A girls’ boarding school, unwanted sex with rabbits and comic John Moloney

Rabbits and their habits were taught to innocent young girls

After last night, I wish I had gone to a girls’ boarding school in my teenage years.

Last night, I sat between two women who did go to boarding school together and who were reminiscing about their not-so-good old days.

I will call them Mary and Margaret.

They had found a Facebook group thread for their old school:

“Does anyone remember The Rabbit Lady?” said one online comment. “Once a year, the whole school had to sit in the hall for ‘sex education’ while she drew diagrams and prattled on about the reproductive cycle of rabbits.”

“She was The Bunny Woman,” someone else had posted. “So-called because the first ‘sex’ lesson she delivered was all about Mummy Bunny and Daddy Bunny and how they managed to produce all those little bunnies… That’s all she talked about. I don’t remember any follow-up lessons, just the rabbit one. It left us all a bit mystified.”

“Do you remember anything about rabbits?” I asked Mary.

“No, that was before my time,” she replied, “but we had our equivalent of The Rabbit Lady.”

“Did we?” asked Margaret.

“You don’t remember?” asked Mary. “Once a year in the gym? Our whole class – well, two years together – we had to bring our chairs in a semi-circle and sit there and we thought this woman was obviously going to tell us the details of sticking it in and ovaries and stuff like that – maybe making it clearer to us, though we’d guessed some bits – and Catherine asked What are periods? and that was it. The whole lesson was spent talking about what periods were. We weren’t interested. We wanted to know about bits & pieces and hot dogs & sausage rolls.”

“Is there a Facebook page for your school?” Margaret asked me.

There was.

“You have a lot of notable former pupils,” Margaret said, scrolling down the list. “Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Button, Director of RAF Education…”

“Ah!” I lied. “Old ‘Butters’,” I knew him well.” In fact, he was born in 1916, before my parents were even born. But I had known about (though never knew):

Raymond Baxter (1922-2006), TV personality (presenter of now sadly forgotten science series Tomorrow’s World)

and

Sir Trevor Brooking (b.1948), Footballer

and, more interestingly

Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971), Chemist, who had studied at the girls’ school and transferred to the boys’ school at the age of 16 so she could study science.

Then, another surprise to me:

Boyd Hilton (b.1967) TV Editor, Heat Magazine

We scrolled further down the list.

“Good heavens!” I said.

John Moloney (b.1965), Comedian and Writer

“I didn’t know he went to my school,” I said. “I worked with his wife Anna on a Jack Dee TV series. She was wonderful. Phenomenally efficient. John Moloney’s very good. He started out billing himself as an Angry Young Accordionist. I wonder if he learnt it at school.”

“The accordion?” asked Mary.

“Being angry,” I said.

I was not on the list of notable former pupils.

It is good to see that standards have been maintained.

But I would like to know more about Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971), Chemist, who had studied at the girls’ school and transferred to the boys’ school at the age of 16 so she could study science.

If I had known that and if she did that, perhaps I missed my chance and I really could have gone to a girls’ boarding school and learned about sex with rabbits.

Life is full of missed opportunities.

The convent school comedienne who now does the sand dance in Brighton

A few days ago, I blogged about a bizarre night at comedy club Pull The Other One in Herne Hill and a very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head, a beard and what appeared to be an MP3 player plugged into his ears.

Charmian Hughes, who compered an early part of that show, tells me she has now received from the aforementioned gent “a special painting for being intellectual… apparently it has Egyptian connotations.”

This is presumably because the mysterious and rather eccentric gent was impressed by Charmian’s… erm… unique on-stage sand dance, part of her latest hour-long show Charmian Hughes: The Ten Charmandments which she is performing for the next three Sundays at the Quadrant on the Brighton Fringe.

Her show claims to reveal ancient wisdoms “straight from the camel’s mouth” and she will be taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

Charmian was one of the first six girls admitted to Westminster Boys’ School in 1972 which, she says, was a bit of an “intense experience” for her.

“I had come straight from my convent boarding school,” she tells me. ‘I had been educated privately in minor fee-paying convents as the only Catholic in my Protestant family – an accident of various widowings and divorcings. At Westminster, the housemaster who interviewed me hated the head, John Rae, and I think admitted me to annoy him.

“My mother didn’t even really believe in girls’ education – she’d love Afghanistan – but she wanted to shaft my father for the fees and also thought I’d get a rich husband. She really did. My dad never paid up and my mother was very disappointed in me not getting married at 18. But she did frighten off all my male chums by demanding whether their intentions were honourable in a shouty voice.”

From such beginnings are comedians made.