Children of the Master. Andrew Marr

It attracted the offspring of television celebrities, and it was the most successful sporting girls’ school in the Home Counties: its hockey team thrashed the London day schools, and it had one of the best girls’ football teams in England. It was a school parents boasted of; but to thrive there, you needed not only to be pretty, but to have a poisonous tongue and a hide like an armoured personnel carrier. Suicide attempts were not unknown, though none had recently been successful when Caroline Phillips, long-limbed and handsome, glowing with self-confidence, had been dropped off by her nervous parents and left with two large suitcases to unpack.

      She, and they, had expected a dormitory, but by that time the girls got their own bedrooms, although bathrooms were shared. Trying to forget the empty feeling in her tummy as the family Audi turned and headed back down the school driveway, Caro had just begun laying out the lilac-striped shirts, the blue skirts and endless pairs of white socks when suddenly her door was shoved open by a pack of hunting girls, smelling of tobacco and peppermint. She was shoved down onto the bed, her cases upended on the floor, and she was subjected to an hour of relentless questioning – boys; fit brothers; bleeding yet? Did she do herself? Ciggies; pills; any spare cash?

      Humiliated but dry-eyed, she survived. Before they’d left she had handed over the £60 her father had said should last her the whole term, and a small box containing a pair of earrings, just given to her by her mother as a starting-school present.

      ‘We are the bitches, we are the witches. Make us rich and never snitch, or we’ll cut your throat, no hitches,’ Farola Ponsonby and Africa Crewe chanted as they left her.

      Caro wondered whether her looks and her ability on the hockey pitch might not, after all, be enough to protect her. She carefully refolded her clothes and put them away. She pulled out the framed photographs of her parents and her brother. And she put them away too.

      It was several days later, while playing table tennis, that Caro first noticed Pep. Pep was very tall, very thin, freckled, with intense dark eyes and cascades of black hair. And yes, there was some acne. The thinness was not unusual at Queen Eleanor’s – even the teachers joked that each year was divided into A and B streams, anorexia or bulimia. But the intensity of Pep’s stare was extraordinary. The moment their eyes met, Pep looked away again, but Caro felt an instant, completely unfamiliar shudder.

      The two girls soon struck up a friendship based on reading, cheerfully incompetent hockey and music. They hung around together. In year four, Caroline put an arm around Pep’s bony back. In year five, Pep returned her kiss; her mouth smelled of peppermint, and their tongues touched. By then they were leaders in the school Christian Union, and were an admired, deferred-to couple. At Queen Eleanor’s this was hardly exceptional. The school had a long-established Sapphic reputation, and at a time in British history when lesbianism was going mainstream, this caused barely a ripple among the parents. To have a gay daughter was, for a dull executive on the London commute, chic.

      As for the staff, they had plenty of other things to worry about. Caroline and Pep were among the girls who had developed to a fine art the communal destruction of teachers. One of them might begin to hum, in a high tone, in the middle of a lesson. Another would pick up the hum, and it would spread around the class. As soon as the teacher pounced in one direction, the noise billowed up from another. Group punishments had no effect. There is nothing half as frightening and destructive as a group of middle-class English girls intent on mischief, and Queen Eleanor’s was not alone in being unable to cope.

      The high mistress, the chief uncoper, was a large-bosomed, horse-faced woman whose greatest talent was her inability to see what was going on in front of her nose. Everything about the school was marvellous. Her girls were marvellous. She was lucky in her marvellous staff. She had surrendered long ago. She walked the corridors with a glassy, painted grin, in a bubble of invincible optimism. It so chanced that idiot opti-mism, an inability to see looming disaster on every side, was a considerable skill in the Britain of her time. She could have run anything – a lousy, malodorous hospital; a violent, drug-infested prison; a tax-squandering, inept government department. In each case her smile would have been as bright, her self-confidence as intact, and her calmness hugely reassuring to all who worked for her. Everything would have been splendid.

      So there was, as far as the high mistress was concerned, no ‘mucking around’ at Queen Eleanor’s. Once, and once only, she had been persuaded by a newspaper article of the need to give the girls a lecture. But all her glossy circumlocutions had made this entirely pointless: the younger girls had no idea what she meant by ‘skulking in dark corners’, and the older ones had simply tittered. Anyway, the teaching staff were almost unanimous that the alternative – insanitary, dangerous and occasionally life-wrecking ‘messing about’ with boys – was worse. As the deputy head once remarked, ‘I’m so old I can remember when the girls who kneeled were the pious ones.’

      By the time they were in the upper sixth, of course, Caro and Pep had fallen out, and were barely speaking. Caroline’s charisma meant that she was constantly surrounded by admirers – sporty girls, musical girls, oddball girls. Pep, meanwhile, embracing her frizzy, black-eyed eccentricity, had plunged into darker places, cutting and ‘restricting’ and reading far too deeply.

      The day came when Caroline’s parents were called in for the ‘What next?’ conversation with the headmistress.

      ‘Caroline is exceptionally talented. She will do exceedingly well. She has done marvellously here and we have done marvellously with her. But we cannot quite decide, just at this moment, at what, exactly, dear Caroline will excel.’

      Her mother asked what sort of careers Queen Eleanor’s girls tended to pursue.

      ‘In the old days, it was all public service – the Foreign Office, the army, and so on. But …’ Her voice faded away. This was a hard one. In the Queen Eleanor’s Chronicle she had become a past headmistress of the art of euphemism. Patti Vidal, undoubtedly the stupidest girl the school had ever known, had become a glamour model, largely famous for her hindquarters. Few of Patti’s films could be referred to by name, never mind seen, by decent people. ‘Actress’, the headmistress had written firmly. ‘Royal Shakespeare Company, etc.’ Amy Brewer and Madelyn Strindberg, from the following year, were currently serving time in a Singaporean prison after a few exciting months as drugs mules. ‘Working in international pharmaceuticals’ appeared against their names. Lorraine Gatto, who had been a senior prefect, had apparently now opened a dungeon off Sloane Square, complete with whipping bench, nipple clamps, a suspendable cage and other useful gadgets. The headmistress had thought long and hard about Lorraine – such an obliging girl – before writing the single word ‘Rehabilitation’.

      But, faced with these transparently pleasant and intelligent parents, she hesitated. ‘Many of our girls these days go into entertainment – film, television, music, that kind of thing – and others do charity work. But Caroline is especially gifted. Everybody wants to be her friend, you see. She sings like a bullfrog and dances like a cow, but she lights up a room.’

      ‘You’re not suggesting she just waits around to find some chap to marry, I hope,’ her mother said.

      ‘Absolutely not. With the spread of pre-nups and so forth, we no longer recommend marriage. No. The extraordinary thing about Caroline is that people believe her. I think she needs to do something quite big, perhaps something in public life.’

      ‘Politics? She says she’d like to read politics at Edinburgh.’

      ‘You know, I was thinking more of banking. I think she’s too nice, too straightforward, for politics,’ said the headmistress.

      She had rarely ever said anything as nice about any girl to her parents; but on this occasion she was dead wrong. Caroline was perfect for politics.

      Pep’s parents, who had adopted her as a young child, never actually turned up to see the headmistress. There was no need. Their girl was utterly determined on a religious vocation. Her mum and dad joked that she’d become a nun. They were spared that. Angela studied theology at Sheffield, and after a year travelling in South America, she returned determined for ordination as a priest in the Church of England. Since they had left Queen Eleanor’s,