To be disturbed by this Jilly Cooper anecdote forcibly stripping clothes off a teacher at school?

[Jane379]

I was reading some articles on Jilly Cooper recently and was quite disturbed by this anecdote about her time at boarding school in the 1940s-50s: ' ‘We undressed Miss Harris, got her down to her petticoat, poor thing, and just jumped on her. She was wriggling on the floor like a fly. Poor woman! So we were punished and not allowed to have cake for tea that day!’

https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/magazines/essex/22628679.jilly-cooper-recalls-earliest-essex-memories/

  What? I suppose I find it really hard to believe since usually you read about awful treatment of students at schools like that, not the reverse. I suppose some schools must have been more lax then, assuming it's true. Poor woman, indeed...

“It was the best of times, the worst of times.”

This..!

Agree with this too.

I always thought Cooper came from an aristocratic family since those were the kinds of people she wrote about, but this doesn't seem to have been the case. Her family were apparently prominent figures in Yorkshire so maybe this had some influence in what sounds like a frankly hard to believe situation.

Unless it was a fantasy as pp suggested...I hope so. I can't imagine what a horrible experience it must have been if true ..

In an interview from 8 years earlier, she sounds a bit more contrite :
'My three mates and I were terrible. It makes me blush to remember now that we de-bagged Miss Harris, our sweet junior housemistress. She was pretty but rather wet, and we took off her cardigan, her shirt, her tweed skirt and her shoes, and there she was, wriggling like a fly in her petticoat, when the housemistress caught us. I think our punishment was to be denied cake for a week.'

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/my-best-teacher-202

You can say that again! 40s surely not 'best' but 50s had better economy etc

Her books are full of explicit sexual assaults designed to titillate so that is unsurprising that she saw such an attack as jolly japes