Do they have to be bad memories? My teachers varied from totally wonderful to completely appalling. Tha wonderful one taught English, which was a head start with me. She knew Tolkein and T.S Eliot (and never stopped telling us so, in the nicest possible way), inspired us to read a huge variety of things, got us all to write poetry (including teaching us different forms - sonnets, villanelles, triolets etc.), and was constantly witty and amusing, though very strict. When I left school to read English at university she gave me some of her books.

On principle I disliked all maths and games teachers. Maths teachers were dull, games teachers were bullies. There were no exceptions in my school. The nastiest teacher of all taught geography. She had Nazi tendencies, and was very racist towards the few Jewish girls, including my best friend. She also made us go in the cupboard of we needed to blow our noses, and made constant comments about our appearance. I remember she told one girl that if all her freckles joined up she would have a nice tan - very hurtful to a 14-year-old. I truly think the woman would have been dismissed these days. This was in the fifties, and people didn't complain.

However, physical violence was unknown and we had no corporal punishment, being girls. My brother's minor public school, however, was another matter....prefects as well as masters beat the boys on the slightest excuse, and as for the Chaplain.....He'd have been in court these days.

I have one very vivid memory of my first year in the Infants.  It would have been late Spring/early Summer in my first year so I would have been 5 in the April. My teacher was Miss Hawkins who was very young and pretty with curly red hair and I loved her.   I was walking to school with the older brother of the girl who lived over the road, he would have been 8 and in the Juniors next door.  He said we’d walk down the alley that led down the side of the allotments instead of keeping to the proper route (the alley was strictly out of bounds for me).  Anyway, it was wonderful and there were masses of butterflies and we were running around and chasing them and generally having a good time.  Eventually I got to school to find the playground deserted, all the classroom doors were closed, I was late!!

I reached up and opened the door and everyone turned and stared, open-mouthed, at me.  Of course I dissolved into tears and absolutely howled with mortification, I was inconsolable.  Not only late, but Miss Hawkins had already started on the daily Bible Story, the best bit of the day.   Miss Hawkins picked me up, put me on her lap, put her arms around me and whispered “You can look at the pictures while I finish reading the story”.  Oh, suddenly for a brief moment, I was in Heaven, I had Miss Hawkins all to myself, but I’m not sure if that episode triggered off my obsession with punctuality. 

Junior School was a bit of a shock, apart from the 1st year when we had Miss Burgoyne and a class hamster which we could take home for the weekend and wild flowers and birds nests on the Nature table, the following 3 years the teachers were men.    So we got no kindly cuddles from them.  The Headmistress was Miss Katy Powell, very tiny, very Welsh and one piercing glance from her would make grown men quail. 

I absolutely hated my Prep school and was utterly miserable there The Headmistress was a ghastly bullying, snobbish old dragon who blatantly favoured those children whose parents had `respectable` professions e.g. doctor, lawyer.  It took me rather a long time to learn how to read and as for Maths I was frightened of figures and used to feel sick before every Maths lesson. As a result of this,  the horrible old harridan told my mother that it would be advisable to move me to a school for "special" children, a euphamism for what we would now refer to as children with "learning difficulties". Except I didn`t.  I was just scared and too shy to say "Help! I don`t understand this". Ghastly old bag

Bah humbug!

I hated school. Every Bliddy day of it !

Another memory from the Infants, I was about 6.   I used to go home for lunch, I only lived 5 minutes from the school and I think my Mother thought school meals weren’t nutritious (although I can’t recall what she used to give me).  I went back to school and lined up for roll-call and suddenly everyone was laughing and pointing at me and saying “A clown has come to school!”

I looked down and saw, to my horror, that after taking off my school shoes on arriving home and putting on slippers I had forgotten to take them off when I left, had gaily skipped back with Candy my invisible pony without a care,  and I was standing here in my Noddy slippers complete with bells!  Also, my Mother had kissed me goodbye and I had lipstick on my cheeks.  Again, the shame, the mortification. 

And that’s what school days were to me, not succeeding however hard I tried except in English, French and Art, sweating  with anxiety in case no-one picked you to be a member of their team, being totally uncoordinated so rounders and tennis were a nightmare, having to do PE in my knickers because I had forgotten my kit, sarcastic Mr. Day who taught singing in the Juniors, being told I might as well not bother with the recorder anymore let along anything else, horrible boys who ambushed you in the alley and pelted you with snowballs, Mr. Vaux (Juniors) who had an unerring aim with a piece of chalk, having knuckles rapped with a ruler, being made to stand outside in the freezing cold quadrangle because you had sinned.

Being top in spelling in the Juniors’ Friday test was about the highpoint of my early school days. 

Prep school was hell.  Because I could already read, I was put up a year within a week of arriving at school, and at the age of four a year is a big difference - I was undersized, under-socialised, short-sighted and bullied like fury in an environment of muscular Christianity where the alleged rough-and-tumble was supposed to be character-building.  It may seem incredible now, but boxing was part of the curriculum from the age of four!  Of course I didn't tell my parents about the nightmare; there was an elaborate system of informal rules to stop you from squealing and, in any case, one learns to consider it as normal.  It was only years later, in a long night of conversation at Oxford with a couple of contemporaries from the same North London hell-hole (and the aid of quite of alcohol) that I was able to get some of this out of my system and realised that loads of other people were suffering the same thing.

In contrast, my public school - the day-boy offshoot of an altogether grander institution built on a hill in North-West London - was an altogether more enjoyable affair - in particular there was a lot of music, performed to a high standard (I first encountered the Bach Passions by singing in school performances) and some fantastic teachers.  Ian Whybrow, the children's author (of Harry and the Dinosaurs fame) was an inspirational Head of English; the Chemistry teacher (and my housemaster), Mr Vernon, a large avuncular tweedy man who was always willing to share his passion for Wagner; but the star was the history teacher, Mr Podmore; a small, pedantic, fussy man who was redeemed by his utter passion for his subject and his ability to enthuse boys.  And he taught us how to write; thirty years on, writing technical reports and research proposals, I can still hear his pedantic Mancunian tones extolling the virtues of plain English and restraint in the use of adjectives.

There was, of course, the usual sprinkling of sociopaths and lunatics among the teaching staff (this was in the days when no teaching qualifications were required to teach in the private sectors, and there were a lot of Old Boys who seemed never to have moved on), but it's the inspirational ones that stick in the mind.

Edit: Minor amendment made to excise redundancy that would certainly have earned the wrath of Pod