'The Best Days of your Life?'

‘And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.’
Shakespeare - ‘Seven ages of man’

Scenes from Boarding School Life -1



I didn’t have far to ‘creep’ as I was at a girls’ boarding school on a fairly bleak stretch of the Cumberland coast.

I hurried down the stairs on my first morning in this strange new place, to find my trunk and start my unpacking. (For our first night we brought just an overnight case).


I was accosted by girl with a pinched eager face, and a sleek dark Richard the Third haircut. ‘Ah,’ she said, giving me a searching look, ‘a new girl, eh? What’s your name’. I told her.



. ‘Mmmmm’, she considered, her head on one side.

Then she nodded decisively. ‘We’ll call you ‘Pug’’. I shrank . ‘Because you look like one’.

She turned and joined her group of fellow dog-spotters.

I had never really thought about my looks, and it had certainly never occurred to me that I might look like a rather ugly dog.


Thus I was both welcomed and excluded - all in one go.

Who? Me?

School Expressions:

Antediluvian adjective before the Biblical flood, so - ancient, out-of-date

from the Latin: ante- before; deluvium deluge

This word was very much in vogue at my school during the late 1950s; ideas were 'antediluvian', clothes were 'antedeluvian' . "Did you see old Cookie's hairstyle - its sooo antediloooooovian!"