It’s odd but I clearly remember not liking school at all and yet, whilst watching a Harry Potter movie recently, I suddenly got all nostalgic about the old place. Dame Alice was a private girls’ school. Back in the early ‘80s, it still operated like Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers, with its boarding house, hockey sticks and straw boaters. Whether it was the teachers floating about like ominous crows in their black robes, or the house colours and points system, or the ranks of dining tables each with their own cliques that warmed the cockles of my heart, I’m not certain. However, the warmth of those memories soon chilled as I recollected the rigid rules, the learning-by-rote, the vicious tongue of one particular biology teacher, and the disinterest of other teachers when it became apparent that I was not going to be an academical starlet. I didn’t realise it back then but an undercurrent of racial prejudice flowed quite freely through school culture, too. Surely, I asked myself, there wa...