• Nursery, age 3, one of the staff washed my mouth out with soap because Pia Jordan told her I’d “said the eff word”. I’d never even heard of said expletive in that form, let alone as the word itself. What I had said to Pia was that I didn’t want to play families, I was going to read by myself. Staff member in question had refused to believe my name was indeed my name the first time we met & was genuinely angry that I was right about, um, my name & its spelling. She absolutely knew I’d said no such thing & also knew I’d not tell anyone what she’d done. Thankfully she didn’t get too far into things before Elizabeth Millard came hurtling to my rescue. (This was the late 1980s, so she’d no business trying any kind of corporal punishment).
• My Y1 teacher used to let us sit on her lap while she took the register!
• My Y2 teacher pretended my friend Fiona & I hadn’t been the first to complete “Granny’s Garden” even after she started feeding the right answers to other pairs. She basically bullied me for a year for that dreadful sin of Being Clever. She also made us lift up our vests in one PE lesson to show how much our ribcages stuck out/how bony they were; & heaped praise on Grace for how visible her ribs were.
• The Infant School Head used to see us one on one in her office if we did particularly good work - completely innocent, but unimaginable now!
• My class teacher for Y4 & Y5 used to tell us we were “cruising for a bruising” (complete with a shake of his fist or punching the palm of his left hand with his right fist) if we answered a question incorrectly. He’d roar at the class quite routinely; once bent a bin out of shape when in a temper with us; & told Kitoto she wasn’t to sing, just mime, when we went to sing carols at the nursing home next to the Junior School.
• My Y6 Monitor role was to assist in the Office - I’d access to all sorts of confidential information as well as doing all sorts of admin work that a student really shouldn’t have been! The other Monitors were doing things like feeding the school fish or choosing hymns for assembly (then controlling the OHP if/when they chose something outwith the hymnbook).
• In Y7 a PE teacher stepped backwards & onto me as I was doing a backwards roll. Her full weight through my spine - not for long, but even briefly it was excruciating. She then yanked me up off the floor when I said I couldn’t get up; & told me that I wasn’t to tell my [widowed] father what had happened because it would worry him for no reason. I have permanent damage from this but didn’t tell my father until I was well into adulthood exactly what the “accident” was that meant a trip to the GP a fortnight later because I still couldn’t walk properly & was being reduced to tears by my attempts to.
• Also Y7, my Director of Studies (head of year) gave out to me for having been off school (as instructed by my GP) with tonsillitis, saying she’d sent her daughter in with it. She layered this up with telling me I was making my father’s life much harder & doubtless causing him issues at work by being off school.
• In Y9 a PE teacher told me off for disturbing everyone in my room’s sleep. By having a nightmare about my dead mother & waking myself up sobbing & calling out for her. I don’t blame the others for being freaked out, unsure of what to do &/or going to find a teacher. A grown woman giving out to a vulnerable & clearly traumatised teenager for having a nightmare? Grotesque. Mind you, she also tried to give out to me ahead of said trip because my father complained that she’d put my mother as my contact on the trip phone tree. My mother having died when I was in Y5, so not any kind of “accidentally used old information” thing. She first tried “why don’t you give this to your father immediately?!” (I had, as soon as I got back into the country) then “why did you give it to your father rather than coming to see me so I could correct it?!” - leaning right into how I’d chosen to upset him.
• That said, as PE staff go I think the worst was the male Maths/PE teacher who had an affair with a Y11 when I was in Y7.
• 6th formers used to drink in the local pub at lunchtimes. Any teachers also in said pub ignored them.
• When I was in 6th form our choir mistress was on jury service for several weeks. In her absence I was expected to run choir & chamber choir rehearsals before school & at lunch in the massively-isolated music rooms.
• Outside school, I used to be left running a Brownie Unit of 24 girls by myself from age 11 while the adult Leaders went to clean the brass in the church next to our hall. Sometimes they went through the door dividing the two spaces, but sometimes they had to go round the outside of the hall to get to the church - including, of course, on the occasion a girl sliced her thumb open curling ribbons. Having been repeatedly told to do it over closed scissors, the minute I was busy elsewhere she used the blade, scissors wide open. I had to send 2 “sensible” Brownies to fetch an adult back & have another one start a sitting down game while I tried to stop the bleeding etc.
• I sustained 2 serious injuries on Guide camps as a Young Leader. For neither of them was I taken to the hospital as I should have been - the Leaders didn’t want to do the paperwork on either occasion; & on the former, they didn’t actually have enough adults for someone to take me! Both caused permanent damage. Makes me think quite fondly of the Scouters who held me over the campfire on a Cub camp I helped cater for - again as a YL, on which I shared a caravan with the Leader of the Guide Unit I volunteered with (again, safeguarding, what safeguarding?).