In the summer of 1950, aged 13 and three quarters, I remember being taken by my mother to a meeting of her Old School Association in Sevenoaks. My grandparents had served in the Baptist Missionary Society for many years in Orissa, India. Indeed my grandmother had been educated in the UK—Walthamstow Hall, School for the Daughters of Missionaries—and her own stepmother had actually been one of the original little girls when the school was founded in Walthamstow, London in 1838, before being moved to Sevenoaks, hence the name.

My mother’s schooling was entirely at this school, since her parents had to take her—and later each of her sisters—back to England at a very early age, as India was not a healthy place to bring up children. Nor of course could she ever go out there for holidays—a six-week voyage by ship each way, each time! So, as the oldest child, she was farmed out to various relatives for holidays and often stayed at school, with a small number of similar boarders for the brief half-term holidays. The girls eventually also had to look after their much younger brother, Eric, who went to the ‘brother’ school, Eltham College in London.

The call to work as nonconformist church ministers and missionaries was a major feature in 200 years of my maternal line. Truly, as my Aunt Joyce used to quote, with a slight and understandable edge to her voice: “The grown-ups heard the call and the children paid the price.”

A hard childhood for the three Wilkins girls, I’m afraid. However, in other ways they were happy and settled at the school, all three sisters making lifelong friendships. At the time my mother took me to the open day, the headmistress was Miss Emmeline Blackburn, a close friend of my Aunt Phyllis since schooldays.

As for me, I remember the school in Selhurst with some affection, but I didn’t find it as easy to make friends as I had hoped, partly I think simply due to the distance, so my friendships were still mostly with local children. Sandra had moved away, though we still wrote to each other—and our friendship lasted the rest of her life. In this summer of 1950, I think I may have been ready for another move. I was an avid reader by now—indeed always had been. I loved all the old fashioned girl’s stories about boarding school: Enid Blyton, Angela Brazil, among others.

The day of the reunion was warm and summery, I was put in the care of a girl my own age and taken on a whistle-stop tour of the boarding part, plus the wonderful grounds, plus a very good tea with lots of homemade cake. What’s not to like? I remember going back to the headmistress, Miss Blackburn and saying to her politely—we were very well brought up to be polite in public situations—”I think this is a very nice school. Can I come to it?”

I remember Miss Blackburn saying equally politely, “Perhaps we had better ask your mother?” and taking me to find her.

So I started the very next term, the autumn I turned 14. It took many decades when, one day it dawned on me that it had almost certainly been a set-up! Never mind! If it was, it was a benign conspiracy that worked overall, very well!

Initially, however, I was desperately homesick almost the whole time for the first term, and I know—from later—that my parents missed me terribly too. But both educationally and emotionally, it was definitely the best place for me. Nowadays I would agree that single-sex schools are not at all a good thing in general, but in the 50s it was in some ways a boon to live out one’s troubled adolescence, with crushes and sexual secrecy and experimentation, in a safe, female environment.

I know too that the homesickness didn’t last and I did not suffer from it again to any extent. The recurring theme of exchanging home for school and school for home for four years of regular holidays meant that at least six times a year, including the half-term holidays, I must have relived the traumatic ‘separation and restoration’ that was my early childhood evacuation experience until it’s edge was blunted.

I was able to come to terms with it because—most importantly—it was my own decision to go to the school. I was in charge, if you like. This is a mental mechanism known in psychology as ‘Repetition Compulsion,’ when we obsessively follow a line of behaviour over and over again to ‘make it come right’. It is mostly used by ourselves unconsciously and often does not work, or is counterproductive, such as when—at the extremes—people marry consecutive abusive or unfaithful partners. But in many cases, it is a helpful and indeed essential inner device, used in minor ways without even thinking about it—because flexibly trying and retrying can indeed work and is the basis of our self-education.

Walthamstow Hall gave me a very good grounding in some subjects, mostly the ones I enjoyed, like English Literature and French, plus fulfilling my previously dormant yearning to act. I was in all the school and class plays, draped in sheets and spouting Shakespeare at the least excuse.

Many rules would be regarded as very petty today, but the benefit of such a system was that quite small acts of rebellion could be acted out most satisfyingly with a sense of being a really dangerous rebel—such as never quite being properly respectful to school uniform rules. I found many ingenious ways to disrespect my hated frumpy school hat without quite going to extremes that could merit punishment. The staff didn’t like it when, in my final summer term, I used the winter hat as a bedside lampshade, with me pointing out that there was no rule that you couldn’t sew a beaded fringe on it plus other colorful adornments and use it in this way. Being fair-minded, they grudgingly conceded this one.

Wandering around the school after lights out, skillfully avoiding the patrolling staff, was another adventure that always made me feel like the dangerous heroine of a spy thriller or an escapee from a concentration camp. The only time I was ever caught doing this, there was just a relatively harmless scolding and I was more careful after. School then wasn’t at all like the fictional genre of the Enid Blyton type stories—and yet in some ways, it was!

To tell the truth, from things told me years later by these amazing teachers, I think they actually enjoyed the spirited girls like me who tried colourful, but harmless ways to flout the rules and probably mostly had a laugh about it in the staff room. I shudder to think what you have to do today to earn the title of ‘The Naughtiest Girl in the Lower Fourth’. Run a crack den or a brothel in the attic?

So I could express the naughty side of me against tough but wily grown-ups and—mostly—spare my mother from my teenage rebellion, though I did throw a few major tantrums at home too, I seem to remember. Anyway, I had four years of a most interesting and satisfying education, made many lasting friends, had many ups and downs, but it was never dull, and I emerged from it—eventually—with the ability to scrape into medical school as previously described.