Boarding in Bideford

When we were in Germany my brother and sisters all went to boarding school.  I didn’t go until after middle school at the age of 13.  I was by now an avid reader and hoped that I would have many adventures whilst boarding like many of the characters in my books.  The first adventure was flying alone, where I would meet up with another girl who was also flying from Germany to England, we would then get to London and catch a train where we would meet up with many other girls travelling to our school. On our return  trip we would often have time to spare in London, so would go into clothing shops and try on all the clothes we would like, but couldn’t afford.

Edgehill School for Girls was a great school where I made some lovely friends my best friend was a girl called Lily who would travel from Hong Kong, sadly we lost touch a few year after leaving boarding school due to us both moving around so much. We shared a love of Mills and Boons books and had promised to invite each other to our weddings when we finally found our perfect man.

I did a lot of sport at boarding school and not only carried on with swimming, but took up tennis where my teacher said I had great technique, I just needed to get the ball over the net. I was on the netball team, and I took up hockey. We had an unusual hockey pitch which dipped towards the centre, so when running the ball up the pitch you had to compensate for the slope.  We had a great team and I went on to play for the North Devon under 16’s and got my hockey colours. 

Sadly I didn’t carry on with craft at boarding school, as it was considered a non-academic subject, but I did develop my creative writing skills.  We had a lovely teacher who would collect the dinner scraps for her pigs.  She would give us a sentence that we then had to make into a story, for example ‘She found herself in a large, dark cave’, we then finished the story, but we were never allowed to finish with ‘and then she woke up!’