If we were very good, we would get to see Top of the Pops and Thank Your Lucky Stars ( Janice Nicholls ‘Oi’ll give it foive’). This was the debut of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones etc and fans screaming manically. Of course we copied them and would start screaming when they came on to the television. This did not go down well with the matron, and the television would be switched off. Sometimes this would be accompanied by the favourite punishment – lines. I must have written ‘Improper behaviour necessitates appropriate chastisement’ tens of thousands of times. My major misdemeanour was giggling. I also remember getting lines for taking a short-cut up the ‘private stairs’ which were for the sole use of staff.

 

Matron’s sitting room was on the first floor beside the stairs and the phone where we received phone calls from home was at the bottom of the stairs – and we were well aware that conversations were listened to.

Before ‘prep’ we had to gather for ‘Prayers’. There would be a Bible reading, a hymn or psalm sung and a prayer. I seem to think this was led by senior pupils.

Another favourite punishment from the head girl or prefects was writing out Chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis. (The ‘begats’). As if we didn’t have enough of Church! In our early years we were made to attend Sunday school and then the main service every Sunday, and the evening service once a month. It was the same routine as we got older, with Bible class instead of Sunday school. The girls sat in the back rows of one side of the church, and the boys sat opposite. Needless to say, our attention was not always focussed on the minister, Rev Fulton. It seemed a cold dreary place although I did like the distraction of looking at the stain glass windows. The content of the services went completely over my head. We would sometimes put nail varnish on our nails on a Saturday night, and then pick it off in church to pass the time. I also remember at one stage keeping a diary, and would take that to church and surreptitiously fill it in. By the time we got to 5th year, we had developed a rota for people who wanted to ‘skip’ church or Bible study. It took careful planning and depended on whether a member of staff came to church with us or not. When we ‘skipped’ church we were normally to be found in the café, which had a juke box and the possibility of ‘talent’. We could also buy cigarettes there, even singly if we didn’t have much money.

 

If the intention was to make good Christians of us, they did not succeed in my case. It all served to put me off church for many years. By 4th and 5th year I began to object to the fact that we were forced to go to church, especially when I was not forced to do so at home. This usually resulted in more lines for being argumentative.

 

Hostel life during the week was pretty regimental with set times for getting up, meals, duties, school, prep and going to bed. The weekend could be very boring, although we could get out more in good weather. Occasionally we would play in hockey matches, which I did not enjoy. On Saturday mornings we had to take turns of preparing the vegetables. There was not a lot to do in Dornoch, apart from going to the café, so we tended to wander round the town. We did find that there was quite a lot of hostility from Dornoch people towards the hostellers. We were negatively referred to as ‘the back coasters’ as if we were some kind of lesser mortals to them. Some of the teachers were also very unpleasant and seemed to take great pleasure in disparaging us. Some seemed sadistic in their use of the belt and I remember being terrified in some of the classes in the early years.

 

We did not have much money. We were given pocket money from home – I think it was 5 shillings a week. Of course, we were expected to put something in the church collection plate every visit. We also had to pay postage to send our washing home to be laundered. I remember the excitement of getting the return parcel with the clean clothes as there was always some ‘tuck’ in it too. The hostel food was generally good and we did not go hungry. I was particularly fond of a pineapple dessert which was cooked pineapple in sauce with meringue. We looked forward to the delicious ‘Goodies’ (Cakes and biscuits).

 

I had several incarcerations in the ‘Sick Bay’ which were unpleasant. On one occasion, I was very scared as the doctor and Matron were discussing the fact that I was ‘delirious’, and weren’t sure what to do. I didn’t know what delirious meant and thought I was going to die. It was a great relief to get better and my first task when I got out was to find a dictionary. Apart from the misery of being ill, there was the strict isolation rule. A day felt like an eternity, especially when no-one would explain what the problem was, or how long we might be kept in there. It was an almost claustrophobic feeling. I remember being sorry for someone who was in the Sick Bay and a friend and I devised a pulley system of dropping sweets down to the window from the window above. We were also able to exchange notes. When we had bad coughs and the doctor was summoned, he thought he was very funny by telling us ‘It’s not the cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in’. We were not amused.

 

We were allowed one bath per week, although this was increased to 2 as we got older. After the hair washing, we had to queue up to have our hair bone-combed over a bath. That was not a pleasant experience but I do not recall anyone ever having head lice. The toilets and bathrooms had the most horrible smell – a combination of Jeyes Fluid, thin slippery toilet paper and the obnoxious smell of the incinerators.

Someone came round each night to make sure we were in bed and to put the lights out. We usually waited up as long as possible and would jump in to bed at the last possible moment. Sometimes we would have problems getting in to bed as there would be an ‘Apple Pie Bed’ awaiting. More giggling, more lines.

We thought it was safe to smoke out of the windows, especially at the furthest away point from Matron. Another girl and I were caught in the act one day – we were on the top floor as far away as possible from the kitchen and she said she smelled it from there. She was raging and said she was going to tell our parents unless we promised never to do it again. My fellow smoker was in floods of tears and promised she would never smoke again. I knew I would smoke again and would not make the promise. My parents were duly informed and hers were not. Interestingly, my parents did not let me know about this for some time and were not unduly upset. I was 16 by this time and they were both light smokers.

 

In 1st year, the older girls were still wearing flared skirts with stiff petticoats. The starch to make the petticoats stiff was expensive, so they used a solution of sugar and water. Smuggling sugar out of the dining room was difficult but we seemed to manage it. As the years went by, the mini-skirts appeared on the fashion scene which created a lot of conflict with authority, both in hostel and in school. All sorts of make-up had to be experimented with and hair styles changed. As today, the girls with straight hair wanted wavy hair and the girls with curly hair wanted straight hair. My earliest memory is of using ‘wavers’, metal clamps which gave a wavy effect, and were torture to sleep in. Then came sponge rollers, followed by prickly ones. Back-combing and sticky hair sprays were all tolerated in the name of fashion. We thought we were very grown up when we got our first ‘slip-on’ shoes and progressed from socks to nylons. For a time there was a fashion for white knee-length socks, as worn by the ‘Mods’. We were supposed to be a Mod or a Rocker, like Cliff or Elvis, the Beatles or the Stones etc. It was a revelation when tights appeared on the scene as nylons and miniskirts just did not work. Getting, and learning to walk in, our first stilettoes was a sign that we were really ‘with it’. It was not good to be a ‘Square’. Many a time we set off to go out all dolled up and would fail to meet the approval of Foxy. We would have to go back in and change and pass inspection if we wanted to out again.

By 5th year we had transistor radios, our ‘trannies’, and would listen to Radio Luxemburg and the pirate stations like Radio Caroline. They were not very loud but we still seemed to get into trouble for listening to them. Reception was not very good, but we discovered that putting them close to the hot pipes improved the volume.

 

The music, fashion and ethos of the early 1960’s was an exciting time to be young. The criticism and disapproval of those who thought they had power over us, just added to the zeitgeist. It helped to forge bonds among the hostel children and that took a bit of the sting out of the feeling of being torn from our parents. However, I cannot condone what was a very bad system, especially for the younger children. I am glad that the parents of the north, including my mother, campaigned and finally got a school in Kinlochbervie so that the youngsters of today do not have to endure what we had to – a system definitely more hellish than happy.