School for Tomboys

By Alex Binney

The girls at St. Bridget’s School for Young Ladies are not really bad. Hyperactive? Definitely. Mischievous? Undoubtedly. In need of control? Without a doubt. And perhaps some of them are more than a little wicked, irresponsible, immature, foolhardy...

But the school, a former convent now supposedly educating the most refined British schoolgirls from the most responsible, upper class families, is mismanaged by misguided educationalists who seem to expect that the girls will behave in a proper and responsible manner. And when a new headmistress takes over and relaxes the rules in the firm belief that it will have a positive effect on the girls’ behaviour, it all goes from bad to worse – in a hilarious series of misadventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strict Publishing International
• Release date: Dec 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857793263

Alex Binney

Alex is a well established English author of murder mystery novels. He took early retirement as a manager from a major UK bank to pursue his first love of writing murder mysteries. Over the years he has devised numerous plots which he did not have chance to bring to his readership whilst pursuing his bank career. Divorced, he lives in Plymouth, Devon, UK, and you can correspond with him on Facebook.

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SCHOOL FOR TOMBOYS

by Alex Binney

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Alex Binney

Published by Strict Publishing International

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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DEDICATED TO MY GOOD FRIENDS

Adrian and Bridget

...who know what teaching is all about and dedicated their lives to all that is good in educating the young.

Schoolgirl’s Lament

I can hardly recall...

In fact there’s nothing there at all...

Possibly an ember of some sort

A flickering of some thought...

It comes and goes I find

Like some trick of the mind

Flittering about

Hinting it will shout

So that it becomes so clear

Not like a whisper in the ear

And then with great relief so true

It will suddenly come to you

That which you’ve been trying

So hard to remember...

It’s no longer an ember

It’s staring you

Right in the face

As plain as a pikestaff...

End of the race

What was it now

That you’d tried to recall?

Something about...?

Was it important at all?

Well it’s gone now

That’s the truth of the thing

Out of my brain

Like an empty drain

Was it important?

I shall never know...

Or perhaps I might

If I concentrate...

Which is hard to do...

I’m only a child

Oh well, no point in worry

At my age there’s no need to hurry

It will all come back

And whenever it does

I’ll realise it wasn’t important...

Nothing ever is.

Map designed by Martin Smith,

Bretonside Copy, Plymouth, UK

Tel: [phone]

CHAPTER ONE: St. Bridget’s School

When Miss Martha Littlebottom first clapped eyes on St. Bridget’s School for Young Ladies, she was filled with dread.

And as the years passed, she had every reason to feel that way.

For in the year of 2004, the nervous young woman who stood outside the former nunnery was just about to assume the headship of one of the oldest private schools for girls in England.

It is situated in the small hamlet of Molesworthy, near Church Stretton on the A49 in Shropshire.

The building is over three hundred and sixty years old and was a former convent. The Order of The Sacred Heart was a secretive and reclusive nunnery which, when the last of the old nuns had died off two hundred years ago, became a workhouse for destitute mothers and their offspring. Then it became a private school for girls in 1858.

Before Miss Littlebottom took up her new position, she had been the head teacher at a state school in London, where discipline was easy to maintain in a ‘mixed-sex’ environment.

In total, St Bridget’s houses 300 pupils of which 100 are boarders.

The old nunnery was not large enough to accommodate the full intake of students when it came to instruction and, in spite of an extension being added, several of the classes were held outside the main building in five Portacabins which were dotted about the acreage.

Today, St. Bridget’s enjoys a reputation for educating young ladies to a high level of refinement and etiquette, as well as producing energetic and academic young women ready to face the world once they have completed their education.

Now all that was about to change. For, in the year of Our Lord 2004, the regime of the old headmistress, Miss Agatha Topnotch, was about to end. She had bestowed upon the school and its teachers the strictest code of disciplines and scholarship, notwithstanding the waywardness of many of its pupils.

The new headmistress, Miss Martha Littlebottom, was of quite the opposite view to Miss Topnotch in that she was of the relaxed persuasion: that is to say, she believed in giving students their head in order to bring out the best in them. This would prove to be a mistake; such an approach was to bring out the worst in the cares under her charge, rather than the anticipated beneficial effects.

It was January 5th 2004 when Miss Littlebottom took over. She had summoned her teaching staff together and had explained to them the changes she intended to bring about in the day-to-day running of the school. There were a number of muted protests from the teachers assembled in the staff room, but none of them dared to voice their objections out loud.

Now let me tell you a little about Miss Littlebottom. She was thirty-three years of age and had been engaged twice. She was not very pretty. In fact, the less kindly of people she associated with said that she was uncommonly ugly. That was because she had a rather large nose and pimply skin. Yet, whenever Miss Littlebottom looked in a mirror, all she could see was a vision of loveliness.

It’s amazing how some people can deceive themselves, isn’t it?

Besides Miss Littlebottom, there were fifteen teachers employed at the school. Classes were twenty pupils in size for ages 11 to 16, and thirty for the ages of 17 and 18.

When Miss Littlebottom first entered the school building, she felt a shiver run down her spine. It was as though she could imagine the ghosts of the former nuns wandering about.

The corridors in the old building were drafty and her footsteps echoed as she walked along the flagstone flooring. On the upper floors, the floorboards creaked.

On top of the teaching staff, the school also employed two nurses, with a local doctor on call, a janitor and three cleaning staff. Five ladies were employed to do the catering and worked full-time in the kitchen.

As regards the teachers, when Miss Littlebottom first came to the school the staff consisted of the following:

Miss Sylvia Prude, Assistant Head

Miss Phoebe Plumb, Mr. Frederick Furze, Mathematics

Miss Edna Flockhart, Mr. Stanley Stump, English

Miss Lulu Lapstick, Geography and Games

Miss Cynthia Humdrum, History

Miss Nesta Nutworthy, French

Mr. Jeremy Toga, Latin and Games

Miss Avery Aston, Chemistry

Mr. Arthur Awkward, Physics and Games

Miss Agnes Asbender, German

Miss Henrietta Loosend, Physical Training

Mr. Dick Dopey, Spanish

Miss Zena Copley, Biology.

Miss Littlebottom remembered being introduced to them by Miss Topnotch just before she retired. It was another reason for the new head to feel uneasy. She did not like the look of them!

The school janitor, Horace Hoggins, had been at the school for fifteen years, was now well into his fifties and was said to be ‘short of a few shillings’ when it came to being quick on the uptake. The cleaning ladies found him highly amusing when he got his words ‘all mixed up’ and was trying to issue them with cleaning instructions.

The cleaning ladies all lived locally and did their cleaning at 6 a.m. before the boarders rose for breakfast at 7.30 a.m.

Lilah Lapwing was the head cleaner, and Doris Dipstick and Valerie Vole were her assistants. All these ladies were in their early to mid-forties.

The nurse, Hannah Hapless, was a jovial, stoutish lady who was always in a jolly mood: nobody ever caught her sulking. The other nurse, Mildred Moody, was a miserable individual, always moaning about something or other – the complete opposite to Hannah. She was very tall and very thin and was always looking at the nurse’s watch on her chest as she wished the day away.

The catering staff were nearly always to be found in the school kitchen. Mrs. Sybil Peppermill was a trained cook and in charge, and her four helpers Audrey Acorn, Edna Buttock, Minnie Mole and Lilly Lope were passable cooks who did all the hard work such as peeling the potatoes, stripping cabbage, grating carrots and so on, not to mention the washing up afterwards. More about them later.

So there it was, on January 5th 2004, as Martha Littlebottom stared at the austere-looking building in front of her and trembled with a certain amount of trepidation.

She drew in a deep breath and entered the school for the first time as its new headmistress...

CHAPTER TWO: The Snail Race

The weather in July of that year was not very good.

It had rained most of the time. This meant that the girls who were being taught in the Portacabins often got caught out for not having a raincoat or umbrella with them, so that when they got back to the main school a lot of them were soaked.

On Wednesday 14th July, Class 2B had finished a French lesson with Miss Nutworthy in Portacabin 3, and were due to have a double chemistry lesson in the school laboratory at 2.10 p.m.

Once the French teacher had left them to move onto their next class, the girls noted that the rain had stopped but the grass outside was covered in snails that had been attracted out of their hiding places by the wet weather.

Hillary ‘Ginger’ Hargreaves was the ringleader in Class 2B, being taller than her classmates and very authoritarian in her ways.

Let’s pick up these snails and take them to chemistry, she said to the others.

What for? asked Jemima ‘Snotty’ Hanky, so called because she suffered from a permanent runny nose.

So we can have a snail race.

There were some takers, but not all. Some of the girls found the snails repulsive, and refused to take part. But eight of them were keen and followed Ginger’s lead.

When they arrived at the chemistry laboratory, Miss Aston was waiting for them. Her working area was a long raised desk with the girls sitting at workbenches at a lower level.

Miss Aston was a woman of plain face. She was very skinny and had long bony hands. She was now a confirmed spinster at forty-three years of age and, like Miss Longbottom, had been engaged twice, but her would-be husbands in each case found a reason to call things off.

One of the girls’ benches was immediately below Miss Aston’s long desk, and the teacher could not see the whole of the girls’ bodies who were seated at this particular bench, being directly beneath her from where she was standing; only their heads and shoulders were visible. It was at this bench that ‘Ginger’ Hargreaves and her eight ‘snail gatherers’ were seated.

Good afternoon, girls, said Miss Aston brightly.

Good afternoon, Miss Aston, said the girls in unison.

At this point some of the girls started giggling as they produced their snails out of view from the teacher.

"What’s