The Passion Flower Hotel
A British girls’ boarding school in 1965 was an institution
heavily influenced by the postwar culture of the fifties. It was also a prison for teenagers only too aware of the tempting and delicious pleasures awaiting
them in the outside world of the sixties.
My pals and I, incarcerated in such a school, endured our
experience with mixed feelings. Our
first and greatest shock was when we arrived, aged 11. Avid reading of ‘Bunty’ and ‘School Friend’
had given us the misguided belief that all girls at boarding school were like
the Four Marys or the Silent Three, creeping round the cloisters at dead of night,
righting wrongs. As it was there were no
cloisters and the only wrongs were that children sobbed into their pillows
night after night wishing they were at home with their families.
The Four Marys appeared in Bunty 1958-2001 |
However, by 1965 we had toughened up into cynical fifteen
year olds and were able to make the best of our lot. After all, living at school meant that there
was always an audience or a group of willing participants for any play you
might write or scheme you may think up.
Our little group of friends also had plenty of fun with minor rule
breaking; eating cereal at midnight with smuggled milk from tea-time or hiding in
the bushes to avoid an afternoon of lacrosse on a windswept North Yorkshire
field.
In the Lower Fifth, we were
allowed out on a Saturday afternoon on our bikes. The rules were that we had to be in threes and
to wear our school uniform. This
privilege enabled us to cycle at speed to Primrose Valley Caravan Park where we
would sexually harass the swimming pool attendant. This poor young man worked in an environment
with glass walls and he could be viewed from all angles by an admiring threesome
of slavering schoolgirls sharing the last Park Drive from a packet of ten.
Listening to the Beatles under the bedcovers on a transistor
radio tuned into nearby Radio Caroline was another pleasure, as was reading
illicit books by torchlight. Illicit books were anything which contained sex, a
subject very close to our hearts. Agatha
Christie was acceptable, Mickey Spillane was not. These literary tastes were, yet again,
usually limited to our small group who tended to be the ones who brought the goods in after the holidays. Occasionally,
something would prove very popular and be lent out to others in the year. In this case, a list would be made inside the
front cover and every girl who finished the book would pass it onto the next
person. I remember a tatty copy of Dr No
seemed to be circulating forever.
After one holiday Louise, who had a great talent for ferreting
out all things smutty, triumphantly revealed ‘The Passion Flower Hotel’. My goodness, this was a school adventure with
a difference. In this gripping tale a
small group of fifteen year old boarding girls, just like us, set up a strip
club and brothel for the sex starved boys of a nearby school. They ruthlessly exploited the boys’
desperation for their own financial gain and pleasure. It was our perfect book.
Syndicate Price List |
In fact, at no point in the book did the actual sex act take
place although there was a great deal of grappling. There was also some pretty overt racism but of course in 1965 that went by the board.
The fame of The Passion Flower Hotel spread round the whole
year. Everyone wanted to read it. When we had passed it around our immediate pals
we then took people’s names and, drawing lots, made a list of would be readers
in the front of the book. As could have
been predicted, out of roughly fifteen amateur rule-breakers on the list,
someone slipped up and the book was confiscated.
The Headmistress, a stern and humourless woman, devised a
cruel and unusual punishment for the list of miscreants. Each Sunday, after church, the girls were to
assemble in her study to read the ‘Passion Flower Hotel’. They would read it
out loud and in turn and would continue this for an hour every week until it
was finished. It must be remembered that
this group were not the ‘bad crowd’ who had all read the book before the list
was devised. They were the nice girls,
class wets whose heads had briefly been turned by rumours of the infamous
paperback.
There were tears and accusations leading up to the first
session. Some of the girls were
absolutely terrified and those who tried to put on a brave face looked like a
Tudor wife on her way to the scaffold.
Come the day they filed in to where chairs had been arranged in a
circle. We felt sorry for them but
obviously not sorry enough to confess ourselves. We waited avidly for their release.
Eventually the group emerged. Some were tearful but the atmosphere had
lifted. The Headmistress must have been
able to see that she was dealing with traumatised innocents or it could be that
she just couldn’t bear to go through the whole thing herself. She wasn’t a woman known for her mercy. As it was she limited their reading to one
sentence each, following this with a lengthy lecture on unsuitable
literature. They were to look upon it as
a lesson learned and that was the end of it.
Whether the Headmistress added 'The Passion Flower Hotel' to her well
stocked bookshelves we shall never know
The Passion Flower Hotel by Rosalind Erskine
First Published 1962
Comments
Post a Comment