What It's Like to Be the Only Girl at an All-Boys' School

When I was 15, my mother and my brother were both diagnosed with M.E., a devastating illness sometimes known as chronic fatigue syndrome. I was lucky in that both recuperated. Their recovery coincided with the approaching end of my exams, and eager to put the worst year of my life behind me, I decided it was time to change schools.

I always had friends at my old school, but I never felt popular in a world of cliques and varying degrees of cool—so in choosing my new place of study, I only considered one thing: its academic reputation. That it was pretty much an all-boys school didn't register with me when I applied. I had been in mixed education all my life and didn't consider the alternative. My old school had a scattily bohemian approach to academia so the new one, founded around the time of Queen Elizabeth (the first one) was always going to be a bit of a shock.

I went from a school of 400 pupils to one of 1,500 students and grand front gates, which—like those at Buckingham Palace—were only opened on ceremonious occasions. My previous school hall had custard cream biscuits stomped into the floor; the new one bore plaques on the wall, marking which Oxbridge college the school's boys had gone to over the centuries.

For the last four centuries, it had only taught boys between the ages of 4 and 18. In recent years, it began to accept teenage girls for the final two years (known collectively as sixth form), and planned to turn completely co-ed. Statistically, boys do better in mixed education. Earlier this January, the head of another British school even praised the merits of a co-ed education and the virtues of a "mixed environment where the emotional intensity of all girls is diluted by the boys."

I was part of the sixth year of girls to walk down my school's halls. But it was only on the induction day that I began to fathom that whilst there were now female toilets and changing rooms, everything else was still trying to catch up. As girls we were outnumbered two to one. The sense of alienation I felt at being a 16-year-old girl with braces and acne was exaggerated by the tacit feeling, sometimes uttered, that I had intruded on a space that had been harmoniously occupied only by men—until now.

On my first proper day of school, I arrived to learn that one of the other two girls in my form had dropped out and returned to her previous school. A week later, the other remaining girl had also gone, leaving me with ten other boys in my class.

The school itself seemed at once hopelessly underequipped and over-prepared for the influx of girls. The uniform policy was constantly revamped as the boys complained of double standards. Being questioned for a sloppy shirt or an undone top button was different to being challenged for a short skirt or visible bra, but try telling that to an outraged 17-year-old boy. I slowly became aware that the school was as tested by the uniform and body politics as we were, unsure of what was politically correct and invariably getting it wrong. Should it be the male or female teachers who enforced regulations upon the girls? Did it even matter?

I wasn't rebellious by nature, but resistance rose in me as my skirts got shorter, I wore pink lipstick, patterned tights or anything that made me feel, whether they noticed or not, like I was kicking back. I resented the boys' complaints about our uniform; didn't they recognize that life as a girl at school was hard enough? The debate pitted us against each other, exaggerating the 'us' and 'them' dynamic of a year in which some struggled—or just plain refused—to accept females as members of the school.

"Why doesn't a woman need a watch?" a boy asked in one of my first Spanish lessons. "Because there's one on the cooker," another replied. I'd been lucky that until now, this kind of sexism had always been part of a bad fairy tale, but now it was sat behind me, cracking one of the most boring jokes in stand-up. At the time, however, I didn't have the language or the self-confidence to respond.

I dyed my hair from my natural brunette to blonde in the Christmas of my first year – maybe a strange choice for someone trying to become an inconspicuous female in a male world. Now I wonder if I was trying to make myself more attractive, or if I was trying to bleach away my identity: I'm still unsure.

In one lesson, my male Spanish teacher said to the class, "I know none of the girls will be able to answer this question, but any of the boys?" There were two other girls in my class. At the time we were too shocked to say anything, wondering if we had misheard: We hadn't. When I won the prize for top marks in Spanish at the end of the year, there were grudging congratulations from boys who believed that I shouldn't even have won—compared to their five or even 13 years, I'd barely been at the school for a year.

On another day, someone grabbed my ass as I walked into the common room. I turned around to a chorus of guys laughing and proclaiming their innocence, their hands in the air. Some boys had clearly only experienced girls in the dark corners of parties, where they were defined by their breasts and not their brains. I laughed along awkwardly with the rest of the room. There were no teachers around to witness it. It's a moment I sometimes replay in my head—sometimes I've retold it and I've slapped the boy, or at the very least, told a teacher. I did none of those things.

All in all, I spent two years behind those grand front gates. I made some incredible friends and had some remarkable teachers, but it took me a while to understand the impact those years had on me. The memories of the girls who were condemned for their sexual activity are the ones that stuck with me: In our first term, a girl was thrown two pence after giving head to another student. It took me years after I left school to finally trust someone enough to sleep with them. I think I still believed that somehow my sex life would be the talk of the common room the next day, and that the man I had slept with would be laughing about it in a corner with his mates.

I returned to my old school last year and was surprised to see how much it seemed to have changed. It had become completely co-ed and the old feeling of alienation had vanished: Girls were as part of the brickwork and ancient stone as the boys, and there was even a feminist society. One student remarked that she'd been told the original girls who came into sixth form were the "trailblazers" for the rest of the girls at the school now.

It was a word I had never expected to apply to myself, but I think it started to mend some of the bitterness I had felt, now twenty-four, since I left at eighteen. It seemed to make everything slightly better and more worthwhile, if this 17-year-old girl felt comfortable in a place I never had; and could do this because other girls had once been there—and through our own triumphs and tribulations, helped in a some small way to make a path for her to follow.