Member-only story
I was a good girl at school. Until I wasn’t. I was always neatly turned out, I was one if the girls who wore her tie correctly, whose white socks were always properly pulled up.
I was one of Mrs Deacon’s coterie of adoring admirer. I guess, looking back, she wasn’t beautiful ,but maybe that helped us to relate. But we loved her clothes, the tartan skirts, crocheted tops, beige boots. She was the woman we wanted to be. And then she punished me.
I guess it was the excitement of wanting to talk to my best friend Tina about the new Osmonds single Johnnie Walker had played on his lunchtime programme. I didn’t hear her say
“Shut up the lot of you!. All of you. You. Too Eve.”
I hardly noticed how everyone else had stopped talking. They were all looking at me as sentence was passed.
“Eve, two hundred lines! See me at the end”
I was fighting to hold back the tears when I went to her desk at the end of the lesson.
“Please Miss, I won’t ever do it again. I promise that I won’t do it again.”
“I know you won’t Eve. But you must still be punished. I made it clear there was to be no talking, didn’t I?”
“Yes Miss”
I was glowing red with shame. I watched her take a sheaf of paper from her desk drawer, and write on the top line of the first page
“Silence and obedience are the good schoolgirl’s route to learning.”
