School trip: My déjeuner sur l’herbe

In 1966 we were 17 and about to do A-levels and leave our convent school for ever at the end of that summer term. Two girls were having a lesbian affair, another had been tempted to sleep with a boy, dramatically confessing this to our head nun, Mother Benedicta, in Mother B’s terrifying private room halfway up the staircase. Our head girl, Vanessa, had an older sister who would roar down to the school on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike along with his friends, known as ‘leather boys’. Vanessa was worried about her sister living in sin. ‘The sins of the flesh are not the worst sins my child,’ Mother B wisely told her. (The sister was still married to her leather boy 50 years later while Vanessa married at least twice, and lived in sin.)

My best friend, Jane, temporarily became a kleptomaniac and was expelled. I never really forgave Mother B for her lack of compassion over this. Two Irish girls would ogle the school gardener’s son, known by them patronisingly as ‘Babyface’. One ex-pupil returned to become a nun and we all attended her postulant’s ceremony in the school chapel. Her Spanish ex-fiancé came. Someone said he was weeping, which we found romantic and sad.

It was in this heady atmosphere that our teacher of French, Mrs Willey, invited those in our class studying for French A-level to lunch at her house in Surrey. Mrs Willey was not even French. In our earlier teens, we’d had elderly, gruff Madame P as our teacher. Madame P had a powdered bouffant, possibly a wig, and a very white-powdered face, and we did dictées with her. Later we had the pretty, blonde, long-legged Mademoiselle S, who read us extracts from Vol de Nuit by Saint-Exupéry — his 1931 novel based on his experiences as an airmail pilot in Argentina. She didn’t stay long but I remember being moved by those lyrical passages about his flights under the stars.

But Mrs Willey, instead of making sure that we knew our set books for the exam, seemed overly keen to show off, pronouncing ‘Racine’ in a special French way, and boasting about her knowledge of French food and culture. I now realise that it was kind of her to invite us A-level students to lunch at her home, but with the callousness of teenagers, we probably took it for granted. In the Sixth, we were allowed to wear home clothes while going out and this could be mortifying. I for one felt scrutinised and uneasy. We were on the cusp of Swinging London, but still mostly wore outfits like our mothers — matching coats and skirts — though that year mini-skirts, in fashion since 1963, became extra short. Vanessa stood out as being glamorous, wearing a floral coat and mini-skirt from a new fashionable boutique co-founded the previous year by one of our old girls.

Perhaps encouraged by the other Sapphic liaison in our class, I had suddenly developed an overwhelming crush on a girl called Joanne with whom I had little in common. She too was studying French A-level and I remember an excruciating longing to touch her hand in Mrs Willey’s house while our teacher generously served us strawberries and cream. I had read my father’s copy of Lolita aged 13 and instead of being shocked by Humbert Humbert’s predatory seduction of a 13-year-old, I was on his side, interpreting the book as a tale of hidden illicit love — like mine for Joanne, or so I thought then.

Returning in the school mini-van, I opened a letter from my mother saying my dog had died. It was difficult for me to take this in then, obsessed with Joanne and worried about leaving school for ever in a few weeks. My dog was part of my childhood, while Mrs Willey perhaps saw herself as Miss Jean Brodie, leading us volatile girls into our unknown futures.

Alas, most of us got Es in French, despite getting As in our other subjects. Thank goodness this disappointing result, and Mrs Willey’s showing off, did not put me off France or French literature, which I discovered on my own later, voluntarily attending a summer course at the Sorbonne on le nouveau roman — it included Proust — and then going to live in Paris.

Twelve years after that lunch, my future husband claimed he’d fallen in love with me because of ‘My Dog’, a short story I’d written about that terrier I had as a child. And I still have my mother’s seven volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. I’m rather tempted to read them again.