The pashes and bashes of boarding school

OPINION: Let me sweep aside the veil on latent lesbianism in New Zealand girls' boarding schools of the past, since British author Fay Weldon has already twitched that Terylene.

It was alive and throbbing in my boarding school long after she dwelt in Christchurch Girls' High School dormitories; not a matter of girls having dirty minds – which they do – but of sheer, nagging boredom. It was something to do. We weren't allowed to listen to the radio, after all, there was no TV, and the showers were communal.

I savoured the response to Weldon's vivid recall last week by a contemporary of hers, Nan Scoones, 81. "I never even knew what a homosexual was until I was 20 years old and my brother told me," Ms Scoones declared, adding that "if any lesbianity went on, I'm sure it was extremely well concealed... "

I picture Ms Scoones being a very competent arranger of flowers, a collector of china squirrels.

"You have to remember Fay Birkinshaw [Weldon's maiden name] was built on the lines of a Sherman tank... The way she and [her friend] went on, it was like having a crush on someone," she added, cattily.

There is a rather famous portrait of Weldon and her sister, painted by Rita Angus, which shows a healthy-looking apple-cheeked girl with a mischievous smile, hardly a human tank, yet in girls' school dormitories the old finely honed nastiness about each other's appearance and foibles sparkled afresh in those words.

God help you if you had ears that stuck out, red hair, a large bottom, freckles, buck teeth, fat ankles, a short neck, large moles in prominent places, or a splodge for a nose. You were doomed to carry a graphic nickname you'd wear for the rest of your life.

British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes last week recalled with bitterness the bullying at Eton, saying that even 50 years later he contemplates revenge. He has said that none of the hardships of polar exploration came close to the misery he suffered as a schoolboy, though he was bullied verbally rather than physically. Among girls, too, the tongue is the preferred weapon. Its sting is more long-lasting than scratches.

Like Weldon's, no doubt, my girls' school was drenched in religion. We prayed when we got up in the morning, at assembly, before we went to bed, before and after meals, and on Sundays we had church twice. In fairness, this was hardly going to obliterate anyone's dawning amorphous lust. Not even our grey interlock knickers could kill that off.

Books were few, lest they pollute the mind, but organised games were compulsory. The girls we admired were athletic, racing about in gym shorts with hockey sticks or tennis racquets. A trace of boyishness was considered appealing – by both staff, one felt, and fellow pupils. The games captain was always a special girl.

Girls being curious, the movements of live-in staff after dark and again at sunrise were noted in detail, and full reports made. We relayed the choicer details to our families, who probably thought we made it up.

Crushes are not – to use Ms Scoones' delightful word – lesbianity, but they were incessant. We called them pashes. If there'd been boys to have pashes on, we'd have had them, but we only saw boys at church, in scouting uniforms, across the pews, or at weekly ballroom dancing classes when we were older. Our hormones were on constant alert, but the vicars we saw between times were feeble targets for lust.

It was an atmosphere in which no affectionate word was ever spoken, in which the matrons boxed our ears, or washed our mouths out with soap and water, for effrontery. We hated most of them, single women who had lost, or never had, husbands, and who had no great liking for children. In that context, if some girls wandered about permanently holding hands and huddled up together, it was understandable.

I wish I'd thought of it.

I was maybe 12 when I asked older girls what the word "lesbian" meant, and they laughed. So there was a word describing why one older girl kept climbing into other girls' beds and was finally asked to leave, and also explaining, in due course, why another sporty girl killed herself.

Weldon writes of "a hum of repressed lesbianism". It was not always repressed, and it was certainly ever-present – like tinnitus. She also mentions girls having "unexpressed and guilty passions for each other", and indeed they did.

That would explain the racket from the music practice rooms, where pianos nightly belted out, with furious intensity, "Fur Elise" and "The Robin's Return". Perhaps it also explains the endless hockey we were subjected to, for which there is no other reasonable excuse.

rosemary.mcleod@star-times.co.nz