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Stott had run ahead to save for them, only they had to budge up and let Baker sit at the other end of the foursome, as far away from Bunty as she could get. There were still two empty rows in front of them, thanks to an extended lecture being given by Mrs Rathbone to her half of the Lower Fourth on the importance of punctuality in later life.
    That was one of the Rathbone’s running gags, that codswallop about ‘preparation for later life’, the idea that this artificial planet they’d created, with its nutty rewards and punishments, with its poxy little pecking orders and traditions was some sort of model village version of the world beyond its chain-link fencing. The idea that once you let yourself yield to the joys of Mildred Fawcett, let her into your life like Jesus in gown and kick-pleated tweeds, you could be re-made as a separate species, femina Fawcettiana , merely by being banged up in the same institution for seven years. Did Holloway make the same boast?
    Mildred Fawcett had begun in 1900 as a far smaller school, but had grown steadily from the original thirty pioneers. After the war, when more and more girls were demanding to stay on for their Higher Certificate, the trustees had decided that the old junior and senior schools should be split into three sections, but to this day not one of the staff had tumbled to the fact that every boys’ school in the district knew their precious sixth form as ‘Fawcett Upper’.
    The assembly hall was lined with oak panels – Dr O’Brien’s ‘Wall of Glory’ – prefects, captains of games, the odd scholarship. Nothing later than 1952, mind you (when the space ran out). Were they even real, these Sidebottoms, Trubshaws and Pratts? They made them up, surely? Or had they just bought a job-lot of sign writer’s samples? Scrote ? That was just being silly.
    Lower Four R were finally clacking across the parquet, a blur of blues. All those different materials – serge, Courtelle, botany wool, nylon, flannel, not to mention the many, many different vintages (and wash temperatures) – meant that there were a dozen shades of Fawcett blue: matchbox; spaghetti wrapper; salt bag; Rothman packet. Not forgetting knicker – and bruise.
    The miniskirt, still all the rage when Baker started in ’70, had resulted in a diktat that all hemlines should be one inch from the floor when you knelt down but it was a tricky bugger to enforce: ‘On your knees, Upper Threes!’ – not really how the goons saw themselves. Fashion had now swung the other way which made a sizeable fraction of the second year very groovy indeed as their entire kit was several sizes too big – ‘Mummy says I’ll grow into it’. Mummy bloody well hoped not, actually, but it lasted longer and Mummy secretly preferred the shapeless silhouette and had an inbuilt horror of seeing her daughter’s perfect young shape in anything too obviously form-fitting. Mummy pined for the days of bust-binding and the Liberty bodice and was ready to thank heaven fasting for the six-month craze for thick black tights and granny boots.
    One sure-fire way to wind everyone up was to wear everything much too small. Queenie, a veteran of the prep department (alias Fawcett Under), was still skinny enough to fit into her original blazer, a saucy little bum-freezer in faded blue flannel which she had grown into and out of since her mother first bought it when she was seven. The goons, who spent more time and energy belly-aching about hemlines and hairstyles than they did on Macbeth or matrices or petty larceny, were horribly torn about this. Making do and mending had stained their thinking like beetroot on a powdered egg omelette, but it drove them all good and mad just the same.
    The alternative strategy was to get everything in the largest possible size: growing into things was never an exact science, after all, and large was very very large indeed – it had to be. Every form had one – a walrus in blue serge wearing sizes you