We are all part of a monstrous tread-wheel of compromise maintained by teachers, parents, newspapers, girls we used to know; by worthies who preside at Speech Days.

Before the Speech Day we came to school in ordinary clothes while the pleats were pressed into our tunics; while the bird was made golder, the rainbow bluer, and build together brighter below them. When they came in their ordinary clothes I saw the others transformed. Gone was the navy serge that seemed soaked in the plummy brews of menstruation, gone were the stumpy legs in socks that looked like bandages. My school-mates were transformed; they left me behind to become young ladies in nylon stockings and nail polish, who wore skirts that flapped about their calves and cummerbunds and elastic jumpers that showed their breasts.

(And all through the Technical School days it is the same: I am different. There will come a time when the other girls will all merge into one who is they. There will come a time when I will lock myself in the lavatory with the broken-handled brush, the stale puddles on cement, and breathe in urine to escape them; when I will keep a diary, and record in it all my loneliness and hatred, and they will find it and read it, will turn savage and hunt me. And the big-lipped art teacher will join the chase and direct it to icier wastes.

Because it must, a final day will come to free me. Yet even here they will have their victory. Then, the only girl I like, who talks constantly of Christian Witness and her Sunday School class, will betray me. She will give me the silver watch to mind that was her grandmother’s — will drop it lightly into my pocket while she plays at basketball. And when she comes back to claim it, it will have gone. We will search for it everywhere — to no avail. And everyone — the big-lipped teacher, the other girls, the girl whom I admire — will think me a thief. The girl’s parents will think so most of all, for they will send a lady who is a policewoman to see me.)

When it was the Speech Day the girls assumed their old disguise; all their borrowed elegance had left them. We sat together, in magpie ranks amidst the gold leaf and red plush of the Town Hall that was the picture theatre. We stood to sing ‘The Nun’s Chorus’. We sat, stupefied with boredom, whilst gentlemen in pepper-and-salt and ladies in simulated Persian lamb (with China weasel trimmings) paraded in turn upon the platform and pronounced cliché homilies that outdid those of the powder-blue headmistress in hypocrisy and patronage. Subtly, with silver tongues, these bland-faced directors and superintendents and inspectors reduced us to our stations; their highest modicum of praise was that one of us would make an admirable girl in an office.