening on a camping trip everyone simultaneously decided to dabble in a bit of sapphism and I naturally thought of the myriad of sleepovers I would hear about in class with the same narrative.
Privacy wasn’t on the curriculum
Due to growing up in an environment with other women, we struggle to locate the boundary in later life. You did not feel embarrassed yelling across the corridor for an XL tampon to halt the tide or comparing the size of your nipples in the locker rooms. I discovered mine share the exact dimensions with a 2p coin. I have failed every woman everywhere when somebody asks, ‘anyone got a pad’ in a public restroom and I do not. Stupid fucking implant. Seven years of training for such a situation, wasted.
We crammed into the same 2 ft-wide bathroom cubicle so we didn’t have to stop our conversation. It wasn’t just the toilet, we couldn’t go anywhere alone. Dropping off a form to reception or getting an ice pack from the nurse was a group outing. Then, after spending all day together, we would FaceTime the entire evening to dissect the same conversations we’d already had in school, during a maths exam. My mother used to turn off the Wi-fi when I started propping my friend up against my water glass so she could virtually eat dinner with us. I would love to know the psychology behind our collective attachment issues.
Your personal life was national news if you confided in one friend. Our year had a population of just over a hundred girls so it was basically an inflated game of Chinese whispers. We all had the passwords to each other’s social media accounts, in case the worst happened, we would get our phones taken away and risk losing all our Snapchat streaks! Break-up texts were a group effort, crafted in our notes for our best friend to send to their shit-stain boyfriend later that evening. The group chat received every minute detail, unprovoked, whether it’s an illustration of a new position or how many times in a day someone defecated and was this a cause for concern.
Grammar school girls have zero filter. We are the ones at parties who initiate conversations with a stranger by saying they look like the ex that ghosted us two months ago. Then laugh ourselves into a breakdown. It doesn’t go away in adulthood. We operate as megaphones for personal business: ours, yours, anyone’s. Tell one something in confidence, her flatmate and their boyfriend are hearing about it over dinner. It’s not gossip, it’s being nostalgic for good old community spirit.
Juliet and Juliet
If you are the tallest in your year, congratulations, you were typecast for every male lead in the school play. I know, you wanted to be Juliet, but you’re 5’8 and your best friend’s barely 4’11, it is what it is.
At one point, (BC) - Before Crystal A - a notorious name in our school, she was four years above and in my form, I worshiped the girl - they let the boys from the opposite school be in our plays but it was short-lived due to an unfortunate incident with Crystal in the prop cupboard which meant they were no longer welcome and it was back to playing both Beauty and The Beast ourselves.
Skirts
They phased out our grey body-con skirts when I was in year nine. It was a direct attack on the carefully engineered system we had in place. This boutique on the high street, TrenD, had been tailoring them for us for like three quid, so we could still have teeny tiny belts without having to roll them, thus avoiding Friday after-school detention. We’d purposefully walk past our deputy head like three times, waiting for her to be like “GIRLS! SKIRTS!” then we would flash open our blazers like some Magic Mike stripper and go “But, my skirt IS unrolled Miss” then cackle in her face. Pure evil.
But, they retaliated and decided to replace these skirts, which didn’t draw too much attention in the public domain (town), with royal blue (to match our blazers!) tartan Scottish kilts. We were located in the southeast of England. I dropped Geography, but this was basically the farthest point from Scotland you could have a school without crossing a body of water and going international. I think a selective girl’s grammar having a kilt as their uniform is offensive to the Scotsmen who originally wore them in the inclement weather and treacherous terrain of the Highlands. Not to hide the mascara they had just stolen from Boots. Underneath, we wore a luminous Primark g-string that came two in a pack for £1 or bum shapers, and I know this isn’t the native way.
They were difficult to roll up discreetly and hard to tailor. We tried. SLG (Senior Leadership Group, aka The Regime) had won. It was a sheet of fabric resembling the cut of a tea towel and you would button it up on either side of your hip. I tend to be a careless person who breaks stuff a lot. I had a great relationship (well, from my side, in hindsight she probably viewed me with the same irritation she felt for a fruit fly) with my DT teacher because come lunchtime either the strap on my bag would snap or the sole of my shoe had come off, and she would fix it for me with the sewing machine or welding gun. My very own fairy godmother. However, she became everyone’s fairy godmother after the introduction of the kilts. Girls were flashing the town left right and centre because the buttons were so crap and they were the only thing that held the whole contraption together. They used to pop off after we’d inhale our post-school Greggs and we would have to run home holding our skirts up with less dignity than we had in the mini-skirts from before. The local perverts were beside themselves.
Blend it like Beckham
You slapped your face on at 6:30 am, it was dark outside, you were half asleep and had yet to learn that you were supposed to blend the makeup in once you put it on. So, I would arrive looking like a mock-up of a clown, a vision of bronzer stripes and clumpy concealer, just in time for the most critical social event of the day: Sainsbury’s.
At around 8 am, all three of the local schools descended upon the supermarket chain. The staff knew what was coming each morning, so they would try and open later or limit it to groups of five schoolchildren at once. This meant we either had to risk being late to form or survive on a cereal bar until 3 pm. But it was never about the meal deal. You had to see and be seen. Who walked in together? This sparked dating rumours. Who let you borrow 50p for a Yazoo? A display of social currency. These mornings made and broke relationships. It was secondary school TMZ. If you weren’t there, you didn't exist.
PSHE (Pointless, Scare-Mongering, Highly Entertaining) days.
PSHE days never taught me what a mortgage was, how taxes worked, digital literacy or any actual transferable life skills like they were designed to, but I did get to put a condom on a cucumber (ambitious of them really, I’d suggest a Chantenay carrot for realism), the name of each strain of Gonnorhea (nothing else just what they were called to recite in a pop quiz) and a catalogue of various contraception. Abstinence, the one that was really pushed down our throats. Another thing we were told to avoid. Blow jobs. You could give one when you had a husband.
All critical information, I’m sure. But, not necessary to be reiterated every month when there were other, more pressing topics, to be discussed to a room of young women.
Plus, the pregnancy scares never went away, so go figure, the propaganda was not working.
They would even recruit Z-listers for the day. One Monday morning, we were corralled into an assembly and some lad from five X Factor’s ago, Sam Callahan, was telling us not to send nudes. He then sang Hey There Delilah in a really high pitch. There was a queue afterwards to get a Snapchat video with him. Message not quite received.
The following month, they brought in police to talk to us about drug use because a balloon canister had been found in the music room. They had set up the stage with portable disco lights and electronic music as they rapped about peer pressure. The whole production was clearly confused about their mission. They just gave us more ideas, to be honest. Half of us hadn’t heard of these substances before they came in and put pictures of each one on a heavily animated slideshow.
Another time, we walked in and it was the RAF. Our school was obsessed with challenging the status quo. The army was ‘male-dominated,’ so supposedly it rested on us 120 girls to change that. I put my name on the sign-up sheet as a laugh because that’s the kind of entirely unfunny thing I like to do. My friend did as well because she said it would get the fit guy to come over and talk to us. He did, all jolly and handsome, to ask what had encouraged us to sign up and we went mute. Not so loud, now. After three minutes of painful silence, I muttered that I did a triathlon once or whatever. Afterwards, I kept getting emails to enlist and would forward it to spam. Every time we are on the brink of war, I get anxiety thinking back to our two names being the only ones on the list, knowing we’d be the first ones drafted.
Ultimately, everything worthwhile I learnt about sex, drugs and violence came from a chat at the back of maths with a girl who lost her virginity at thirteen to a bass player in an underground indie band. The guy was into militarism. Or, from Chic-Lit. Not a forty-year-old trying to turn it into a fun and interactive learning experience. I think this was for the best.
Teachers
These multi-faceted beings took on many roles. Mainly the makeup police, seemingly with an endless supply of wipes and nail polish remover in the top drawer of their desk, at the ready for when you walked through the door.
“This isn’t Top Model USA TJ, roll down your skirt and wipe the smuck off your face.”
“Smuck? I am wearing a Limited Edition Kylie Cosmetics Snow Way Bae Lip Kit.”
It was 2016, I was in possession of Maquillage crude oil and she wasn’t getting it.
Whilst there are no right and wrong feminists, the headteacher was always borderline extremist. Believed you set women’s rights back a hundred years by wearing acrylics and not pursuing a career in STEM.
My sister went to the same school but is six years older than me, so had near enough completed the cycle before I joined. She was a prefect, house captain and all-round kiss-arse. Her name is literally Angel, and I got called Tyler. Does sounds like a boisterous boy who will grow up to distract the class. One can’t be mad. In their defence, the midwife told my parents they were having a son. I just like to defy people’s expectations of me.
I liked school and was academically smart, but I got bored. Teachers had it in their heads that I was a trouble-maker and bad influence. God forbid, I tell a silly joke every now and then and eat Haribos underneath the desk. You would think with the way they spoke at Parents’ Evening, that I was a mass murderer in the making.
They would sit there, lips pursed, hands interlocked, “Well, she’s nothing like her sister, that’s for sure,” narrowing their eyes at me as if physically searching for the hidden gene mutation which led them to change the seating plan every lesson. It was my mother’s most dreaded event in the calendar. We would stop at the Harvester in town after, other families having a meal to celebrate their daughter’s glowing reports. My mum just needing a glass of wine.
“You see what I have to deal with,” I’d say, as I sat opposite her, stabbing a fork into the chips that I had to pay for because I did not deserve any generosity. She’d tell me to shut up and was thankful that it was my father’s turn next. He went in blind, as complaints about my behaviour throughout the year were usually forwarded to my mother.
Teachers would shake his hand and introduce themselves to him and his girlfriend.
“Hello, Mr and Mrs Kemp.”
“That’s actually not Mrs Kemp,” I’d clarify.
Looking at my Biology teacher with bemusement that he didn’t question how I had two white parents, as if we didn't go over Punnett squares a million times last week.
I would then take my seat and say, “So, now you know that I am from a broken home, maybe this can explain a few things.”
Male Teachers
You could not be young and hot unless you were prepared to feel the full force of eight hundred oestrogen-fuelled teenage girls. Many learnt this the hard way. That wasn’t meant to read like an innuendo, but the point stands. Lol, again. Just trying to explain how they never lasted long. Omg. Impossible.
Even if you weren’t attractive, you still had a target on your back. You were different and outnumbered. For once, it felt like we had the upper hand. Not actually. Our school wouldn’t let us go to the toilet outside of lunch breaks without a pass. Mostly because we would sit in a cubicle and waste thirty minutes of an art class discussing the beauty standards of a vagina. But it was a ridiculous and dangerous restriction to install in an all-girls school, any school. I have heard about ones that would lock toilets, and it’s honestly so stupid considering the nature of menstruation and gynaecological issues. The toilet pass was a laminate scrap of blue paper you obtained if you had weak bladder control, diarrhoea or a UTI. All quite difficult to prove with any level of etiquette.
Whenever we would have chemistry with Mr Underwood, it became a battle of wills.
“Sir, I need to go to the bathroom.”
“You know you can’t unless you have a pass.”
“Yeah, but I need to change my pad.”
Instant defeat. He’d go all red and start sweating. Knowing if he waited any longer, I’d double down, start comparing the shade of crimson he’d reached to a healthy flow.
Female Teachers
I’m referring to the ones fresh out of university, not entirely different to the sixth-formers. They could be the ultimate friend or foe. There were no troubles with the lower years because there was a large enough age gap to exert authority, and then when you got to year twelve, it was less Matilda, more Real Housewives, where you would play Snog, Marry, Avoid with famous film stars and discuss what you drank over the weekend.
Years ten and eleven were trickier. She would overcompensate because these were the devil years. They needed authority but would reject it. Her age insecurity being easy to grab onto. Trying to prove themselves only made things worse.
During GCSE revision, our Sociology teacher used to lose her temper when we were messing around so close to our exams.
“I’m doing this for your benefit girls, I don’t have to retain this information, I’ve already got my GCSE.”
“Only two years ago Miss.”
I remember my German teacher went on a rant at the beginning of our course. Our school required us to take a GCSE in a foreign language. Most decided on German because there was an exchange programme the following year where you could potentially be paired up with an Erlangen boy. Most of us didn’t choose her subject out of choice and passion, so switched off. This ignited a speech about her age not defining anything, and if anybody had a problem with her methods, they should leave now. Two girls got up. It wasn’t even personal, they just switched their option to French, but it was such a comedically well-timed moment. I was fifteen with no empathy. Now, closer to her age of twenty-three, I would give that poor woman, who would square up to me about the dative case, dressed head to toe in Zara, a big hug.
Les Garçons
I would encounter some on the bus, but they could have just as easily been zoo animals. I had a neighbour who I believed was a boy. I had a cousin who I knew was a boy, but he was a baby, so didn’t know that himself. All in all, they were mythical creatures.
My friends had big houses and absent parents. We were already underage drinking, but the aesthetic of sitting in an abandoned car park with a warm can of cider was starting to feel a bit played out. Once we hit fifteen, house parties became a weekly fixture. The boys across the road never hosted, so we would import them like exotic goods. Making a list in the back of English of who we wanted to kiss, so in turn, the invitees. The boys always wanted to bring their friends along, and they weren’t on the kiss list. I never claimed a pursuit because that was better than rejection, so my friends would go, “Well, he can sit and chat to TJ.”
Nobody would integrate for the first two hours. We would operate at opposite corners of the garden, equally as terrified of one another. Eventually, somebody would suggest a game of beer pong and with a bit of liquid courage, the place operated by tongue. I used to expect the boys to blow up mid-event. They never took off their backpacks, not even when they would go behind Ella’s shed to do whatever horny teenagers did.
Mr Brightside would come on, signalling the end of the night, and we’d head home with a collection of stories to dissect come Monday morning, by then having forgotten how to speak to boys all over again.
The Thrift Shop of Macklemore’s dreams
The co-ed comprehensive next to us was cool. It had a Starbucks (before they sued their union) inside their sixth form block (yes, sixth formers over there got an entire building, not a tiny, over-heated room that fit like thirty girls horizontally if they didn’t move and were under 110lbs). They had a basketball court, a football pitch, tennis courts, actual science labs, not some mobile temporary block that was never knocked down. The school an extra ten minutes away had a petting zoo and hairdressing salon. Meanwhile, we had half a field that we weren’t allowed to use most of the time because they would be on it, and AC (After Crystal A), SLG thought we would immediately start pro-creating if males were in close proximity.
We had to take exams over there because our hall was not big enough for an entire year. Walking over, I got a glimpse of how Katniss Everdeen felt approaching The Hunger Games. They opened the steel gate between our schools with similar ceremonial dramatics. We were very observant when it came to boys due to not being around them and recognised amongst the Fulston ones there were large height discrepancies. They were either below 5ft or above 7, there was no man of median height. So, with this visual in mind, imagine as we are walking through, they split like the Red Sea, Wonka’s Loompas on one side, the BFGs on the other. There is a brief moment of silence, then the heckling would start.
“Oi, Lezzzaaas”
“The LESBIANS are passing through.”
Whatever, we would get worse comments from the bossman in Premier, be more creative. Then the rock-throwing started. In grammar schools, academic achievement was your whole life. So, we’re a group of girls already completely on edge because the test we’re about to sit determined our entire value. You’re mumbling mnemonics for equations to yourself, and then a rock pounds the left side of your head. I got a fucking black eye before my Biology Paper 2.
As you can concur, Fulston was a breeding ground for terrorists, but one with a gymnasium. Ours did not give a fuck about such trivial things like facilities. Although we did have a thrift shop. This thing called Lost Property. You left your coat behind in statistics; best believe somebody else was strutting around in it by lunch.
Why Girls Never Shoot Their Shot
Being on the netball team earned you status. Not that anybody was ever any good. Also, back to the facility conundrum, our mini-bus only had ten seats, including the driver’s, so we couldn’t play any regional competitions that required us to drive there. Our school, obsessed with promoting women in ‘competitive sports’, played bi-yearly against the two that were a walkable distance and always suffered a large defeat.
PE (Physical Evasion)
It was an unspoken rule not to carry your kit or food tech ingredients in a rucksack or drawstring bag. That is not high fashion. You needed to sport a Topshop or JD bag. Bonus points if it was Forever 21, after they shut all their UK stores.
Telling my kids that bringing your lunch in this plastic with bubble font was our version of serving cunt. They’re gonna ask, was it worth my future grandkids not being able to leave the house without a gas mask? I will try not to hesitate before I answer.
Getting out of PE was a professional side-hustle for a lot of us. We would rotate our planners and forge our best mother-like handwriting. I said no need to be delicate, mine writes as if she has hooves for hands. We would scribe essays declaring our darling daughters had weak ankles or horrific period pains, so, cue the violin, regret to inform that they cannot participate in tennis or cross-country this week. Our teacher, who was included in the list of lesbians I know from my school, said, “So you’ve been on your period three weeks in a row??” I said, “It’s the birth control Miss, trust me, my boyfriend’s not happy either.” Then, suddenly, there was a written-note ban. I am no conspiracy theorist, but it did coincide with the week we had the Bleep test.
You couldn’t even get away with the excuse of forgetting your PE kit because they would force you into some artefact that has not been washed since 1904, when the school was founded.
I saw boobs for the first time in the PE changing rooms. Probably not true, but I mean within my memory when I knew the word boobs. My mother wasn’t one of those naked types, and I didn’t have a pair of my own until year ten. I think that’s why I grew up scared of female anatomy. This girl used to not wear a bra but had like C cups and would whip off her polo shirt, and we would all be exposed to her breastiness. It was difficult not to stare.
Scarves
An accepted part of the uniform. Not for warmth nor fashion. But, for covering up hickeys.
Sex
Let’s talk about it (ba-by) because why was it normalised to be having sex in year seven. The rule of thumb was two years up because some girl whose sister studied psychology said men emotionally develop two years behind women. So, mentally, dating a year nine was the same age. It was moved to three years when we, ourselves, were year nine and could capitalise on the girls’ boyfriends’ who could drive. I was a late bloomer, so my whole secondary experience, I just passively nodded and smiled when it was bought up. Which was a lot.
The five most memorable scenarios I learned my friends had sex:
During a Madeline McCann Documentary
On the roof of a car
There is this long road, off an A junction and it is notoriously known as Shag Lane because there are no street lights and a car passes through once every hour and everyone was seventeen so could drive but not stay the night at their boyfriends. Once we spotted our mate’s Kia Picanto parked there with steamed windows and she’s never lived it down
On a trampoline
16th hole of his dad’s golf course
RBF
The Resting Bitch Face. Invention of our own. A self-defence mechanism to keep men at bay. It doesn’t work very well. It’s a universal experience for a woman to get men approach her everyday, some nonsense like ‘give me a smile,’. What do we have to smile about? You think patriarchy is funny? I bet. I say tell me a joke, give me money or fall on your face and your wish is my command.
Phwoar, They Are Sex Gods!
We started letting boys in at A-level. These boys were extremely average, but placed in a school of eye-candy deprived girls, we were looking at the likes of a young Leo Di.
Their personalities meant they were some of the worst people ever and only a certain type of straight guy was willing to leave the sanctuary of his all-boys school to venture across the pond to ours. They mansplained and thought girls were stupid. They believed they were the only ones who could watch a Wes Anderson film and have anything to say. They hated Greta Gerwig or Sofia Coppola.
It was the ones that only did one lesson at our school that had the most allure, because we didn’t know the scope of their misogynistic opinions yet. They would all shuffle in at 11:45 am for Econ or Drama, the only lessons we offered that theirs didn’t. Stopping to sign in at reception and we would all press our noses against the canteen glass and observe them with the eagerness of a kid eyeing up a chocolate eclair in a bakery window. When you’re in lower school, sixth form seemed like adulthood. This was our dosage of grown up men and they had entered our space. Naturally, all we did was critique their suits.
Not so Easy to get an A
Everybody at a grammar school is smart. So the pressures are insanely high. And comparative academics, even higher. You want to know misery? Be the dumbest one in top set.
Our school would just straight up lie to us. I thought it was the norm to take four levels and an EPQ, and everybody at uni is like why did you do that? I thought…did you not? We got told the pass in GCSES was a 5 and had to retake it if not, apparently it’s a 4 and re-examination is not necessary, you just opt to not get the GCSE. Like, what are you doing with thirteen of them? I’m still unemployed.
You wanted to find out a friend’s grade so you could compare it to yours because a 62 isn’t as detrimental if the highest was a 64.
Also, everybody’s notes looked like a Banksy.
They gave out special recognition awards every month. It was a paper certificate with your name on it and was given to pupils who got 100%, did hella extracurriculars and got an Oxbridge interview. The same rotation of ten got it each time. No, I am not bitter.
Our ‘free periods,’ a time branded as a break from our intensive studies, where other schools were granted the freedoms of going home or grabbing lunch out. My sister spoke of days, her and her friends would go to the local spoons and get smashed. We were not allowed off-site. It was silent study only. I used to look up houseboats on eBay. We did use to sneak out by army crawling beneath the gates so that CCTV wouldn’t catch us .
Perfume was banned, it made no scents
Everybody was obsessed with spraying Victoria secret/Impulse/Hollister. We would spritz a cloud of our cheap stuff into the air and run through it because apparently it made it last longer. I remember when we all became obsessed with pheromone perfumes because there was an advert where all the men on the street fall in love with a passer-by who happened to look like Marilyn Monroe. We all just smelt like plug-in air fresheners, confused as to why nobody was asking to sniff our neck like they had advertised. I think my nonstils were de-sensitised for a few years after leaving school. But, that could have been long COVID.
Women belong in a House
The house system. They are always named after influential women. If they weren’t, your girls’ school is incognito. Ours were Franklin, Keller, Seacole and Chanel.
“A woman that doesn’t wear perfume, has no future”
Coco Chanel
I know, the irony.
At the end of the year, you had to be the house with the most House Points(hp) and you would earn these by getting high marks on an RS essay, volunteering to stack chairs after an assembly or through inter-house competitions such as the drama competition, sports day, cook-off or the big quiz. They were all deep. House loyalty was our religion. They always felt fitting, as if we had our own version of the Sorting Hat. It was also hereditary, I was in Franklin because my sister was.
You would find out who won in a grand-ceremony during the end of year assembly where they would display immortalised caricatures of these women on pedestals. My whole school career, I genuinely thought it was a metaphor since this is what wider society is like, pitting women against other women when they’re each successful in their own right. My form tutor was like no we just need you in trackable registration groups that fostered year group integration.
Home Economics
Hours of being taught to sew and cook and I still don’t know. We used the Home-Ec rooms for other endeavours. My friend pierced my second piercing with a needle I was supposed to use for cross-stitching. She watched a youtube video first. I purchased an apple from the canteen and we sterilised it with a bunsen burner, we aren’t that irresponsible.
Laughter
I laugh a lot. All the time actually. I feared that leaving school meant I would never match the frequency of laughter that a year eleven maths or science lesson provided. It was unbridled, clench your stomach because it hurts peals of laughter. We would fall off chairs and bang desks. Part of it was because you were not allowed to. Teachers would get red and angry at a blunt pencil. There was so much absurd humour in it all. It is the contrast of putting young, undisciplined girls in a serious environment and expecting it to work. There is a reason exam years are the best because there is extra goading towards you that in response, one become delirious with whimsicality.
We were put into a holding space before each mock and our teacher was lecturing us about revision techniques. He goes “Be patient girls, don’t go cramming things into yourself late at night.” This is an audience of fifteen-year-olds. We tried to stifle it, not wanting to let slip that our innocent minds understood an innuendo, but pretty quickly the place erupted in hysterics.
A Jacobean Fisticuff
I witnessed one fight at my school. It lasted 45 seconds and had all the adrenaline rush of soggy rich tea biscuit. We were in the hall, waiting to be shepherded onto a coach, to go see a showing of Macbeth at The Marlowe Theatre. We had all put on our best ripped jeans and filled in our eyebrows with a black sharpie. We were hoping to bump into some of the Simon Langton boys which made the Borden ones look like paupers. The atmosphere was electric!
It had been brewing between these two girls and their various camps all week. A dodgy look down Sainsbury’s meat aisle, involved boyfriends, strategically posted Snapchat stories. Serious stuff. So, all it took was a carrier pigeon (sorry, Noelle) to relay a bit of gossip from one side to the other and all of a sudden the two ring leaders met in the middle of the hall. Their disciples formed a semi-circle behind them. There was a few exchange of words, nobody could recall what was said, but it led one girl to shove the other, where she fell into a curtain and made a go for her hooped earrings. At this point everybody in the hall is watching, mouths agape, like we are witnessing a scene plucked from Albert Square. This included our teacher escorts who stood there for about twenty seconds before it dawned on them that it was part of their job description to split this up.
They were English and Drama teachers, of course the reprimanding was going to be a performance piece. Our English teacher declared he had half the mind to cancel this once in a life time cultural experience. Macbeth is played by the same questionable theatre company at this box theatre every month, one of the witches was our dinner-lady. He continued that in his sixteen years of teaching he has never once witnessed a fight. I don’t think you could call it a fight. But, he was right. I had never witnessed anything physical before. At our school it was all raised voices and vicious DMs. My friends who went to mixed comprehensives texted me daily about fights where they would throw chairs and break bones. Boys and Girls. I would receive a blurry video from the all-boys school next door of a poor kid getting ganged up on in the hallway. Statistics show that boys are involved in the most physical violence but girls suffer the most sexual violence in school. I wonder how gender-exclusive schooling comes into play. It’s all only intensifying. Kids nowadays bring knives into school. Schools are beginning to mimic a prison yard.
The School Nurse
The school nurse was like Santa to us grammar school girls. Instead of presents, we got pregnancy tests and a blue paper towel for anything else.
Our medical room had to get beds installed like a hospital ward because it was always so overcrowded.
Pacify Her
Every school has its urban legends, one I have recognised as a pattern with girls’ schools is the gruesome tale of a student who gave birth in the bathroom, panicked, then stashed the baby in a locker. I don’t know if it actually happened, but people used to say you could hear the cries behind the wall.
We were given a robotic baby to care for over the weekend when you’re around fifteen. The piece of plastic mirrors the needs of a real baby and tracks what you do with a chip, which reveals a percentage declaring how well you parented. I got 97%, which was shocking, considering I left it in a KFC in Peckham and let it cry through the night more times than not. My report revealed that I broke its neck twice from a lack of support. The ‘neck’ was hardened rubber, my bad for presuming it could support itself, I’m not sure how that wasn't an instant fail though, the baby would be dead.
I am unsure if this project was to deter us from becoming teen mothers or give us insight and preparation. I asked my form tutor at the time how comes the Borden boys didn’t get one but wasn’t met with a direct answer. I muttered you bunch of sexists as I burped Aristotle (she was destined to be a great thinker) to sleep. Then I got the bus home Friday evening, fake baby in tow and they all immediately went to poke its eyes and spent the journey trying to come up with various jokes on how she was conceived so I silently understood why these expensive robots were not given to prepubescent boys.
Sixth-form
When we eventually made it to sixth form, we ditched the kilts! This by no means was freeing and within the first month I wished for the dish cloth back. I suspected since they got off making us ugly for five years, the dress code would be just as policing. At welcome day, we were told it was ‘What you would wear to your boyfriend’s grandma’s house.’ Because my mouth moves before anything else has the chance, I replied to the head of year, also my former history teacher who was already looking at me expectantly, “My boyfriend’s grandmother is a naturist Miss.” “In her home she prefers if I-“ My mum nudges me hard in the ribs. Nobody laughed. It happens to the best of us (stand-up comics, I mean).
In the car, my mother trails on about why I insist on embarrassing her at these things, it’s as if I grew up with no discipline. “Didn’t I?” I said it’s a stupid dress code and I think it’s a setup. I wasn’t wrong. I come in on the first day with jeans, a white tank top and a knitted shrug. I’m immediately stopped at the gate. I put my hands up in false surrender and tell Mrs Nield, “My boyfriend’s grandma would compliment this since it’s synthetic wool and she’s a vegan.” “No midriff allowed.” Midriff? It took me a few minutes to translate that she meant my stomach. Am I cow? A cut of steak? Who uses the term midriff if they’re not a butcher? I explained how my boyfriend’s grandma likes Christina Aguilera. She would think the display of ‘midriff’ is a 90s homage. The next week, I come in wearing a slogan tee. It was old merch of Corona beer. I got told it promotes alcoholism and promiscuous behaviour. No denim skirts because they could see my knee caps. No boots since“This is a place for learning not line dancing.” My hoops were too big and distracting, and my friend who tried to become a redhead got penalised for donning a bad dye job. We were getting marked up every morning, our form tutor said “Best buy a new wardrobe girls,” then laughed like a pillock. Only if you fund it, miss.
It was only upon leaving that I realised I was raised in a cult. A well-meaning one where we all had an iron deficiency, but a cult nevertheless. At the time, I thought this was a universal experience, that everybody knew the theatrics of an all-girls environment but have come to realise some people will go their lives not.
In lectures, I notice how the most talkative are the boys or girls that went to all-girls grammars. I can’t help but think of the statistics that show how boys dominate the classroom because teachers tend to spend their time and attention responding more frequently to their questions and behaviour.
My first idea for a show was an Armando Iannucci style mockumentry series about all-girls grammar schools because like many before me, I recognised the humour laced in every crevice. Then Derry Girls came out in 2018, with the added socio-political backdrop of Northern Ireland’s conflict and I thought there’s no topping this.
So here’s a little list instead. An attempt to document the dystopian, suffocating, yet wonderful world of an all-girls grammar school. A place where I learned a lot, just not necessarily what I was supposed to.
as a fellow grammar school girl, this was a fascinating read; especially as mine was co-ed! struggling to imagine school without the chaotic rule of rugby boys or lads undermining you in science class (only for you to beat them three months later) but relating very hard to the deep House divides, the bizarre cultish rules, the weird culture around sex and the insane academic expectations 💘 thank you for this, remarkably enjoyable!
This is sooooo good. Maddi McCann documentary is crazy crazy behaviour. And the chokehold Mr Brightside has on British culture deserves peer reviewed studies. Brilliant read