A couple of years before I left England I went to a fancy dress party disguised as a penguin, complete with beak hastily constructed from orange cardboard and string. A colleague from work was the hit of the evening when she sauntered in dressed in a gymslip, white shirt, striped tie, and black stockings, an ensemble immediately identifying her as a sixth-former attending St Trinian's School For Girls.
Not being certain if the series is as well-known in this country I shall scribble a line or two about their content. Here I am talking about the original films, not the remakes, so if you know the former, talk among yourselves until the next couple of paragraphs end.
Why does the British public have such affection for the St Trinian's films? Inspired by Ronald Searle's cartoons, they are set in a boarding school where anarchy rules and pupils run wild, tormenting teachers, each other, the residents of a nearby town or indeed anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with them Perhaps the appeal is to that little bit of wildness in all of us when we see chaos let loose in an educational setting, where traditionally (To Sir With Love notwithstanding) all is expected to be orderly and quiet and fourth-formers do not concoct spirituous liquors and create explosives in the lab, not to mention constructing deadly traps for the headmistress and staff. Drinking, smoking, and gambling are routine and so are melees during hockey matches. Indeed, the school song brazenly celebrates trampling on the weakest and declares might is always right. Whichever form was involved, however, there was some hope of reform -- none of the girls ever swore.
Every member of staff is depicted as not on the up and up and almost certainly involved in shady doings past and present while the fourth-formers (aged around fourteen) are spectacularly untidy with holes in their stockings, wild hair, and disreputable straw hats. They are capable of and glory in criminal behaviour -- one of Searle's cartoons shows a teacher grilling her class on who had burned the school's east wing down the previous night. Pupils are violent, their weapons of choice being various types of sports equipment, with hockey sticks a particular favourite. On the other hand, the seventeen or eighteen year old sixth-formers are more interested in higher matters, especially the opposite sex, having bloomed into bosomy young women wearing thigh-length gymslips, revealing glimpses of their suspenders. Note to young 'uns: you should know suspender belts and stocking tops were considered as racy as all get when the original films were made.
By contrast, the all-girl grammar school I attended had a strict dress code. Gymslips had to reach our knees and the hem of shorts worn for sports were required to touch the ground when we knelt. Observed on public byways eating or not wearing a school hat or beret while in uniform merited punishment. Urchins at a school lower down the hill from ours had discovered this and attempted to grab one or the other off our heads and run away with it on many occasions. Worse transgressions while abroad in uniform were smoking or talking to a boy. One year a rumour swept the lower forms claiming a pupil had been seen in one such conversation on the street and was punished for it. Even though the fellow in question was her brother -- or so it was said.
The only thing we had in common with St Trinian's were prefects, sixth-formers with the power to hand out penalties for breaking the rules of conduct. Generally they were tasks such as learning an extract from Shakespeare or writing a hundred lines declaring the miscreant must not do whatever it was they'd done. The only time I had to submit lines was because of running in the corridor. I still claim I was just walking fast and everyone else was slow-poking along. A touch of irony enters the picture at this point, given when I took my lines up to the sixth-formers' common room under the eaves of the Victorian building in which the school was housed, the opened door revealed a haze of cigarette smoke.
However, at this remove I feel it is safe to reveal I was guilty of a little bit of wildness myself since I always wore my school beret at a truly rakish angle. Provided of course one of the young hellions from down the hill had not made off with it.
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