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We had sex in the staff room... as a teenage girl I thought my affair with my geography teacher was an intoxicating adventure. It's only now as a mother I see I was groomed
It began during the final geography lesson of the day: we were revising how glaciers are formed, somewhere in the bit about compression forcing snow to recrystallise into ice. I remember the classroom’s high ceilings and vast, Victorian sash windows and the way the January light was fast fading outside.
We didn’t sit at desks. The tables were arranged in a large square and our small, first year A-level group, sat around the edges, poring over our textbooks, already thinking ahead to the evening — buses home, dinner, friends.
Then I felt a foot touch mine. It wasn’t a brush but a definite nudge. It continued to nudge, circling my own foot in a very decided way, unseen, under the table. I looked up, confused. I didn’t have a boyfriend or, as far as I knew, any admirer who would want to play surreptitious footsie with me during a geography class.
All the boys were looking down at their books. But then our teacher — whom we called by his first name, James (not his real name, obviously) — lifted his head and smiled at me in such a knowing way there was no mistaking the foot belonged to him.
Thirty-seven years later, I still think back to that moment, the flush that crept from my neck to my face and the flutter of adolescent thrill. And I still wonder what possessed him, a married man in his thirties, to step off that precipice a few months later, with a girl who had never had a boyfriend and was still a virgin.
It was having a conversation with her own children that made Shona (pictured aged 17) realise that her geography teacher had groomed her
It’s a scene that must have played out in hundreds of classrooms and private tutorials. I had no idea what a cliche it was back then — no idea about anything very much actually.
I had joined this sixth form college from an all girls’ convent in Somerset, where I had boarded for the previous eight years. To say I had been sheltered is an understatement.
So, though some might regard it as OTT, I am in favour of Cambridge University’s decision to crack down on relationships between staff and students. New rules in force from July 1 will ban sexual encounters between students and professors where the tutor has ‘any direct or indirect academic responsibility’ for the student concerned. Students will also be warned against flirting with staff.
If something similar had been in place when I was in sixth form it might have deterred my teacher from taking advantage of me. Not that it felt like that at the time — I was so naive I saw our affair as an adventure, my first taste of adult life. It’s only now I can see how much damage it caused.
At 16, I was no precocious temptress, oozing sex appeal and confidence. If anything, I was gawky, slightly odd-looking, and had a bit of a Bloomsbury set vibe going — round wire-framed glasses (which I didn’t need), long skirts, tweed jackets.
But I was funny. And I was hopelessly romantic in a ridiculous, up-for-anything kind of way. So, from the moment I first clapped eyes on James I was absolutely smitten. As well as being my A-level geography teacher he was also my personal tutor.
On enrolment day, when I found my form room, he was in there alone, swinging back on his chair, feet up on the desk. I clocked his cord trousers, brown brogues and slightly dishevelled hair.
Shona is in favour of Cambridge University’s new rules to crack down on relationships between staff and students, which come into force on July 1
The only member of the opposite sex I’d had any contact with at the convent was Father Kennedy, whom we all secretly fancied. (Don’t judge — men were thin on the ground). James looked me up and down, grinned, and said: ‘Did someone pay you to wear that outfit?’
What started as a hopeless crush on my part soon became an overwhelming obsession that he did nothing to discourage. My parents were going through a messy divorce so, at home, nobody was paying much attention to what I was doing.
It was easy for me to stay late after college to help tidy the geography room or — sadder still — linger around in the corridors of the college, hoping he would stop and talk to me.
James wrote poetry as a hobby and began asking me to type it up for him on the staff room computer, long after all the other teachers had left.
He wasn’t coming anywhere near me and I didn’t, in all honesty, believe he ever would. But this didn’t stop the adoration I felt and, looking back as an adult, I can see this must have been glaringly obvious to him.
As a mother of three young women, I have spent hours trying to make sense of what happened next.
I told myself for decades that I pursued this man shamelessly, stalking him around the college and waiting in the car park for a glimpse of him leaving. I blamed myself for the events that unfolded, as if it were me who was the predator, pursuing my married teacher to the point where he could no longer resist.
It has, I’m embarrassed to admit, taken my three, twenty-something children to force me to understand that this carefully crafted narrative is utter nonsense.
Shona joined the sixth form college from an all girls' convent in Somerset, where she is pictured second row up, third from left
When I recalled my teacher/pupil affair and described it to them as some kind of character-building, regrettable adventure, they looked at me with pity. ‘Mum, you were groomed,’ they said, with that unswerving sense of righteousness Gen Z’ers do so well.
Even so, I am uncomfortable with being put in a victim box. I’ve liked to think I felt in control of what was happening. I desperately wanted it too.
To give James credit, apart from all the menial jobs he threw me, like gravy bones to an eager puppy, he was pretty responsible at resisting me for the first year.
Things developed very slowly and, I can see now, carefully. I turned 17 and began my second year of A-levels. All that had occurred to this point was his hand on the small of my back as I left the classroom, that touch of his foot on mine under the table. And lots of banter.
He constantly insulted what I wore, how I wrote, and my grasp of orographic rainfall. ‘God, Shona, can’t you do better than that?’ he would snap, which actually just made me swoon even more.
As Christmas of that second year approached I started emotionally unravelling. It was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that I had an uncontrollable — and inappropriate — obsession. A colleague of James’s in the geography department even took me to one side and sympathetically suggested I talk to someone about my feelings.
Instead, in a brave and reckless move, I decided it was time to declare my love to James himself. It took an hour of standing outside his office plucking up the courage, before I could knock and reveal the full intensity of my feelings. I had no idea how he would respond but I didn’t care. I just wanted him to know.
What happened next will be forever etched on my mind. He didn’t warn me off or kindly advise me on the correct protocol of a teacher-student relationship. Instead, he carefully walked around his desk, wrapped his arms around me and said: ‘I know how you feel. But it’s probably not a good idea to tell anybody else.’
And just like that, the line was crossed. Any sane adult looking in from the outside world would have seen an abuse of power. I just saw a mission accomplished.
It took Shona years to process the emotional toll of the inappropriate interactions her teacher had with her
We kissed in his car a few days later. Sex first happened in the staff room on an old Chesterfield sofa, after everybody else had gone home.
I remember he drove me home afterwards, his left hand on my knee, wedding ring on his finger. When we arrived at my house, my mother invited him in, offered him a glass of wine and then proceeded to ask how my schoolwork was going.
Still, I felt I knew what I was doing. I felt — stupidly — that it was love. I thrived on the heady excitement of having this forbidden liaison with a man on a pedestal of authority. It was the stuff of Mills & Boon, the plot of every teenage girl’s fantasy.
But in reality it wasn’t a ‘proper’ relationship at all. We never did anything outside college.
Contact between us — something I hoped every day for — would consist of a snatched kiss in a classroom when nobody was looking or a quick squeeze of my bum as I left a lesson — always the last person to go, lingering until the end for any titbits of physical touch he threw my way.
On occasion, James would drive me home and we would have sex on the kitchen rug. We never ventured up to a bedroom for fear of being caught and the sex itself — I now know — was wholly unsatisfactory. It was always over in a seconds and left me wondering what all the fuss was about.
It sounds crazy when I look back on it, but I never used birth control either. The whole thing felt so surreal I moved through the motions of our affair in a total daze. I can see I was entirely out of my depth.
I should have been able to talk to James about what we were doing but I never did. He was on such a pedestal to me that I had no idea how to approach a conversation with him on that level.
I remember not daring to ask him to define what we were doing for fear it might spook him. It almost felt like I was holding my breath and not making any sudden movements in case it scared him away. I understand now that in not talking to me about it, he was probably able to pretend it wasn’t really happening at all.
When the summer term neared its end, James drew back — brutally and unceremoniously. I will never forget standing in the quad on the last day of term, watching him walk away, his leather satchel swinging. I was trembling so much it was all I could do not to sink to the ground.
What had I expected? Who knows? If not walking off into the sunset together at least not being discarded like unwanted clothing. Something kinder. I had assumed — stupidly — he felt the same way and I had never been on an equal enough par to ask. I was totally unprepared for how side-swiped this would leave me.
I spent the summer holiday pretending to be alright before heading off to university. It would take me years to process the emotional toll and to understand that measuring every future relationship against an inappropriate teacher/pupil affair is not the best recipe for a successful love life.
With a 14-year-old daughter who will be approaching A-levels in no time, I am more than a little unsettled when I imagine the same thing happening.
I can finally see things for how they were: an emotionally immature teenager and a weak older man who may, or may not, have continued this inappropriate behaviour with other female students.
He is retired now, having enjoyed an illustrious career, climbing the ranks of the education world.
He risked it all. And for what? The sad thing is, I’m still not sure I was even worth it.