Monday 30 December 2013

Monday, December 30, 2013 -

A New Girl at Westland Hall

by Jon Thorn
Published: Oct 25, 2013
Words: 32,202
Category: general
Orientation: M/F
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OPENING EXTRACT
It was my final year at Westland Hall. I had started there, a rather shy and academic boy, fresh from my preparatory school, just thirteen years old. Now five years later I was on the verge of manhood, six feet tall, broad shouldered and full of vitality. The shyness had long since evaporated, but the academic bent had continued which had had the very pleasant result of my rising to the elevated position of Head Boy.

Head Boy. How I had looked up to that exalted creature when I was a fresh faced junior. How strange, but how wonderful, it now felt to be on the receiving end of that awe and admiration. The position was not merely an honorary one - it brought with it some very real power. I had the ear of the headmaster at all times, the right to impose a large range of sanctions and punishments on my fellow pupils and the privilege of my own set of rooms apart from the other prefects.

Westland Hall was an ancient institution, dating back to the second half of the seventeenth century. In many ways it was a very traditional place, but that autumn of 1961 it was at the forefront of innovation. For the school's board of trustees had decided, in full agreement with the headmaster, that for the first time in the school's three hundred year history, girls were to be admitted as pupils. Not that the school was to go fully co-educational, but that a select group of thirty young ladies would be allowed the benefit of education in the Westland Hall sixth form.

It had been a cause of huge speculation and interest throughout the final weeks of the previous term, and opinion was evenly divided between those who thought it a jolly good thing and those who saw it as the end of civilization as we knew it. The argument was most hotly contested in my own house, Dalton's, for we had been chosen to be the only house where girls were to be admitted. The reasons for this choice were fairly clear. As the largest house we had plenty of accommodation that could be adapted to female use, and indeed over the summer vacation the whole upper story had been converted for just that purpose. And secondly in Mrs. Thompson, wife of our own housemaster and a teacher in her own right, we had a ready-made housemistress.

So it was that Dalton's admitted the first girls to Westland Hall, and so it was that on that first day of term I encountered Pippa Hamilton.

Pippa Hamilton, eighteen years old, straight blonde hair held back in a shiny pony tail. Pippa Hamilton in her navy gymslip, her maroon blazer and her straw boater, standing beside an oversized trunk looking around her at the old school. I had never in my life set eyes upon such a gorgeous creature.

---oOo---

I had never intended to end up at Westland Hall, I had been very happy at Roedean and confidently expected to progress into the sixth form there.