I had a very memorable and somewhat melo-tragic experience of getting into secondary school.

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I was both privileged and underprivileged in the sense that I was within a family who prioritised education and wanted the absolute best for me (school-wise, not emotionally), but we also had no money to allow me to enter these schools without also being the best – in other words, I needed scholarships and bursaries.

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The 11+ process in UK private schools is unique, as far as I know. Whilst university, or college, application processes are competitive around the world and there are clearly many schools outside of the UK with tough entry requirements for secondary level (from 11 to 18, or middle to high school if you go by the US system) it is a pervasive evil across all private and grammar school potentials in this country that pupils at the cruelly young age of 10 or 11 must sit this gruelling set of exams and interviews. Often schools are known to have up to 40 applicants per place, with these odds slimming further each year. It is a premature plunge into the pool of wider existence, realising that your place on earth is shared with many others like you, and not everyone’s going to squeeze into the same lane.

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My mother is Chinese and my father is English. I mention this because there are stereotypes abound for Chinese ‘tiger mums’, though lesser-known tiger breeds also exist within other racial parental tropes, including Nigerian, general Asian and Jewish mothers. Though the concept itself has its origins in 5th Century Confucian philosophy! However, as much as it is possibly in-keeping with the idea that I had a lot of strain on me because I had a Chinese mum, the pressure was more as a combined result of my father and mother’s situations and priorities. My dad failed to find a stable job in my early childhood (or ever), despite his supposed status as a privileged white man, even equipped with a posh accent. This could be put down to a problem with authority, though the story is obviously more complex. My mother worked on a very low wage but academic job at the British Library. As a recently married (for love, but it came with a visa) citizen of the UK, she found herself totally financially supporting not only herself, but a daughter and her English husband – in England. Bitter fights about money occurred on an hourly basis and none passed me by.

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Over at the British Library she had colleagues inform her of the importance of finding a good school. City of London School for Girls was mentioned as one of the most cosmopolitan and interesting of the private schools in London. My dad also had had a rather pleasant start to life in one of these oddly named boarding preparatory schools, called Papplewick, which still exists. Although after a slightly grim set of family divorces and deaths, he failed his common entrance, taken for entry at 13 years old. Therefore he did not go to Charterhouse, one of the counterintuitively named ‘Public’ schools, and became acutely aware of how much he was not awarded this most British advantage in life. Both this understanding and our financial situation meant that it was ‘necessary’ for me to get into these competitive schools. Grammar ones existed too where they were selective but free, so they were on the list too. The harder to get into, the better.

 

Comprehensives, especially around Southeast London where we had just moved, were completely off the charts. This was around the time Tony Blair had just become prime minister in the late 90s. His election chant of ‘Education Education Education’ became a winning slogan because expecting to learn at a state school was a bit like expecting to reform in a rioting prison.

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My dad therefore took up a job at a car dealership in Old Kent Road on minimum wage. I think he just liked cars so much this was a viable prospect for him rather than the only choice. Yet it does seem kind, if slightly perverse, in retrospect, that he ‘compelled’ himself to get work so they could send me to my first prep school myself aged 10. Going to private school at this point was slightly an accident, and slightly by force. The other 6 to 7 schools I’d attended had been all so bad at the time that I’d had teachers recommend me to leave on account of the class being a living pit of a child-based hell. My memories of up to 40 kids in a class all screaming in anti-unison are faded but real. I was shuffled from state school to state school in search of one that was halfway decent, i.e., where I learnt at least one thing in six months. I went to one school for 3 days but it was the furthest one we considered and the commute turned out to be near impossible, especially as we had no car.

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After that I was out of education for a very illegal six months, having a great time as a truant 7-year-old, chilling with two equally unemployed buddies for company: my father and cat, Fluffy. I helped or watched the building works happen around me, fancying the Australian builders who were removing our asbestos bomb shelter, and improved my skills in various board games and chess. I remember playing a game of Monopoly for two solid weeks until one of us lost – a good metric for anyone who is attempting to genuinely finish the game.

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This period ended by September of the new academic year, where my parents had bided their time and successfully faked me being a Christian to get into my next school. Barefaced lying we told them that I was a regular at my local Sunday service. So, I found myself in the local Church of England school, St Luke’s, with my genuinely God-fearing new friends very curious at the fact I just hadn’t seemed to bother going to school for a while before this. This religiously selective primary unfairly promised the highest standard of education in West Norwood, one of the more deprived areas of Southeast London. This pre-dates its gentrification two decades later, with now some more expensive beers available in the two main pubs.

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In my disguise as a fresh young protestant, or whatever you call the Church of England denominees, I remember within five days I became a true believer. This was impressive and much to do with a group that surely can’t exist as this now called The Crusaders. It was an afterschool club every Wednesday at 4.30pm held in a plywood and strip-lit community room.

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Here we stitched up felt pieces into stuffed toys and were awarded a (signed!) New Testament Bible after 40 weeks of attendance. I think it took me all of about a day, however, to stop believing upon reaching secondary school, where it was no longer part of the ritual to confide to Sisters sitting in the circle at Crusaders the dear things God had told us that week (turns out he’s got a lot to say). In the playground we would feel guilty, or even sullied, whenever we told our fellow female friends that we loved them.

 

This scenario occurred following a friendly fight, where two-thirds of my trio Lydia and Catherine would argue on a daily basis, make up, and say “I love you” to reassure the other. Feeling the unholy awkwardness, they had to quickly qualify that this love was solely “in God’s way” with hands clasped in prayer, as God forbid that we might be GAY, or worse: lesbian.

During this time, we’d tried having a private tutor for two sessions to step things up a gear for my English, and I remember precisely learning one thing each lesson. This first was never to end a story on “it was all a dream” because it was lazy and stupid. She did not speak like this, she was a quaint old lady with frilly dresses. The second was that blood poured out “profusely” rather than vigorously. I was pretty disappointed by this because I had just learnt the word vigorous and wanted to show it off, but also impressed that English had a specific word for haemorrhaging out at rapid pace.

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Unfortunately, one weekly hour of tuition would’ve been too slow to attain the vertiginous academic level that my parents expected from me. My mum had hopes of me skipping a year and then getting a scholarship into the year above straight into secondary school. Realising this might be unfeasible, I instead moved to a private or ‘preparatory’ school for my last two years, which is an indicator for how these schools are intended solely for the real important deal: private secondary school. This is banal as it sounds, but it is where you meet all the contacts you’ll need for life, and here spawns the finest, and only, prime ministers this country has ever known. Actually, bar ten, but it’s more the idea of this British School System that its pompous father, the English Class System, loves to keep.

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Here, at Oakfield Preparatory School I landed and first suffered the experience of not being judged on race. Given I look pretty much white, or even if I looked completely Chinese, I was put into the white friendship group at all my previous state schools, as opposed to the black kids who were in the black groups. We lacked any further distinctions. These groupings had no discernible issue that presented itself at school, at least, and they were determined by the kids alone, to my knowledge, who seemed naturally versed in the social ease of unspoken racial segregation. However, the number of black children in my class dropped from about three-quarters at state school to roughly an exact zero, so there was another route required to socially split us apart. This one was about being cool. Often this simply meant subconsciously who was richest, because they had the nicest clothes even if we were wearing uniform, or else, who was most comfortable about showing off with the most confidence. I entered as the newest and shyest girl in the year and was promptly hounded by the entrenched class leaders who were most extroverted, initially because they wanted to compete to see who could claim me first, but later to trial if I was worthy enough to be in their group.

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We were streamed too, academically, and this was the subject of much contention. Almost every child in the A class, in which I was placed, later ended up at top private schools. On the other hand, almost every kid in the B class, failed most of their entrance exams. Parents, knowing that the differences would be more self-fulfilling than truthful from the start, complained at my unusual and sudden entrance into the A class, which they had heard ‘was full’ – particularly considering my origins from an unpaid establishment. Yet my mum’s academic preparation for me had started well before this, and in my first two class tests I achieved the top mark, making some of the parents wonder about what exactly they had been paying for all this time. Perhaps they put it down to my Chineseness as I was doing well in maths and science, and maybe they were right.

 

Regardless, I did not think I was particularly clever, as it was all quite simple, but the other kids in my class just didn’t really care until after they got their marks. In English, my level was far lower, I did not know how to do joined-up writing and using the profusely too profusely was getting somewhat draining. Socially, I also was forbidden to say the word “damn” by other children, which I found excessively puritanical and unnecessary, but it was an enforced measure to smoothen out their ill-mannered peer.

Changing from state school to private school meant I was suddenly entered into many conversations such as: “Did you really not have to pay for your school before?”  and an abnormal number of variants on, “How much does your dad earn?” My mum had warned me this sort of thing would come up and to flagrantly bend the truth or stay silent when it did. Do not reveal we live in the poor area, do not say your dad is on minimum wage, and don’t expect to be bought the same clothes and toys as them. I was chastised at home asking for branded clothing like everyone else, as I had clearly become Americanised and materialistic, which to be fair was exactly what it was given I was requesting a Gap jumper.

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The change to private school was by far the largest jump in culture I had experienced, given I had moved areas, and attended about seven different schools by this point. Knowing that I had to suddenly act a certain way through my personality to maintain friendships, rather than be de facto in the white group was unsettling for my 10-year-old self. I was under constant strain from my parents to get top scholarships, lie about my family life, and in school, I now had to have a totally different personality. Being shy was not cutting it socially, and people were getting bored of me as I was replaced by a newer girl who featured in girls’ magazines like CosmoGirl as a cover model. She was pretty nice actually, but she started her period early, which led a lot of the girls in our year to regularly stalk her to the loo to spy on what was going on. I saw that I needed to entirely change my outward self to maintain, or even acquire any friendships, and the easiest way was to be loud and arrogant like the others who were socially successful. One day I made a joke in a class against a boy in our class who fancied himself as the resident clown or teacher-disrupter, everyone laughed, and I gained popularity in this brief but significant display of humiliation from me to him. From that moment onwards I craved public approval, something I had never experienced before, and within approximately a week, became one of the loudest kids in my class. My popularity surged, and as soon plummeted when my newly discovered comedic talents were met with an adapted response of generalised exasperation, all within an embarrassingly short frame of time.

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I remember the end of year assembly when everyone gathered cross-legged in school form rows to celebrate the final day of term and beginning of our summer holiday. The designated school anthem, the hymn Jerusalem, started playing on the hall piano and everyone swung side by side, seated uncomfortably but smug with their groups of friends. I remember – I think, distinctly – seeing everyone grab each other’s hands in pleasant groups that had deviated from the initial rows. Yet mine were rejected from inclusion, with even some disgust or just a headshake of dismissal from the other girls. I don’t have too many memories of being bullied, and that was mild, but it was hurtful and a confirmation of my unpopularity at that time, and I went home to my dad and cried in his arms for the first time about how I was finding life at my new snobby school very isolating and just very sad. He was shocked at the first news he’d heard of me not enjoying myself, and offered me to move to another school, but I’d had enough moving and wanted to last it out for the final year.

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So, that September, school began again, and it was the final push before entrance exams, which were already that month for the grammar schools and December for the private ones. I decidedly did not attempt any jokes or interruptions in class and moulded my personality for the second time. This time it was towards being more amenable rather than outgoing and I immediately gained the friendship of those who had two months before rejected my hands in the sanctimonious school singalong. It felt all a bit fickle but there are some people who need social acceptance. I think it was because at home I had just my cat Fluffy for company and a lot of Pokémon by this point, which got me quite popular with the boys in my class. I required steady friends in the standard girl group and saw the benefits they would give me. It all seems a bit utilitarian, to want friends so you could have an easier life, but it was probably fear based too and I was very conscious of being judged, as I knew everyone was.

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Working hard as a child, at least for me, was traumatic and compulsory, but still had room for rebellion. Though I found the work endless and free from any praise apart from good marks in school maths work, I never once considered that it was optional. The most I ever questioned the constant essay writing and the endless torrent of maths and reasoning papers was when I tore them up in fury if I couldn’t do them well enough, and reams of ripped lined paper would lacklustrely confetti the living room, with occasional screaming tears adding to the parade. Some of these papers I had the anti-privilege of having the answers to because my mother’s friend’s son had entered private school a couple of years before me. I saw his pencilled scribblings on the originals of papers I was now doing myself. To observe his light pencil marks was like making the discovery of a mathematical genius, and it was something utterly unattainable. ‘Find a shape that has two sides and exactly one line of symmetry’ – to which he drew a crescent moon, an answer I can’t decide is very clever or not now, but it looked inspired at the time. I very much doubted I was destined for such lunar heights.

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At the same time my piano teacher Mr Siprell, an English-born Greek giant with flopping black Beethoven hair and the biggest Frankenstein hands I will ever see, was coining me some sort of piano virtuoso, and placing far too much gravity on my apparent talent for playing convincingly enough without a scrap of enjoyment. He would frequently play concertos between his lessons, a fact that greeted me upon each of my weekly arrivals when we would have to wait outside the door until he had finished the piece or some crucial part of it (a stanza, frame? I can’t remember music terminology now) for a good couple of minutes before being welcomed in. Or else his daughter or mother would answer and we would be placed in the kitchen as we waited for him to finish with his tumultuous playing in the background. When he played his whole body rocked like a ship in a storm. I’m not trying to be poetic, it just looked huge and violent and only somehow coming from a human. His hands ached impossibly broadly up to two octaves across at a time. His daughter was a ‘famous’ singer from my previous school. Famous to our whole school that is, singing in all possible assemblies and church services. This is how we knew her father, because my previous friend Lydia from that school had him as a piano teacher too. Lydia, who used to be quite obviously jealous of me for being better at her at maths and stealing the precious chalice of best-friendship with her friend Catherine – who she was definitely closer to anyway (these were the ‘in god’s name we aren’t gay’ pair) – was now being driven to the edge of nine-year-old sanity as she witnessed me swiftly become the favourite student of the piano teacher that SHE had given to me.

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Meanwhile, a new passion in me emerged, usurping my hatred of writing below-par English essays: practising piano. Every repetitive mistake reminded me of my inherent fallibility and incompetence, and as piano was now being scouted as another source of removing private school fees, there was now another focus for stress in this arena: I had to perform sufficiently for a music scholarship. I skipped up to grade 4 in a year or two and then did the next two grades, including theory, within the same time, studying for my grade 7 when I had just turned 11. Typically, these grades were taken one year at a time, and most of my class, if they were doing any music, were on their grade 3 or 4 at a maximum by the end of that year, to give some context. In the previous Church of England school, I was so far above what anyone else in my school was achieving that it got somehow noticed, and I played in assembly. I remember playing a piece that involved me moving my hands across each other, and received my first and only life’s standing ovation. My god, it was over-sentimental, and the primary school audience hadn’t even clocked I’d made a whole load of mistakes. There was a complete dearth of compliments from my parents and even piano teacher. He spent a good portion of every lesson telling me how much better he knew I could be – which does not constitute a compliment – and shouting at me for not practising at all between lessons, which I hated so never did. Maybe I stuffed in an hour before the lesson, compared to the two hours a day he was commanding. Despite obviously doing quite well without much effort at all, the entirely negative feedback I received meant I persistently just thought I was shit.

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Two weeks before my scholarship performance, I was taught a completely different piece, Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu, to impress the music scholarship examiners more than my generic graded pieces. I didn’t know how to go beyond the first two pages at all well, but in the performance itself I fumbled so much that I didn’t even get past the second bar on the 3rd re-start. In half pity and half impatience, the music teacher at City of London Girls told me to leave it there and annulled the audition. Given how much I hated piano, truly hated it, failing the music scholarships meant there was no reason for me to continue now, and my mum released her grip on my need to play ever again uncannily easily. My piano teacher was deeply disappointed as he had big ideas for how far I could go and tried to convince my mum to keep me going. I used to go to a playscheme whilst my parents were at work during school holidays, and I remember asking one of the young adult supervisors who was probably in her early twenties, if I should quit piano. She said no, and it was certain that I would live to regret it. At that moment I decided I had to quit to test this prediction and indulge for the first time in anticipated regret. It was a curious fuck-you and hello to the future me, to whom I also say Hi, and fair enough. Self-schadenfreude was certainly more blissful than hearing all those mistakes. Since this time, I have never successfully got to the level I was at when I was 11 and I presume I will die this way, because my brain just isn’t there anymore and no one is torturing me outside of my will. Could I do it for enjoyment, or even curiosity? I could theoretically take it up again in future, but it would never be as good, and I imagine most people would agree given all these studies about childhood learning thresholds, etc. Meanwhile, Lydia became a concert pianist.

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Gosh! What a negative childhood experience I’m having. Friends I see as threats for whom I must totally alter my personality. Parents are my minute-by-minute reminder that I’m not doing enough, and we are poor which makes us different. Schoolwork I am not good enough. Piano I’m not good enough, but that’s over. There was one saving grace: Fluffy! Fluffy was my soul pet. She knew what was going on. Fluffy and I communicated by closing our eyes slowly one after each other. This is now a scientifically recognised method of feline-human communication. She would come to me if I cried. Though she also came if I whistled, (only inwardly at the time) whereupon she would scratch me. Rarely did anyone else care when I cried, with the exception of that one time with my dad, so I immediately knew she was my one true friend and family member who knew me, and I knew who she really was too. She was my mother. And my mother was a witch. She had black hair and Fluffy had my hair colour, so it made sense.

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From a young age I’d heard voices during the day telling me I was doing everything wrong and sometimes when I get feverish or get stressed at some points, a similar feeling, but voiceless, comes back even now. My friend Catherine was worried when I confided in her this happened when we were together in the playground one time, and she told me hearing voices wasn’t normal and I was to tell her the next time it happened. I never thought it was that unusual, or even malevolent, to have an inner chorus of booming voices repeating the word ‘No’ at me from all directions in my head. I told my parents this after Catherine said it was weird, who privately discussed how this might be a result of shouting at me so much, but they carried on anyway. It wasn’t a choice that they shouted at me, after all, and it still isn’t now. My dad has since told me to not react so strongly I believe I am being insulted, because as much as he realises that they get it wrong, he claims, it upsets them when I retaliate, and so I should just deal with it internally and not complain. In some situations I can understand this – I am overreacting and shouting helps nothing – but other times it feels unfair to feel like I am not allowed my say, while they are.

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So eventually, come December of year 6 I have to do these exams, and with over a year of training now, I have mid-levelled out my personality adequately so as not to be too shy or too loud, and therefore I accrue a solid group of friends. One of the boys in the class even fancies me as it transpires; he says he would choose to shag me over anyone else when another girl conducts an informal survey during one art lesson. In fact, I like my friends so much now that I want to go to the same school as them, naturally. So what if I have to get a scholarship? I’m pretty much there now. I’ve already become the first person in my school to get into this grammar school, Newstead Woods, and then Nonsuch School, a school whose name denies its own existence as much as I refuse to consider it. But the school my ‘rich’ prep school friends wanted to go to most was James Allen Girl’s School, or JAGS, and it is most certainly not free. I go to my final three exams, and I seem to do very well in all of them, getting scholarship interviews in City and JAGS immediately. Alleyn’s is the third and only mixed school I apply to, but it’s not as academic on the schools’ ‘league tables’. On top of this, they’re all obsessed with going to army or cadet training when I go on the open day, so as a natural pacifist for no real reason apart from instinct, I have little interest in going, even though it holds the largest prospect of getting a boyfriend sooner. Despite being a little interested in ‘boys’, it is as much a consideration as my fascination with Pokémon, and my more serious priorities are most certainly academic and friend based.

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I turn up to my scholarship interview at JAGS and they give me a poem about a train journey. No matter how many times the headmistress repeats the lines in a rhythmic on-off fashion I do not get that she is trying to imitate the locomotive chugga-chugga of a train and I fail the interview, I imagine, because of this. The CLSG interview follows this and it’s a whole day of having sample lessons and then an interview with the headmistress too, as all the scholarship interviews are, rather than the standard entrance interviews that are with any old teacher. I have no interest in going to school in the tower block of council flats, which I know the look of well, given I used to live in one until I was seven. Though this is the Barbican and I am just a philistine. Regardless, I do not care about this day for my longer-term future whatsoever.

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I do however like to do well in general so I put on a bit of a performance, for which my mum has, again, trained me to exaggerate and fabricate. I have to say this is my undoubted top choice and the location in the City of London is unparalleled for its cosmopolitan environment, where, unlike any other educational establishment, I would see a successful working life in the financial centre of the UK, which is in motion around me even as I simply travel back and forth to school every day. I do say this, but I also am overdoing it, which is revealed in the mock lesson we are given, in this case by the Religious Studies teacher, Miss Kelly. I can’t believe my luck thinking I’ve basically practised faking being Christian for two years, up to the point I still sort of genuinely believe, so it’s like method acting. The RS teacher introduces herself and asks us: if we were to achieve one thing during secondary school, what would it be? I brazenly go first and somehow say the words, “I would wish to continue praying to God every day.” She looks slightly taken aback, but I feel like I’ve won, until the next girl sitting next to me follows with, “I’d like to become an Olympic-level athlete who takes part in international competitions.” She didn’t even mention God. The question did not mention God. Why did I even mention God? I had sycophanted myself sick. I do not speak for the rest of the lesson and I hope to all ungodly entities that she has no part in either the decision-making for letting me in or that I ever see her again, or that other girl for that matter, who is justifiably horrified by me – her potential classmate Jesus-freak. I did see Miss Kelly again, however, and I presumably got over this aching cringe. It turned out she was either atheist or agnostic, but never revealed this tactically, though I don’t know why it was so important a secret. She was one of our most interesting and thought-provoking teachers, mainly because she just liked chatting about weird stuff like dream significance and pop psychology where we had to identify ourselves as various jellybean men on a tree of life, rather than conduct any formal lessons.

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Two weeks or so passed until mid-January where increasing amounts of acceptances and rejections were coming through. One of my friends at the time had finally all her schools waitlist or flat reject her, which was pretty steep on her ego having applied to seven schools. Meanwhile, I was rife with offers, and it was just a case of what I received from each of the two scholarship interviews. I hoped for a scholarship from JAGS so I could be with my group of ten friends, who had all been accepted by now, and I certainly did not care about City. The letter came and I had not been awarded a flat scholarship by JAGS, but instead an Assisted Place for one third off the fees as well as a Bursary to Alleyn’s for two-thirds off. City had awarded me also a third-off as a general exhibition scholarship. This should’ve been great, I got the money off everywhere enough for my parents to afford, so I could do what I wanted. However, it then transpired this was far from the case. When writing the application, it turned out my parents had omitted my dad’s salary on the forms to apply for a bursary, knowing their combined income crossed the threshold for what was granted financial assistance, so both my JAGS and Alleyn’s places were void unless we were to pay full fees. I still find this move so frustrating that I should probably get over it. They made everything about the last three years of my life about money, putting me through this school, so much work, so much criticism, as well as acknowledgement of our dire financial situation, and when I manage to finally get what they’ve been putting me through for, there’s no congratulations – I just don’t qualify – because it turns out, they lied. They thought they would get away with it, but trying their luck, it didn’t work out. The schools were requesting proof and we wouldn’t be able to provide it.

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The next part of this painstaking process wins the prize for over-dramatics, whilst I appreciate now that the school system and our situation laid most of the groundwork. My friends at school all knew that I’d got into JAGS as I’d had the interview, so we had been busy making plans about how we would all name one friend to be in the same class as us, which was an option on the acceptance letter. By standing in a circle of the ten of us, we would each now promise to name the person on our left and therefore still be intact as a group for secondary school. A perfect plan was forged, and as a team we had combatted the urge to select our best friends as favourites, therefore protecting the unity of the entire circle. My best friend Laura was particularly keen on seeing it through and that I was part of it, and I was too – I’d worked a lot for these friends. So, when the news came that I couldn’t go to JAGS because though I’d won a prize, which was what I needed, it wasn’t exactly the right one, so I couldn’t go.. It was a difficult story to relate to my friends. I had broken the circle, and it was now shattered into pieces that felt disloyal to repair into nine new shards without me, or maybe it did, and I wasn’t looking. But I was confused too. I had worked so hard, and finally achieved the crazy level of expectation my parents had set for me, not getting into the year above, or winning the music prize, but the money thing was the aim, and now I couldn’t go for reasons that were almost entirely not my own fault. Assisted places and bursaries are like an impure scholarship that need not just your exam prowess but also your family to be in the shit financially. A scholarship, or exhibition, however, is strictly academically awarded, so you could be a billionaire and have a free or reduced-cost education, but you’re clever so come here, is the idea.

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My mum is a bit of a snob, and she saw JAGS and my friends, despite being richer than us, as also being stupider and less internationally minded than City. As a blunt stereotype, I’d have to agree, but as a child, I found it cruel at worst and dismissive at best to send me to so many schools, and not care one bit about my friendships there. No one asked or cared about what I wanted. She knew City was where I should go, and the more I pushed for JAGS, the more she doubled down. My precocious desire to control my own future was just a disturbing hurdle to flop to the ground. Even now it’s hard to tell if it was really just the money that meant I couldn’t go to the school I wanted. JAGS was academically as strong as City, and at one point was considered a great choice. But it was money, and not reputation, that certainly made a good case for her to stand by.

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Divorce was now on the cards if my dad was to side with me. Whilst involved, he was less heavily invested in the specific push for City, and perhaps having been at home more as I grew up had gained some more personal understanding of me. My mum had worked full time for as long as I had known, and could have been rightfully jealous of the bond my dad and I had formed in her absence. It wasn’t fair, after all. At this point he was working full time too, but on the lowest salary you could be, and only for the last 18 months. Therefore, him saying meekly that perhaps I should go to the school I wanted to, did not go down well. It would be my mum absorbing the cost, not him. There was one very loud argument where I remember standing by the door, and on either side of the staircase, my mum screamed at my dad saying that if he thought I should choose where I go then he could kiss their marriage goodbye. They both use retro idiomatic phrases like this in serious situations, but the message was still unfortunately serious and clear: Getting what I wanted would result in something I wanted far less. Or would I mind?

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So, in chimed my headmaster, Mr Brian Wigglesworth. A great name: a brain, a wriggle, a worm? All disgusting. Finally, my parents had decided to team up and call in the troops so that other intervening forces would convince me to concede where they had been unable. From the playground I was called up to his office, with his giant glass pane for an exterior wall through which I could see everyone still freely playing outside, and if they looked, they could most definitely see me pale and horrified, facing a one-on-one parentally commissioned forcing-of-hand from the top of command. No one ever got called in personally by the headmaster, and it was the first time I’d properly spoken to him by myself, since our interview a couple of years prior when he’d tried me for the school. I knew immediately, or at least once I realised it wasn’t because I was in trouble, that my parents had put him up for this, because 1) it had nothing to do with him which school I chose, given I’d got in everywhere 2) this treatment was unique and unheard of 3) he appeared deeply unconvincing in his pleas for me to see reason. However, despite all this, he did genuinely seem to buy that he was convincing me to do the right thing, as he told me that friends didn’t matter here in the long run and listed almost verbatim the same reasons my mum and dad had told me. It felt a little bit like I had no control over any element of my life, and my parents had just possessed my headmaster.

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So, I had nowhere to run, and so it was. Fine, who cares that an 11-year-old doesn’t get what they want? All I know is Pokémon, real or fake friends and my cat, who by this point had given birth to two kittens, one of which was still-born, and my dad had disposed of in a correctly sized jam jar, which seemed bizarrely expedient. It just pissed me off that less than a few weeks after turning down JAGS, disappointing me and my worthless friends who I shouldn’t care about anyway, my dad quit his job at the car dealership, and so I could’ve qualified for the financially assisted place after all. But by that point, it was too late, my mum was happy she had got her way, and I accepted my place at City. And for reasons I’ve described here, as well as my experience into the future, I can see it was probably the right choice.