Alison Waugh (Class of 1965)

When I Became A Religious Martyr

When Miss Fleming became Headmistress in 1958 she started making changes to “but that’s how we’ve always done things around here”. The annual singing of the Te Deum went (I can still sing it more or less accurately, 60 years later) and she banned the Scripture Union from meeting on school premises. I assume that she was trying to secularise the school, but it made no sense to me as a junior member of the SU (I hadn’t yet discovered Heriot’s boys). It was all quite exciting, and I felt rather like one of the persecuted Early Christians meeting in secret; but although the eight or nine of us met in a basement it was just too comfy to be the catacombs. As a good Early Christian, I persuaded two of the Junior girls who had just come up to George Square from St Alban’s Road to join us, and at the end of term they were each presented with an SU booklet by one of the senior girls. Unfortunately out of sheer habit she had written Presented by George Watson’s Ladies College Scripture Union on the inside cover, and when the junior girls got their copy confiscated when showing it around under the desk in arithmetic, things got out of hand. The teacher asked the junior girls where they had got it, and the only name they knew was mine.

The first I knew of it was being hauled out of class and interrogated in the corridor by a member of staff, the contraband booklet with its damning Presented by George Watson’s Ladies Collage Scripture Union waved under my nose, questioned about who the senior girls in this subversive sect were. My Early Christian persona held out valiantly for all of three minutes before my ‘name, rank and serial number’ determination fled and I crumpled under the pressure, naming names and feeling quite dreadful about it. Surely St Paul wouldn’t have dobbed them in so fast? I then – horror of horrors – found myself in front of Miss Fleming. Those of you who have had this experience will remember how well she set up these meetings. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, back to the window, she was a Dante-esque figure, a tall dark silhouette, terrifying to the 13-year-old I was then. “Didn’t I realise I had been disloyal to the school?” By this time I didn’t know which way was up, and hadn’t a clue what it was all about, far less what to say. For the life of me I couldn’t see what she was getting at – I had thought that being an Early Christian and reading my text for the day and going to SU meetings was, on the whole, a Good Thing. I reverted to very un-martyr-like mumbling.

When I got home, it got even worse – the doorbell rang and it was the senior SU girl – on whom I had a bit of a crush – coming to apologise to me. The embarrassment was worse than the interview with Miss Fleming – I wept and had to tell my parents what had happened. My father – Hector Waugh – was Head of History at the boys’ school. And was furious. He phoned Miss Fleming (unbeknownst to me) and tore into her. Next day the very very worst possible thing happened – I was summoned to Miss Fleming’s room and she apologised to me.

I would have preferred the lions.

This story comes with the caveat that my memory is imperfect

In GWLC’s hierarchical power structure (top: Head Girl – Deputy Head Girl – Prefect – Deputy Prefect) being appointed a Deputy Prefect was in many ways to be handed the fuzzy end of the lollipop. The numerous school rules, each with its potential for ingenious not-quite-infringements (school beret tightly folded into a 3in x 3in square and Kirby-gripped badge uppermost behind a back-combed beehive hairdo “See – I am wearing my beret!”) were difficult enough for me, as Deputy Head Girl, to enforce, let alone for a Prefect. I developed a well-honed blindness to the skirts rolled up well above the knee which would have miraculously grown the necessary modest inches by the time I reached them, chewing gum that would have been tucked out of sight behind the tongue “What gum? Nothing here….” and other stuff that I’ve now completely forgotten but was then life or death.

But a Deputy Prefect didn’t stand a chance.

Their worst duty was chucking girls out of the cloakrooms at lunchtime. Most of the cloakrooms ran round the outside of the Central Hall, and were ideal places to hang out, gossiping, back-combing the beehives, catching up with homework assignments, swopping forbidden makeup. I never did find out the rationale behind clearing them – fresh air? Gossip ban? A simple “You never know what they’ll get up to”? By time one set of cloakrooms was cleared with much arguing, the girls would scoot round the corner of the corridor that joined them up, wait until the Deputy Prefect’s back was turned, and take up position again.

So the Deputy Prefects complained to Head Girl and me.

We called a Prefects’ meeting to tackle the problem. Solution: give the Deputy Prefects some real clout. We spent a happy couple of lunchtimes in the prefects’ room (yes, as top-of-the-heap we didn’t have to chuck ourselves out at lunchtime) coming up with all sorts of sanctions involving arithmetic, detentions, demerits, and other pupil-scarers, then requested an interview with the Headmistress – the ultimate pupil-scarer – Miss Fleming herself. Head Girl and I were ushered into her study, smoke-wreathed as always, but she sat at an angle to the window, so we were able to see her partially-lit face, rather than the unreadable dark silhouette presented to malefactors.

Head Girl pushed me forward to present our case, and I hadn’t got more than half a sentence out when Miss Fleming interrupted me with “No.”

“Don’t you realise,” she said “that there is no system of punishment in this school?”

Then, and for days afterwards I thought about what Miss Fleming had said: individual teachers could require us to redo work, we could be sent to sit in the Tiled Hall where the implication was that we were en route to see Miss Fleming (although some girls got wise to the often poor communication between teacher and office staff and simply sat there for a while, then skedaddled). What else? I couldn’t then – or since – come up with any conclusion except that we were kept in line by unspoken social pressure. No-one set out what our behaviour should be, there were just expectations, all the more powerful for being unspoken, about how, as the Young Ladies of George Watson’s Ladies College, we would conduct ourselves. I had joined GWLC in the first year juniors, at the age of five. I was now pushing eighteen. For thirteen years I had failed to realise that the school operated without any kind of retribution to hold us in line. Instead – with the glorious exception of those girls each year who refused to take it seriously – we held ourselves in line.

It took me many years, if not decades, to challenge it, and to begin to understand how I restricted and restrained myself (with, it must be said, varying degrees of success). The constraints made for an ideal environment for learning – my education was second to none – but I still marvel at how long it took me to really think for myself without a continuous undercurrent of second-guessing what might/would/should be expected.

No, there was no system of punishment in GWLC, there was no need, but the Deputy Prefects still got the fuzzy end of the lollipop. And so, in a way, did we all.

Alison Waugh (Class of 1965)