Fifty years ago

This picture has nothing to do with anything. It's my plant table in the sitting room and behind it you see proof that I've swept up some more of the fallen leaves. Nothing particular has happened today but a comment about my piano teacher being like Miss Jean Brodie (she's NOT - she's lovely) made my mind spin back fifty years... .

Fifty years ago I was in my first senior year at an Edinburgh girls’ school - not unlike Marcia Blaine’s, as featured in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Our headmistress, Miss J, was tall and thin. She had masses of grey hair swept into a bun and she glared down her hooked nose at any girl who happened to wander in range. She was renowned for her snobbery. Once she stopped my friend Christine in the corridor – it was a hot day and Christine had the sleeves of her school shirt rolled up. “You look,” hissed Miss J, “like a washerwoman!”

Another time – when we were moving to a new building - another friend, Mary, came in from the street where a van was being loaded. Miss J was standing inside, arms folded, supervising operations. Mary said timidly, “Miss J, a gentleman outside wants to talk to you.”

 Miss J sniffed. “Do you mean a gentleman?” she enquired frostily, “or a workman?”

We weren’t allowed to use the word “teacher”: Miss J insisted that we say “mistresses” or “masters” – though in fact there was only one master - surprisingly (in an all-girls school) the biology teacher. And we weren’t divided into “classes” – we had to use the word “forms”.

Almost all the mistresses were unmarried and unbelievably ancient – or so we thought. Now I realise that since they retired at 60, even the oldest must have been younger than I am now.

 A particularly memorable lady, Miss C, taught us history. She was known to us as “Granny C” though she was unmarried and we never imagined that she might have had any romantic life. She had a mat of suspiciously black (for one so ancient) hair. We thought it was a wig but maybe it just looked wig-like because it was bundled into a hairnet.

Miss C was always cold. She wore a thick tweed suit in all seasons and would come into the form room, ask someone to shut the windows and then settle herself facing the radiator, a rug over her knees. She would then proceed to teach us by dictating notes as she massaged lotion into her hands. We were extremely well-behaved. Years later, a teacher myself at a comprehensive school and trying to cope with classes of up to thirty-nine (very) lively pupils, I would fleetingly remember Miss C sitting in peace, rubbing her hands and murmuring meditatively, “Nelson won at Trafalgar because he had – remember, girls? – long range guns firing broadsides.”