Victoria Owens and Nick Barton reflect on their very different experiences of private schooling
Although Henrietta Heald (Letters, 19 December) is correct in saying that girls by and large are not admitted to Eton, that is not to say that being female necessarily spares you from the trammels of the independent boarding school system. In the 1970s, I spent six years at Wycombe Abbey, a girls’ public school in Buckinghamshire. My parents thought that by buying a “good” education for me, they were acting in my best interests.
Homesick, useless both at lacrosse and tennis, anarchic – “Why shouldn’t I go shopping in my free time? It’s what every normal 16-year-old does,” I once argued to my dismayed housemistress – and endlessly at war with the totalitarian regime of the place, I was an unhappy square peg in a round hole. At university, I lost my way badly – I scraped a third-class degree and seem to have spent the rest of my life trying to recover.
