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School Days.Bizarre school experiences for girls…
We had one teacher who was eccentric and taught us such stuff as electro-biology and discoursed on hypnotism and spiritualism. She was attractive and had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen. She fascinated me and got quite an uncanny influence over me. She used to disappear for days at a time and we used to hear weird stories of her having drunk all the /
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water from the jug in her bedroom and of her suffering agonies with neuralgia. But it turned out that she drank or took drugs and she was quietly sent away and we never saw or heard from her again.
When I returned home that summer I refused to go back and it was decided I should leave school for good. But an interfering cousin got hold of my Mother and told her I was quite uneducated and could not even address an envelope properly.
At that time the first School on really modern lines was started called a High School. It had nothing to do with the official Education Authorities as High Schools have to-day. It was run by two ladies, sisters, who were highly educated in the modern Girton and Newnham way, and it was advertised as for the “daughters of gentlemen only.”
My age put me in the highest class but I was absolutely unable to do the work as it was entirely different from anything I had done before in the slip-shod methods of other days. But we all were supposed to sit for the local Cambridge examination in which no girl from the school had ever failed to pass.
Then began two years only to be described as “grind”. After the first year I passed an examination of the College of Preceptors and at the end of two years the Senior Cambridge Examination with a distinction in English.
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