It should have been a warning, really

There are moments we look back on and realise were prophetic. What happened then, how we behaved, pretty much summed up how we would approach the rest of our lives.

One of those moments occurred when I was 14 or 15 (depending on which half of the year it was in, I can't recall).

That year my class, in a small Catholic girls' secondary school, had a mass personality clash with our science teacher, Mr Aldridge. The relationship just wasn't a happening thing and became increasingly dysfunctional as the year progressed. We were, I suspect, the sort of class every teacher has nightmares about.

During one particularly chaotic science lesson, when Mr Aldridge found it impossible to keep order, let alone teach anything, the headmistress, Sr Patricia walked in. I don't know who was more mortified — us because we knew we were in deep shit, Mr Aldridge because he was caught in the act of simply not coping, or Sr Patricia because this sort of thing simply wasn't meant to happen at her school.

Painful order was restored, and we may possibly even have learned something in what remained of the lesson. But, even more painfully for us, our next class was Christian living (yes, they taught such things at Catholic girls' schools in the 70s) with none other than Sr Patricia.

She stood there, looking furious in a way that only head nuns can, and proclaimed in a voice that was not to be disobeyed, "I am not even going to try to teach Christian living after that disgraceful display. Instead, I want you all to sit here and write an essay on how good Catholic girls should behave, and why you were not behaving that way."

So I did.

I can't remember what I wrote about how good Catholic girls should behave, but it probably involved being respectful and polite, doing to others as you would have them do unto you, etc. I knew the theory well. I've always been good at theory.

But then I took the second half of the assignment just as seriously as the first. The class wasn't behaving like a bunch of good Catholic girls, I wrote, because most of its members weren't good Catholic girls. Hell, some of them weren't even Christians.

The one thing the girls all had in common, I wrote, was that they had parents who wanted them to go to McKillop College. For some, that's because their parents were good Catholics and wanted their girls to be the same. But many parents weren't even practising Catholics themselves — they simply  didn't want their daughters to go to the local state schools, which had less than perfect reputations.

Even though they'd stopped practising years ago, the parents used their nominal Catholicism as a ticket to what they perceived to be more desirable schooling for their girls. Their daughters knew it. We all knew it. Sr Patricia probably knew it but maintained a livable denial.

I handed my essay in, knowing it was entirely true and, if we all were meant to seek truth and justice as we'd been taught ad nauseam in Christian living, Sr Patricia would have to agree and deal with it.

It was the end of term. We didn't have another Christian living class before the last day, when, as was the tradition, we were all let out early mid afternoon.

As we were standing there, many of us with our bikes, others just ready to catch the bus outside the school grounds, waiting for Sr Patricia to say we could go, she looked us all over and said there was something she wanted to say. I knew what this was going to be about.

This was a Catholic school, Sr Patricia pronounced. It didn't matter what we or our families believed, or how we behaved, when we were at home. But while we were at school or in school uniform, we were to behave like good Catholic girls.

And with that, she sent us home for the holidays.

It should have been a warning, really.