The teachers at Romley Fourways did not much appreciate her line of success. They regarded her as lazy and subversive, something of a trouble-maker, intelligent enough to do better if she tried, but she never did try, partly because none of them found any ways of making her want to try. It was in those days a dull, restrictive, traditional school which aimed to keep its girls as quiet as possible, not to let them mix too much with the boys from Pinstead Green, not to let them write on walls or in textbooks, not to let them linger too long on the premises after school. The academic standards were not high; the brighter girls were steered towards jobs as secretaries and bank clerks and nursery nurses. The headmistress was an elderly spinster in the last years of her career, whose outlook on life was dour, negative, unnerving. The girls were frightened of her, with her bun of white hair and tailored suits and well-polished brogues; those were the days when schoolgirls were still frightened of authority, when threats of bad reports and detentions and parental summons could alarm all but the most brazen. Her cultured middle-class tones depressed them and made them feel inferior. But they did not respect her. There was something odd about her that prevented respect. Kate never quite worked out what it was—a kind of insecurity, perhaps, that made her adopt a peculiar expression of hard command when addressing the school, and which also lured her into the most astonishing Fruedian double entendres. She was fond of speaking to the girls, especially as they grew older, of the perils of sex, and unfortunately this theme seemed to draw her unconsciously into the strangest realm of sexual imagery—she would speak of guns and triggers, of climaxes, of filling the girls in, and of playing ball. The girls, who had never heard of Freud, got them in one. Once she referred to a recently married ex-member of staff as being “firmly bedded down in Billericay,” a phrase which even Kate could not resist repeating with delight—for in general Kate disapproved of laughing at those who were unintentionally ridiculous. Laughter should be worked for, in Kate’s view.

It was not until years later that Kate, looking back, began to think that Miss Simmons had been physically frightened of her pupils, that the sight of them sitting or standing before her, sullen, bored, ominously fertile, potentially rebellious, must have been as unnerving to her as the sight of an angry mob to a Victorian mill-owner, as the sight of a mutinous hungry crew to a captain far from land. Kate even began, posthumously, to feel sympathy, for on the few occasions in adult life when she found herself before an audience of teenage girls, she could see that it took a good deal of nerve to face such a mass of young, restless, and hopeful bodies with confident equanimity, and poor Miss Simmons had not had much.