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food. At lunch they had a rule, not uncommonly for the time, that you had to eat everything that was put in front of you. You were also not allowed to refuse anything that was on offer. Now, for most adults, eating something you don’t like is easy – and far preferable to social awkwardness, on occasions when someone’s well-meaning dinner party preparations have led to a plateful of soap-flavoured gravel. You just swallow it politely and say it’s delicious. Any bishops or actresses reading will know what I mean.
    But it’s different for children. Their palates are more sensitive, their feelings of discomfort keener. When I had to eat one of the four things I found utterly disgusting from the school’s rotation of dishes – macaroni cheese, gooseberry pie, rhubarb crumble and croquette potatoes – I found it horrific and I would always be sick.
    That’s not a disaster and you wouldn’t think primary school teachers would be fazed by seeing pupils throw up after meals – particularly since this one was attached to an all-girls’ secondary school. I wasn’t fazed by it either. It had happened to me many times before, admittedly only when ill, but still: once it’s over and the period of stomach-lightened commiseration begins, then all is well.
    So it really came as a horrible shock to me that they were so angry about it. They thought I’d been sick on purpose, as an act of insolence. They weren’t standing for it, let alone allowing me to change my clothes. I would spend the rest of the day in a state of disgrace – and caked in my own vomit.
    Now, if that’s the worst thing that ever happens to you, you’re a lucky person. But you could say the same thing about being kicked in the balls by a sommelier and you’d still ask to see the manager. It just seems so unnecessarily unkind, such a failure in empathy on the part of those teachers. They made me so unhappy, and all they had to do to fix it was excuse me from eating things that made me throw up or (even if they couldn’t bring themselves to so lower their standards) to be nice to me if I did throw up. My whole life, I have always been nice to people when they throw up.
    And the thing that makes me even crosser and more uncomprehending is that I know I wasn’t a difficult child to keep under discipline. I have always responded with slightly lamentable obedience in the face of authority. I am no rebel – I will do what I’m told when my gag reflex permits it. If I was to be unhappy at school, it should have been because of bullying from my peers, not because I came to blows, or rather heaves, with authority.
    Neither am I, nor have I ever been, a fussy eater. There were just a few things I couldn’t stand when I was tiny. I think that’s normal. I don’t know how the other children coped with this rule. Maybe some of them hid food they didn’t like – which I would have been afraid to do because it was against the rules – and maybe some others threw up as well.
    So, for my first three years at school, I thought I was one of the naughty children – it was something that I couldn’t help. My stomach had ordained it. At school, it seemed, I was destined to spend a certain amount of time standing in the corner facing the wall, despite my sincere desire to do exactly as I was told. And I spent every day dreading the lunch hour and was only ever able to relax afterwards, if I’d been lucky enough to be given food I could keep down.
    I moaned about all this to my parents, of course – and on several occasions, when they collected me, I’d be caked in sick. They complained too, but the school’s response was very firm. I could be specifically excused certain foods in advance, but that was as far as they were willing to bend from their policy. But I wanted to be excused more things than my parents felt able to specify without embarrassment, so the problem continued.
    I think they were swayed by the school’s argument that this rigid approach to