Lucy Worsley: ‘For years I thought an au pair and a courtesan were the same thing’

West Bridgford is a leafy, middle-class suburb of Nottingham. It has a large cemetery and there’s a housing estate called ­–ordean Park, named after Torville and Dean. Isn’t that a cool fact?

I went to West Bridgford comprehensive. It was a pretty good school, although definitely not a sedate place: the children were quite savage, there was a lot of bullying, and shoving and shouting. Perhaps I’m overdramatising it in my memory, but I remember gangs of semi-feral children fighting for survival – though perhaps most children are pretty savage.

Fortunately, there were ways of avoiding all that: you had to choose subjects and teachers where you could quietly get on with your swottiness. Mrs Mills seemed very calm and ­cultured and she taught English and Latin, which were the subjects I was most interested in.

I particularly enjoyed our Latin group, and because not many kids wanted to do Latin we were a small class with people who tended to be less feral than most. (I ran into Mrs Mills the other day when she came to one of my talks. I believe she has a first name, but my brain has refused to accept what it is, so she’s still Mrs Mills to me.)

Another teacher I warmed to was Miss D’Arcy, who taught history, although she was always having to leave lessons because she was organising a teachers’ strike. I remember the mortification when one day there was a “wear what you like” day – it had been organised by some of the ­students to protest against the teachers’ strikes. It could have been to please Miss D’Arcy that on that day I defied the normal social pressure and turned up in my school uniform. I did not realise what a reaction that would get.

Everyone was hooting and laughing and calling me a swot. I don’t know if even the teachers appreciated my act of solidarity – they probably thought I was an annoying little goody-goody who had no social skills. But in truth I was a swot. I just was. In a geeky way I enjoyed learning things – I still enjoy learning things – it was a part of life that seemed to go well for me. Also I was good at passing exams – I’ve got an excellent short-term ­memory and can hold a lot of information easily. I felt freakish in that sense.

Finally, just to top things off, my appearance was weird. Throughout my school days my mother cut my hair and made a terrible job of it – I looked like a strange alien. Whenever people see ­pictures of me at school they say “ET, phone home”.
I spent a lot of time working in the library, which was an important strand of my school life.

Somewhere I’ve got a letter from the head librarian who was quite clearly mystified that a young ­person had volunteered so much time for nothing. But the librarians got used to me and began to think of me as one of them, and I was allowed to take adult books out of the library which were not age-appropriate – and they confused me. For ages I thought an au pair and a concubine were the same thing.

I had a series of very intense friendships, but I was a serial monogamist in that I would have one best friend, then would move onto another best friend, and then another. I can do cold anger quite well. Sometimes these fallings out would involve going to a teacher who would have to adjudicate… Goodness, the drama! Friendship is still very important to me, although I’ve not kept up with any of those “best friends”.

My real life was outside the school, that’s where my social life mainly ­happened. A huge part of my childhood was taken up with music. Between the ages of four and 20 I played the piano for at least one hour a day, and I played in piano competitions too. I went to Miss Beaumont in West Bridgford who had this huge Steinway piano in her front room, which was filled with dozens of bowls of water so the Steinway would never dry out. She wasn’t a warm or encouraging person – she always thought I could do better – but she just knew how to teach piano. I was so lucky to have fallen into her hands.

Also, I had been a Brownie and a ­Beaver leader, and was an enthusiastic Girl Guide – I had friends from the Guides who went to other schools. It was great to be with people my age who didn’t see me in my super-swot role at school. We used to go on camping ­expeditions without any adults, which seemed amazingly independent.

We’d sleep in a wigwam tent and be given a dead rabbit for our dinner and told to deal with it, and we would have to skin it and cook it, and we’d also make a suet pudding from it. Eventually I gave up scouting, because in those days if you wanted to progress as a leader you had to swear an oath that you would indoctrinate your charges with Christianity, and I didn’t want to do that.

Because of my dad’s job as a university professor we moved to Reading for my sixth form, and I then went to St Bartholomew’s school, which was a comprehensive that had been a ­grammar before. It was quite a long way from home so it was a pain getting there; I spent a lot of time commuting, although sometimes my mum would drive me. I’m not very good with cars, and I would often feel sick and she’d have to stop to let me open the door and throw up.

By then I had acquired a Nottinghamshire accent, which other kids there found a subject of mockery. But St Bartholomew’s seemed a much more civilised environment than West Bridgford, although I guess everyone in the sixth form had chosen to be there because they actually wanted to do their A-levels.

I was the school librarian there, too, and I had a badge that said as much, but it was a bit rubbish, because all I was supposed to do was help look after the proper librarian, which wasn’t extreme enough librarianship for me.

By the end of sixth form I realised working from home on my own was a much more effective use of my time –there was always an endless repetition of pointless things at school, which really got me down. So I hardly ever attended class, and school just sort of fizzled out. Consequently I had to go to the headmaster and explain my behaviour. I wanted to tell him the truth, that school simply seemed a waste of my time, but I guessed that would not have been the right answer, so I simply apologised.

When I look back on my schooldays I think how great it is to be a grown-up. Throughout that time I tried very hard to pass for normal, but didn’t always succeed, so I was lonely quite a lot of the time. I guess I seemed like a ­little adult to adults, and to other kids I appeared to lack all sorts of basic skills, like teasing or going to parties and enjoying myself. Also, I wasn’t into pop music. I loved Mozart: there is an element of elegant perfection in Mozart. A question people sometimes ask is: “What was the first single you bought?” –  but I didn’t have that rite of passage in my life. I never bought a single.

But I knew one day I would find my own people, and I did when I went to Oxford, because everyone there was a super-swot like me. Finally, people with whom I had something in common.

‘Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman’ by Lucy Worsley (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now