If ever there was a teacher at Wymondham High who epitomised the phrase ‘force to be reckoned with’, it has got to be Miss B. Unlike Miss M and the ‘Casa Azul’ teacher – stars of previous Lowe Downs on Wymondham High – Miss B never actually taught me. She did teach some classes but was more famous for patrolling the school in a high-vis jacket and barking orders at transgressors, be it for using their phones in corridors or being late to get to class.

She joined the school as a new member of staff when I was there, and quickly gained a ‘sergeant-major’ reputation. One of her first roles was to announce the school’s new detention policy in assembly, where she announced to the crowd, ‘we can keep you back from school at any time. And we don’t need your parents’ permission to do it.’ Needless to say, everyone loved her for that.

You had to admire her. With that assembly role and her high-vis patrolling duties, she must have known when she took the job that she wouldn’t be instantly popular. But she kept going and became a fixture of the school.

And to her credit, she could be very nice when you met her 1-1. She first noticed me when she heard me play a Rachmaninov piano solo at a school Christmas concert. She came up to congratulate me, and after that, when she saw me in the corridor, she would smile and say hello rather than barking an order. Her warmth towards me meant that in the end the feeling became mutual. She became my advisor at a Careers Advice event, and she was very kind and useful.

(Maybe being good at piano was a route to her good books.)

But Miss B did also provide two of my most memorable school anecdotes, the first of which still haunts me to this day.

Shortly after the Christmas concert – and for reasons best known only to my younger self – I divulged something about my personal life to one or two trusted class teachers. It was a small and ultimately unimportant detail just mentioned in passing, as one does. All was fine.

But this tidbit about me clearly got through the teachers’ grapevine, because a few days later, I was standing in the school dining area holding a just-purchased hot meal – about to sit down – when Miss B cornered me and started giving me advice.

She wasn’t telling me off. She was giving me concerned life advice based on what she’d found out about me.

It was professional, well-meant, and completely mortifying. I have never wanted the ground to open up more. I stood there awkwardly listening and clutching my jacket potato and beans, before scuttling off red-faced that a teacher I barely knew had found this out about me and was forcing me to talk about it in public.

The next time I saw her was even more mortifying – though in a much funnier way.

I was in Year 13 (Upper Sixth). My classmates and I were sitting an English Literature mock exam. It was one of our last practices before the real thing, so it felt like a big deal. Our teacher was absent for the day and they needed an invigilator. Miss B was free, so she was brought in.

One of our teachers wondered afterwards if Miss B was peeved off at having to invigilate during a free period, and so deliberately did a terrible job. Because for whatever reason, she decided to talk incessantly throughout the exam, making naff jokes and chit-chat.

One of our exam texts was a famous Agatha Christie novel. Miss B chipped in (while we were frantically writing), ‘oh yeah, Agatha Christie, she’s good. You know the narrator’s the killer, right?’

(We’d been studying this book for a year.)

A few minutes later, I quietly asked for more paper. She looked at me – only just noticing I’m there – and shouted across the classroom, making people jump, ‘oh, Freddy! Long time no see! Yeah, sure, have more paper. I want you to pass.’

Recollections varied, but some people also remembered her making some fart joke.

It was like a bad comedy night. And it was non-stop. Non-stop until a teacher walked in and said (with forced lightheartedness), ‘Miss B, you’re not talking to them, are you? During an exam?’ This intervening teacher was clearly apoplectic but forcing herself to remain polite to a colleague in front of students.

Things occasionally go down in schools – and that was one of the funnier (and weirder) incidents. All credit to Miss B for terrifying us, mortifying us, and giving us all a laugh!