There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.

My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire

It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable ‘resilience’ and ‘green’ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.

I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like.

The crumbling Jacobean country house had its own kitchen garden, not fashionably uprooted for tennis courts, whose potatoes, beetroots, cabbage and worm-ridden carrots filled us........

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