We went once a week to an Art Room, where a lady like a man with a protruding lip and a lumpy body drilled us in colour circles and flower-pots and horizontal borders. We went once a week to a Dressmaking Room, and I did not understand the sewing-machine; I sat at the back pretending to sew: my empty needle jumped in and out of raspberry cotton.

We went once a week to the room over the laundry, and I tried to vault a wooden box called a horse that was spiteful and reared and punched me — suddenly (in the stomach); I did the bidding of a lady who taught splits and ballet and tap down the Beach Road who had little sharp teeth. I was afraid of her and the horse and the sewing-machine and my brush going over the lines when I did the colour circle. I stood bent while a favourite (who did splits and ballet and tap) stood on my back. I got red marks and it hurt, but I was scared to say.

We went once a week to a Science Room that seemed to have a mystery. The teacher was a man. He came in the morning on a bicycle with pants caught by clips. He had a moustache; he was a foreigner. One day there were nasturtiums over the benches and all their green umbrellas and orange trumpets were cut up for our science lesson. We pulled the flowers apart and they were just petals and carpels and stamens; we put them in our books as diagrams. The room was full of sunshine that got fainter and flowers that died. (There is no mystery. The science lesson makes things shabby and commonplace. It reduces the rainbow to a name — roy g. biv; it sweeps away the moon — diminishes it to lunar craters. Orion, The Whale, Noah’s Dove creep away — become constellations. Man is an alimentary canal.)

We did Shakespeare in English (not Shakespeare in the raw, for that would be dangerous, but Shakespeare filtered through the tales of Lamb), and there was Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Cobweb and Moth. I went with them to a wood near Athens; saw painted butterflies and spotted snakes and changelings and lovely boys. Wild thyme blew; I smelt oxlip, eglantine, woodbine, musk rose.

I was surprised when the lesson was over. There were no fairies in our garden (lolly papers, sickly shrubs), or in the classroom, or at Assembly where I watched the singing teacher with greasy hair feel her breast through floral nylon (and dream of a Methodist wedding in a rose garden that will never be); followed the progress of the swollen goitre beneath the senior mistress’s chin.