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

The girls were sassy and clever and the boys came over as pretty needy.  ‘The Syndicate’ as the girls called themselves, created a menu and price list and the slogan,’The Syndicate Will Meet Your Needs’.  They borrowed scarves and bangles from others in their dorm to create magnificent costumes for ‘Gaby de Gallantine’ and ‘Princess Puma’ who would perform their striptease in the torchlit gym at midnight.  The eager customers would arrive on their bicycles.

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

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