Every preparatory school seems to possess at least one teacher whose habits become part of school folklore.
One establishment during the 1960s apparently possessed two.
Both taught French.
The first was Miss Patricia Bennett, an Englishwoman who nevertheless insisted that, during French lessons, the girls address her as “Mademoiselle Bené”.
The linguistic accuracy of this title was perhaps questionable, but school traditions have never depended greatly upon scholarly precision.
Her colleague was Madame Pauline Poulet, who really was French.
Her surname, inevitably, provided endless amusement to generations of schoolgirls who had discovered that poulet meant chicken.
Madame Poulet possessed the neat, formal appearance which her pupils regarded as unmistakably French. She was remembered for several eccentricities, not least her approach to discipline.
The slipper was already a familiar object at the school.
Indeed, one former pupil jokes that it was so thoroughly woven into school life that it might almost have appeared upon the school badge.
Madame Poulet, however, used it in an unusual fashion.
Rather than employing the more conventional method associated with school punishment at the time, she was remembered as occasionally applying the slipper to a pupil’s hands.
Whether this was genuinely unique is difficult to establish, but former pupils certainly regarded it as peculiar.
The slipper itself occupied a small leather case resembling a music case. According to school legend, the case contained little else.
Miss Bennett was altogether different.
She was genial, energetic and generally popular with her classes.
Nevertheless, she had her own system for encouraging attention to French vocabulary.
Every week there was a vocabulary test marked out of twenty.
There was also a pass mark.
The difficulty was that the pupils were not told what it was until after the examination had been completed and marked.
Sometimes the girls even exchanged papers and marked one another’s work before Miss Bennett announced the required standard.
The pass mark was invariably high.
Eighteen out of twenty was apparently not unusual.
More suspicious pupils became convinced that Miss Bennett selected the figure only after seeing the results, ensuring that two or three unfortunate girls would always fall beneath it.
The precise penalty has disappeared into the mist of memory. One recollection suggests that the number of strokes may have corresponded to the number of marks by which a pupil had missed the target.
Yet Miss Bennett’s punishments seem to have been remembered more as theatrical performances than acts of genuine severity.
She delivered the proceedings with considerable flourish.
The object, her former pupils concluded, was encouragement rather than retribution.
Or, as a French teacher might have put it, with an appropriately dramatic wave of the hand:
