Kate Middleton has asked her wedding guests and well-wishers to donate money to Beatbullying, a British anti-bullying charity. This announcement has led to some silly stories in the press about how badly she was bullied when she was a pupil at Downe House, a girls boarding school in Berkshire. She was tormented, it’s said, because she was ‘too perfect’, so she left after two terms for Marlborough College, where girls mind perfection less.
I was a couple of years above Kate, or Catherine as she was known, at Downe House. I don’t remember her, but a friend of mine in her year recalls her being ‘quiet and square, with brown hair’. In fact none of my old school pals can remember much about her, which suggests she wasn’t excessively singled out.
What does sound like nonsense is the idea that Kate was picked on for being ‘too pretty’, as my old headmistress claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail. What rubbish! Kate doesn’t appear to have been egregiously attractive at that age, and anyway it is never the pretty ones who get a hard time.
Downe House was undoubtedly a strange place, but not because of any unbearable boarding-school bitchiness. There were duvets and mattresses thrown out of the window in the middle of the night, but this was done more in a spirit of excitement than malice.
Unlike Kate, I was neither sporty nor tall, but I was for the most part left alone. The worst thing that happened to me was one night outside the shower. Some of the older girls rugby tackled me, pinned me down, took my towel off and sprayed my groin with blue hairspray. Then they threw me out into the corridor naked. My housemistress, Mrs Howard, and her vegetarian dogs discovered me curled up on the floor, but they weren’t too interested. ‘Lights out in ten minutes, girls, this is no time for tomfoolery,’ she said in her shrill little voice.
Was it an outrage — an appalling humiliation — or just a rite of passage? Not many of my peers experienced anything as extreme. I thought of it as a joke, really. We all laughed about it at the time, and we still do.
This doesn’t mean that Kate didn’t find her experience at Downe distressing. She was a day girl, for a start. In the cliquey atmosphere of a boarding school, to be a day girl made you an oddity. Day girls tended to keep to themselves, and they were looked on with suspicion. But it’s a mistake to make too much of this. According to some reports, our future queen had poo smeared on her bedsheets. But as a day girl, she wouldn’t have had bedsheets. So I would take that with a pinch of salt.
The real problem at Downe House — and I believe this is true of most other girls’ boarding schools — was not bullying, but eating disorders. Many of the girls were so addicted to starving themselves that they didn’t have the energy to bully anyone.
Anorexia and bulimia were endemic. I’d say well over a quarter of the girls in my year suffered from them in some way. Two girls ended up in hospital. In the loos, the smell of sick could be overwhelming. We would smoke to cover up the smell — and further suppress our appetites. Girls were meant to sign in to the school dining room to make sure they were not skipping meals, but there was nothing to stop us walking straight out again. My peers could be intensely competitive about how little they had eaten or how thin they were. Swimming lessons were a nightmare: a parade of self-loathing stick insects in ugly pea-green swimsuits.
We took laxatives, too. I remember someone discovering chocolate laxatives, to much delight. We would spend happy weekends baking brownies, and the next week in agony in the bathrooms.
By the time I had left Downe House, self-harming with compasses and knives had become another, more popular hobby. There was no easy way for teachers to spot the scars under those long shirts and thick woolly tights.
So, yes, adolescent girls can be bitches, especially when they gather together in packs. But their viciousness towards themselves is far more troubling than the way they torment each other. Instead of tackling bullying, perhaps Kate (who is herself starting to look a little gaunt as the big day approaches) should use her high profile to raise awareness about eating disorders and self-harm.