Mija’s Room

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Saint Clare Prehistory, Part One – In which The Luggage steals my sources

Posted on By Mija

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This post will (hopefully) evolve. It’s intended to be a living bibliography of boarding school books, stitched together while my brick-red school trunk goes off into an alternative universe to have adventures without me… because every great school story begins with a missing kit and misplaced books.

There are still several days of Oasis Party posts (first and second) waiting in the wings, and more than a few Inez entries stranded halfway through editing. In theory, finishing those should have my full attention for this Friday morning’s blogging. In practice, however, my AuDHD brain—already juggling post-COVID fog, the occasional energy crash, ridiculous Southern California late-summer humidity and heat, unanswered emails, and an overwhelming number of personal and professional to-do lists—has staged a coup. It looked at the careful queue of half-finished projects, waved politely, and declared: what we really need right now is to get a boarding school bibliography posted.

And so here we are.

I’ve been meaning for ages to pull together a proper list of books and studies—especially those centered on British girls’ schools. Partly as a research tool, part a nostalgia trip, and, of course, partly an excuse for muttering, “Can you believe this was actually published… for children!?” As a research resource, it’s also slowly taking shape in Zotero, where I no longer have to depend on memory (unreliable), BBEdit, my favorite writing space, on random pages of notebooks, or on the chaotic space that I call my desk.

FedEx account of The Luggage’s journey. Clearly there is a portal somewhere in the LA sorting facility.

(more…)

Oasis 2025 – Day (-1) – Arrival.

Posted on By Mija

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Some things are over, some things go on.
Part of me you carry, part of me is gone.” — T.P

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Day -1: Arrival

I left the house at 5:00 AM this morning to catch an eight o’clock flight from L.A. to Las Vegas. Landed just after 9:00 AM, hotel by eleven, dog park stop for Sutti tucked in before my 2:00-5:00 meeting, oodles of emails and then quick walkies before straight into teaching a Zoom class from 7:00-10:00 PM that’s only just finished. Tomorrow morning brings more meetings before the official start of Oasis tomorrow night. As ever the weekend feels like a braid of obligations: academic, domestic, and canine, with an added kink.

This is only my second Oasis—my first on my own. Last year Paul and I were in Vegas together, as we had been for decades of parties before. Onks ago, before he moved to Los Angeles, before we married, there were two long-ago Shadow Lane Labor Day parties I’d attended without him, but those were in Palm Springs, and I’d driven. No dog, no flight, no juggling of suitcases and expired licences. Flying makes traveling different, heavier somehow,  though I’d been careful—lesson learned from the UK trip—to pack light: just two bags, each under twenty-five pounds. Neither heavy nor hard to handle on their own,  but even packing light is heavy with the knowledge of how often and how much I’d taken for granted Paul’s quiet labor as bearer. Without him, every minor thing looms far larger.

Today it was the luggage hydra: deplane, doggie relief, train to baggage claim (blue line? red line? I never remember—this airport feels like it was designed as a riddle). Then the slow parade: bus to central car rentals, another bus to the off-site car rentals—only to discover my driver’s licence had expired last month. Back on July 28, my birthday, while I was in the UK, no less. Exactly the sort of stressful AuDHD slip that drove Paul quietly nuts and that he would have noticed, prevented, and made sure I fixed before I even clocked it was a problem.

Sutti and my much-smaller luggage watch me try and solve the Expired Driver’s License Problem.

Left to myself, I still made it through. Solved the license issue in twenty minutes via California’s DMV online renewal –a minor miracle—but not without the sense of carrying two bags that grew heavier with every transfer, multiplying like gremlins despite each being small enough to carry-on.1Though I’d checked them because, well, Sutti. And then, of course, my discomfort at navigating the casino: all flashing lights and noise, a disorienting labyrinth that seems custom-designed to trip every sensory wire I have. Paul’s guided me through such spaces so many times (I realized today I’ve never even been to Vegas without him), steady and unbothered while I flinched at the clamor, blindly following the thread of his presence like it was the only map that mattered. Alone, it was another gauntlet in a day full of them.

Still, I managed, and I am managing. Day-by-day. There’s a quiet pride in that, a sense of #smallvictories—getting the licence renewed, finding the right bus, shepherding the luggage and the dog and myself through the day. But the victories don’t lessen the losses. Friends like Tony, gone. And Paul: his absence both sharp and constant—so much so it blurs into the texture of everything, distorting, making it harder to name, and still harder to breathe. Not impossible—just hard. Everything is harder without being satisfying..

Tonight, beneath it all—the meetings, the luggage, the dog walks—runs the quieter anticipation: what it would mean to play here, or anywhere, without him. For years, Paul has been both my anchor and boundary: the one who made it possible to for me play, however rarely, with others, because I knew he would be there afterwards to carry the physical side of aftercare, to give the touch I otherwise find so impossible to accept. Even before he began attending these parties with me, he called every night whether I was away or home. Bedtime check-ins, his voice steady in my ear, the reassurance at each day’s end that no matter what I did or didn’t do at the party or elsewhere, he would be there to come back to, to gather me in, make sure I made it back to him and to myself. That’s always been my real aftercare—the spine of it.

Once he could come to parties with me, he was never far away. We didn’t play together much, but he watched me play with others, his presence making that play possible, his aftercare grounding me through some deep and dark scenes. He watched and helped me say “no” when I froze, carried me out of scenes that might otherwise have left me stranded. Care that was the invisible net beneath the visible play.

In June I went to TASSP in Dallas, my first time at that gathering, first party without Paul in more than twenty-five years. I stayed only a couple of days, and I made the conscious choice not to play much at all, apart from the group detention scene. It wasn’t abstinence so much as reconnaissance: watching, listening, reminding myself I could be present without having to prove anything by throwing myself into play. Oasis will test that same edge. Do I play? With whom? Why? And if I do, what scaffolding will I need to make it feel safe, meaningful, shared, and mine?

I haven’t really seen anyone yet—just a few quick waves across the lobby this afternoon. The anticipation is still in my head, untempered by coffee or dinners or catching up. Today his absence showed itself in the unglamorous practicalities: luggage straps biting into my hands, the absurd relay of trains and buses, the birthday licence expired in the desert heat. Tomorrow, I know, it will surface in quieter ways—less visible, more tender.

For now, I’ll go down to dinner, alone. Later, at least, I will not be entirely alone in the king-sized bed. Sutti will be there, breathing steady beside me. A small comfort. But a comfort all the same.

  • 1
    Though I’d checked them because, well, Sutti.

Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files

Posted on By Mija

4 comment(s) so far. Please add yours!

How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”

The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover, as this post indicates, your responses and ideas can be included in the archives, shifting and changing the focus.

 

Forward to: “Clarissa’s Letters Home”

Archivist Note: These letters, begun and co-authored by reader JustAnotherBoomer, were the private correspondence between a widowed father and his fourteen-year-old daughter.

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington and her father, the Rt. Hon. Gerald T. Charrington, weren’t writing for teachers, headmasters, politicians, or biographers sifting through archives in search of origin stories. Clarissa, newly arrived at Saint Clare’s School for Girls in the Lower Fourth during the summer term of 1955, could never have imagined these early letters home would be treasured decades later—by a daughter who may have walked the same school corridors, or found by a granddaughter after a lifetime of stories. The letters themselves spoke to no one but sat quietly for years in a forgotten tuckbox, hidden behind a yellowed copy of Jane Eyre, a single petrified Jelly Baby, and a torn wrapper from an ancient toffee.

This first exchange between Clarissa and her father captures her earliest days at Saint Clare—tentative, observant, and already sharpening into something unmistakably her own. Clarissa’s letters home are notable not only for her frank admiration of one Inez de Vries—already firmly on the staff’s watch list—but also for the affection and respect she shows her father and his public life, and for introducing a private code between them: their “Jelly Baby Ledger.”

Clarissa left the ledger on her father’s desk the morning she departed for school—a small, deliberate gift in her careful handwriting. Its pages are marked with doodled sweets in the margins and a hand-drawn scale that ranges from “catastrophic” to “triumphant.” In her letters home, each Jelly Baby count is shorthand for how she is faring—socially, strategically, and in terms of her all-important tuck supply.

The paradox is part of the charm: Clarissa is still young enough to count her sweets in Jelly Babies, yet already capable of nuanced political metaphor and a subtle, sidelong interest in the de Vries family. Something is awakening here—not a rebellion exactly, but an alertness. She is watching Inez. She is watching the adults. And, increasingly, she is watching herself.

You may already be familiar with other records from this term—the official school reports praising Clarissa’s eloquence, the stern notes cautioning against questionable friendships, and the famously provocative essays. Yet these letters offer something different—personal, candid glimpses of Clarissa quietly shaping her conscience beneath covers and torchlight, with Inez’s daring casting long, flickering shadows across the page. In these early exchanges, we glimpse not only the schoolgirls they are—but hints of the women they will become.

The archive cannot answer every question. But the Jelly Baby count will shift, and the careful observer might notice that while Clarissa watches Inez, others have begun watching Clarissa.

Read on, gently, knowing these letters are not merely relics, but snapshots of a life becoming—quietly powerful, subtly courageous, and, well, interesting.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.

 

This sort of stationery/letters attache case was a frequent and much coveted gift to boarding school girls. Many Old Girls used them their entire lives.

(more…)

fiction

Staff Meeting Transcript – Inez of the Upper IV

Posted on By Mija

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How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”
The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Forward: Staffroom Transcript: The Inez de Vries Meeting

If you’ve been following the events of the past week at Saint Clare’s, you already know that one essay—unwritten, then written in defiance—has ignited more than just the usual hallway gossip and that the cast of characters is growing.

It began with a missed geography assignment. It escalated with a detention essay that raised eyebrows, a “contract” punishment scheme, and a growing file of staff memos that read less like documentation and more like dramatic monologues.

Then Matron added her own notes—unsentimental, cod-liver-scented, and unbothered by anyone’s feelings.

Now, finally, the meeting. The transcript below was taken by the Headmaster’s secretary and marked confidential. It includes commentary, interruption, and at least one very pointed biscuit refusal.

If you have ever been in a meeting where nothing was resolved but too much was said— this may all sound rather familiar. Please feel free to add your thoughts on what you’re seeing between the lines, where you’re thinking this may go next. 

 

 

CONFIDENTIAL TRANSCRIPT

Staff Meeting Regarding: Inez de Vries, Upper 4th
Date: Thursday, 15  June 1955
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Saint Clare’s Headmaster’s Library
Transcribed by: Miss Edith Simms, Secretary to the Headmaster
For: Headmaster Stephen Lewis’s Files Only

Present:
Mr. Stephen Lewis (Headmaster)
Mr. George Green (Geography)
Miss Anne Kelley (English and French; also assistant housemistress for Inez de Vries)
Mr. Bertram J. Johnson (Latin and Classics)
Miss Elaine Clark (Modern History)
Matron Patricia Rowntree (Head Matron, Infirmary)

 

Mr. Lewis:
Yes, well—thank you, everyone, for coming. I realise this may seem an elaborate convening for a single Fourth Form girl, but the situation appears to have developed… contours.

Before we begin—Mrs. Frobisher has sent up tea, and a tray of those ginger biscuits the kitchen’s trialling. I encourage fortification. As I was reminded repeatedly during the war, an army marches on its stomach—and I daresay this staff does as well.

Now then—George, I believe you were first to raise the matter?

Mr. Green:
Raise it? Headmaster, “it,” as you say, landed in my lap. de Vries failed to submit her geography essay. When questioned, she claimed—quite breezily—that it was in her dormitory. In fact, the essay did not exist. She absented herself from my lesson and ignored a summons from Matron when I sent for her return.

Eventually, I found her in Miss Clark’s classroom, participating in that class as if nothing had occurred.

Miss Kelley: (evenly):
You sent the girl to the dormitory. How then do you find it surprising she left your lesson?

Mr. Green (stiffly):
I think the reasonable expectation was that she would retrieve the paper and return promptly.

Mr. Johnson (mildly):
Did you say that? How was the girl to know?

Mr. Green (teeth clenched):
It was clearly implied. That she failed to intuit my implication is, I think, rather the point.

Having finally located the girl, I confronted her—an hour later—and she admitted the paper had never even been written so her leaving my classroom was entirely a ruse, as I had suspected from the start. 

de Vries’s attitude was evasive, her responses were unsatisfactory. Insolent, even, given the circumstances. I promptly administered six strokes of the tawse to her hands. This was, I might add, was a mild punishment, entirely within school guidelines and should not have been unexpected. That she chose to turn the matter into an epic for her detention essay is another issue entirely, but also indicative of her poor character and relevant to this discussion.

Miss Kelley:
Was a record of that punishment entered in her file?

Mr. Green (after a beat):
Not yet. I’ve been—preoccupied.

(more…)

Saint Clare School Justifications or A Few Explanations for the Inconsistencies That Are Absolutely Not My Fault

Posted on By Mija

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It has been brought to my attention — mostly via very kind readers, indulgent co-authors, one formidable academic, and more than once by a pedantic spouse — that the stories set in and around Saint Clare School for Girls do not follow a coherent educational model but shifts, sometimes jarringly, between UK and US education models.

To which I reply: yes. Quite.

Or: like, totally, dude.

Saint Clare School for Girls is a patchwork, a blazer-clad chimera. But in my defence, so is/was the history of girls’ education, especially in Britain — and I have the sources (and schoolgirl excuses) to prove it.

I started Saint Clare’s School for Girls as a one off, a whim so I could write “Tessa’s Summer Uniform,” a breathless little story, inspired by my 1999 wide-eyed visit to John Lewis in London (where I got a lovely boater) and a much-missed (and oft- discussed) uniform shop in Edinburgh: Aitkin and Niven.

I never intended it to be a series — I never ment to build a world. Mary Catherine’s world building work with Saint Francis didn’t exist yet, else I probably would have been intimidated into silence. Whatever my good qualities may be, consistency is not one of them.

Yet , paradox, I love tradition. Saint Clare isn’t one story, one time, nor does it exist in one place. Instead it borrows freely and globally from girls’ boarding school fiction and history.

Yes, Saint Clare’s  traditions are occasionally contradictory. But then — so was reality. When Oxford and Cambridge were still squinting suspiciously at women applicants (Oxford grudgingly awarded degrees at a very few colleges in 1920; Cambridge waited until 1948 in any colleges, it was the late 1970s in others), clever girls with ambition often looked west. The Seven Sisters colleges in the U.S. — Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and their ilk — had offered full degrees, rigorous coursework, and well-sharpened elbows since the 19th century.

There were lasting exchanges between British and American institutions surrounding women’s education going back to before the US Civil War. Some young women crossed the Atlantic for study and stayed in the US, changing and influencing elite US female education, making it more British. Others returned to Britain with transatlantic ideas and wearing sensible shoes. So if Saint Clare seems like it can’t quite decide whether it’s Malory Towers, Radcliffe College, or Harry Potter with Latin homework — it’s because it’s world is built on just such migrations.

Supporting Notes:

  • Girton College, founded in 1869, was the first residential college for women at Cambridge. Women were not granted full degrees until 1948.
  • Newnham College, founded in 1871, was a centre of women’s education and later a pipeline for wartime service (including codebreaking).
  • Oxford began granting degrees to women in 1920, but Cambridge waited nearly three decades longer.
  • The Seven Sisters colleges (Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Barnard, Mount Holyoke) were America’s answer to the Ivy League for women — frequently hosted or corresponded with ambitious young British students.
  • Girls from stricter British schools were sometimes dispatched to Toronto or Chicago when their Headmistresses deemed Cambridge ‘too soft.’ (This remains a highly enjoyable but currently untraceable anecdote.)
  • More notes will be added, excuses provided, and sources invented as needed.

And if all that still doesn’t explain Saint Clare’s peculiar place in the digital and literary cosmos, I must remind you: the earliest stories were written not for print, but for the glorious chaos that was 1990s Usenet. It was there that Saint Clare first emerged, polished shoes and all, into the great adolescent commons of the early internet — a place oddly well-suited to school stories, which are, after all, about rules, rebellion, longing, and the vast emotional complexity of growing up in public.

And if EVEN all THAT isn’t enough to explain Saint Clare’s particular blend of precision and anachronism, I offer this personal note: I am myself the product of an all-girls school — not a boarding school, but the sort with hymns praising Mary in assembly, pleated knee-length skirts and a frightfully strict shoe policy. My mother attended, taught there, and served as an administrator. She, and the school’s other teachers, could spot a shirttail untucked or the wrong shade of socks at fifty paces.

My secondary school was also a beautiful place, designed with girls and young women in mind. The grounds were full of roses and vases of flowers filled the classrooms where advanced placement literature and calucus were taught. It’s hard to shake the rhythm of a schoolgirl’s day or being one of many in matching uniforms, at once unique and, well, uniform, once it’s in your bones.

Beyond those,  Saint Clare’s offers a particular blend of precision and anachronism In answer I offer this final exhibit: Aitken & Niven, a now-vanished department store on George Street in Edinburgh. When I spent the summers of 1999 and 2000 there, it was gloriously — stubbornly — out of time. The upper floor was entirely devoted to racks of school uniforms for every imaginable Scottish boarding school, alongside footlockers and racks of name-tag personalization forms. The floor was staffed by women who dressed like it was still 1959 and operated with the silent authority of minor royals. In the corner, there was a tea shop so British that when I left a one-pound tip, they chased me down the stairs to return it, assuming I had left it in error.

Tell me that’s not Saint Clare in miniature.
Post TitleDate Posted
Teaser – “Inez of the Upper Fourth” – a Saint Clare Summer Saga21 July 2025
Saint Clare School Justifications or A Few Explanations for the Inconsistencies That Are Absolutely Not My Fault)22 July 2025
Waiting for Inez – It’s your own time you’re wasting…23 July 2025
Start HERE: Inez’s Detention Essay24 July 2025
Inez of the Upper IV – Cast of Characters25 July 2025
The Real Motto of Saint Clare’s School for Girls27 July 2025
The Staffroom Files Part 1: Inez of the Upper Fourth29 July 2025
Notations from Matron’s Logbook: Inez of the Upper 4th30 July 2025
Staff Meeting Transcript – Inez of the Upper IV2 August 2025
Inez’s Diary, 19 June 19553 August 2025
Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files11 August 2025
The Elwood Files – Inez of the Upper IV17 August 2025
The Lady and the Headmaster23 August 2025
The Secret Letters – Part 15 September 2025
Melodrama by Post: Aunt Gladys, Lady de Vries, and Other Disasters7 September 2025
Heard in the Charrington Household, OR,The Day Miss Gladys Came Home12 September 2025
Gladys in Trouble15 September 2025
Honour’s Lesson, Autumn 193816 September 2025
Honor's Game - Prologue - Autumn 19383 October 2025
Honor's Game - Part 1 - November 19383 October 2025
Honour’s Game – Part 2 – November – December 19384 October 2025
Honour’s Game, Part 3 – December 1938 – January 193924 October 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare – Prologue – 11 July 195516 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare: Part 1 – 8 – 12 July 195519 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part II – The Road to Saint Clare22 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part III – Gladys Williams’ Return23 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part IV – Heard From the Outer Office24 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part V – Clarissa in the Infirmary 11 December 2025

Teaser – “Inez of the Upper Fourth” – a Saint Clare Summer Saga

Posted on By Mija

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This summer in Mija’s Room, I’ve come back to to Saint Clare’s School for Girls. Here’s a teaser of what’s to come, starting, hopefully, later this week. 

Saint Clare’s School for Girls. 

Where you eat what you’re given.
Where the prefects are as sharp as their pens.
Where the staff only agree on one thing: a clever girl is dangerous —and must be managed.

Yet Saint Clare’s School is for clever girls.

 

Enter Inez de Vries.

At fourteen, she is a strategist in a gym-slip—a third-generation legacy.
She’s read the rules.
She understands the masters’ and mistresses’s expectations.
What she hasn’t learned—yet—is the code the girls keep among themselves.

This isn’t a redemption arc.
Not a story of downfall or triumph.
This is an end-of-term report. Inez’s portfolio. Her folder.

Inside are the essays no one wanted to mark.
The memos no one was meant to read.
And a perfect curtsy, well-timed, and offered not to the Headmaster,
but to the young woman wielding the Head Girl’s hairbrush.

 

Bring your best pen.

Press your shirt.
Straighten your collar.
Check your tie.
And wear your badge properly.

You are seen. Always. Even the silences.

…That, at Saint Clare’s School, is and eternally has been the final word.
Post TitleDate Posted
Teaser – “Inez of the Upper Fourth” – a Saint Clare Summer Saga21 July 2025
Saint Clare School Justifications or A Few Explanations for the Inconsistencies That Are Absolutely Not My Fault)22 July 2025
Waiting for Inez – It’s your own time you’re wasting…23 July 2025
Start HERE: Inez’s Detention Essay24 July 2025
Inez of the Upper IV – Cast of Characters25 July 2025
The Real Motto of Saint Clare’s School for Girls27 July 2025
The Staffroom Files Part 1: Inez of the Upper Fourth29 July 2025
Notations from Matron’s Logbook: Inez of the Upper 4th30 July 2025
Staff Meeting Transcript – Inez of the Upper IV2 August 2025
Inez’s Diary, 19 June 19553 August 2025
Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files11 August 2025
The Elwood Files – Inez of the Upper IV17 August 2025
The Lady and the Headmaster23 August 2025
The Secret Letters – Part 15 September 2025
Melodrama by Post: Aunt Gladys, Lady de Vries, and Other Disasters7 September 2025
Heard in the Charrington Household, OR,The Day Miss Gladys Came Home12 September 2025
Gladys in Trouble15 September 2025
Honour’s Lesson, Autumn 193816 September 2025
Honor's Game - Prologue - Autumn 19383 October 2025
Honor's Game - Part 1 - November 19383 October 2025
Honour’s Game – Part 2 – November – December 19384 October 2025
Honour’s Game, Part 3 – December 1938 – January 193924 October 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare – Prologue – 11 July 195516 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare: Part 1 – 8 – 12 July 195519 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part II – The Road to Saint Clare22 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part III – Gladys Williams’ Return23 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part IV – Heard From the Outer Office24 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part V – Clarissa in the Infirmary 11 December 2025

fiction

Inez of the Upper 4th – Summer Project

Posted on By Mija

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What is Saint Clare School for Girls?
A fictional British girls’ boarding school, inspired by real Scottish and Welsh, as well as English, institutions. The history of the school stretches back to the mid-19th century and forward at least to the 1980s. The world of Saint Clare spans generations. The school is steeped in tradition, with layers of history, shifting leadership styles, and cultural change echoing through the decades. Stories are collected here:

My summer 2025 project, Inez of the Upper IV is my Mija-self returning to Saint Clare after more than a decade away from writing this world. It is set in Summer Term 1955.

Inez of the Upper 4th – the story so far
Post TitleDate Posted
Teaser – “Inez of the Upper Fourth” – a Saint Clare Summer Saga21 July 2025
Saint Clare School Justifications or A Few Explanations for the Inconsistencies That Are Absolutely Not My Fault)22 July 2025
Waiting for Inez – It’s your own time you’re wasting…23 July 2025
Start HERE: Inez’s Detention Essay24 July 2025
Inez of the Upper IV – Cast of Characters25 July 2025
The Real Motto of Saint Clare’s School for Girls27 July 2025
The Staffroom Files Part 1: Inez of the Upper Fourth29 July 2025
Notations from Matron’s Logbook: Inez of the Upper 4th30 July 2025
Staff Meeting Transcript – Inez of the Upper IV2 August 2025
Inez’s Diary, 19 June 19553 August 2025
Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files11 August 2025
The Elwood Files – Inez of the Upper IV17 August 2025
The Lady and the Headmaster23 August 2025
The Secret Letters – Part 15 September 2025
Melodrama by Post: Aunt Gladys, Lady de Vries, and Other Disasters7 September 2025
Heard in the Charrington Household, OR,The Day Miss Gladys Came Home12 September 2025
Gladys in Trouble15 September 2025
Honour’s Lesson, Autumn 193816 September 2025
Honor's Game - Prologue - Autumn 19383 October 2025
Honor's Game - Part 1 - November 19383 October 2025
Honour’s Game – Part 2 – November – December 19384 October 2025
Honour’s Game, Part 3 – December 1938 – January 193924 October 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare – Prologue – 11 July 195516 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare: Part 1 – 8 – 12 July 195519 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part II – The Road to Saint Clare22 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part III – Gladys Williams’ Return23 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part IV – Heard From the Outer Office24 November 2025
The MP Visits Saint Clare Part V – Clarissa in the Infirmary 11 December 2025

Historical Context Notes:

Time Period: Summer Term 1955

  • Post-war austerity still lingers in places; rationing has only recently ended.
  • British empire continues the colonial wind-down begun the century before.
  • The Coronation of Elizabeth II (1953) is still fresh in memory.
  • Society is in quiet flux: expectations of women are shifting, but the institutions remain steeped in hierarchy, class and patriarchal.

Cultural References for Girls in 1955

  • Books: Enid Blyton (Malory Towers, St. Clare’s), Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (Chalet School), Noel Streatfeild, Austen, Brontë, Hardy.
  • Comics/Magazines: Girl, The Beano, School Friend, Girls’ Crystal.
  • Cinema: Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Roman Holiday, Dial M for Murder.
  • Music: Vera Lynn, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra; early stirrings of American rock (e.g. Rock Around the Clock).
  • Television: Rare in schools. Pathé News reels were shown at local cinemas.

It’s the One Year Anniversary of Mija’s Room

Posted on By Mija

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Introductory Note: June rather than January is when the academic year changes at most colleges and universities in the United States. Academic year (AY) 2024-2025 is over; AY 2025-2026 is being rolled out. Paul left on his journey to rediscover his home in early May; I turned in my grades almost exactly a month ago today.  didn’t plan it this way, but it seems a good time to take stock of where I’ve been and where I want to go.

In June 2024, after spending more than a year messing with the layout and design while trying to figure out how to blog again, I pushed the button and made “Mija’s Room” live. My (or at least Mija’s) return to the internet was largely received with silence and disinterest, much to my delight. I wanted to write but feared answering questions, especially about Paul and me, as I figured out if I can be “Mija” again. Blogging was a way to reconnect with the parts of myself that had written stories and discussions on the ass/sss newsgroups for 15 years.

That soft launch was a year ago today this month, though I didn’t formally write a “Welcome” post until the end of September, some three months later.

Since then I’ve tried to write updates regularly, though it’s been less often than I’d like. I managed to post at least once each month, except for April.1That month I did update and add to the stories and links page, but never got around to putting up an actual post. Overall, and being kind to myself, I’m happy with having put up 39 posts and more than 25 pages. It’s been great to have a place to write about kink again in a more sustained way than Twitter/BlueSky can allow. Writing about Paul and me separating and all that accompanied that was harder than I’d expected it to be, especially when it went from a two to a three body problem. I’ve appreciated the support from and reconnection with old friends and the chance to make new ones.

Going to two national (really international) parties where I saw and experienced the changes the rising generation is making, especially in the far greater racial and gender diversity, as well as their comfort with switching is more than I could have hoped for and has been fantastic.

My “Mija” goals for this coming year include:

  1. Write at least two posts, ideally one story and one not-story, every month
  2. Be more timely in replying to readers and make replies regularly on blogs and sites I read
  3. Develop and curate my link pages so as to encourage readers and writers
  4. Inventory “The Cupboard”  (implements) and “The Wardrobe” (uniforms)
  5. Get el tercer ojo and The Punishment Book back up on the web, probably as archives rather than active sites.
  6. Working with Paul, get the The Treehouse back up and get two long-discussed special projects going
  7. Attend as many parties (national and local) as possible
  8. Attend Rosy Peaches and other Southern California munches
  9. Make new friends and reconnect with old ones
  10. Stop caring who knows I’m into spanking

Other goals include:

  1. Gett my house organized by both adding things that I want to add and clearing out the many many things I have that I “don’t find to be useful or believe to be beautiful”
  2. Figuring out the best way to meet my monthly expenses which are currently exceeding my incomings2This was expected and is okay. I’ve got a number of options, none of which involve selling plasma.
  3. Taking better care of my health, physical and mental, and all that entails, including, sadly, several surgeries
  4. Stay in touch with my kink and vanilla friends
  5. Restart calligraphy
  6. Get ready for my too-long-delayed sabbatical in AY 2026-2027
  7. Default to “no” rather than “yes” when asked to add to my work responsibilities
  8. Journal as well as keeping a calendar
  9. Don’t let the grim state of the US and world steal my joy or hope
  10. Do my best to be aware of ALL THE THINGS but don’t beat myself up for every mistake

Writing all of these down will help me remember them and be a gesture toward holding myself accountable.

These are pretty ambitious — I’ll see how well I can do. This is exactly the sort of sustained effort I’ve always struggled with so it will be a test for the efficacy of my ADHD therapy and treatment.

Let’s see how it goes…

 

  • 1
    That month I did update and add to the stories and links page, but never got around to putting up an actual post.
  • 2
    This was expected and is okay. I’ve got a number of options, none of which involve selling plasma.

Gymslip Mystery Solved – An “About Uniforms” Extra Dispatch

Posted on By Mija

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A Special Bulletin from:

The Bell Rings Out

Proudly misprinted every third Thursday since 1914

For Immediate Release (Despite No Authority Granting It)

Though this report falls outside our customary publication schedule (and indeed outside Matron’s good graces), the Editorial Committee has resolved, unanimously and with much thumping of fountain pens, to issue this special edition.

We are compelled to interrupt our regular editorial schedule to bring you this hastily penned, but no less vital, communique, one that has left even the most senior prefects momentarily lost for words (a rare occasion indeed), upset our (admittedly non-existent) posting plans, played havoc with our study schedules, and caused considerable disruption to our indexing of tuck boxes and biscuit crumbs, this paper is pleased — nay, obliged — to issue an unscheduled dispatch.

The circumstance are further news to report on the mysterious gymslip featured in yesterday’s #DailyUniform communiqué (Twitter and BlueSky editions both). Though I wore the gymslip, complete with crest and motto, I didn’t know what school the uniform came from, an embarrassing fact for this reporter. Was it a boarding school? Coed or girls only? Was the  school even still open? Thanks to our loyal readers and their strange encyclopedic knowledge of school uniforms and girl’s boarding schools, the truth is now known!

Word arrived at precisely 3:47 p.m. — carried not by pigeon, but by Trevor Bell  whose dashing entrance through the common room window has already entered local legend. Breathless and biscuit-crumbed, he delivered a parcel of information so curious, so delightfully unplanned, that it demanded immediate attention.

(more…)

Thinking About Pooh…

Posted on By Mija

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This post was inspired by this Twitter post:

I’ve got a lot of writing to post, assuming it gets finished. Two are stories, currently each over 1500 words with no ends in sight, another is a uniform post about my uniformity kink, also too long, also unfinished. Yet another is a loooong post on limits and consent, currently 2000+ words. Now that the 2024-2025 academic year is done, at least for me, I’m trying to write, that is, do “Mija writing”  for at least an hour a day. So far, so good, but nothing is yet finished.

But while Paul was packing for his epic coast-to-coast journey across the US – from Long Beach, California to New York, New York seeing friends and Big Things along the way, and then on to London (for pictures of said Big Things see his Twitter feed), he pulled out a pile of letters, cards, and postcards from me.

I wrote letters and post cards to Paul most days in the summer of 1997 and pretty regularly after.

Going through them felt like going through a time warp.  I then pulled out some of mine from Paul. There aren’t as many as he was phoning me most mornings. He was, however, much better than at picking cards, including the one he sent with birthday presents1The only ones I received from anyone that year, a fact that scandalized him. in July 1997: the worst and most wonderful summer of my life. It was the summer when I was, at least in the technical sense, homeless,2Not “sleeping-on-the-streets” homeless. I’d taken a summer job that required me to sleep in as I was supervising and teaching ESL students, working (or at least on call) 24 hours a day, six days a week. But homeless in the sense of having no fixed address. having left my marriage but, because of that, been refused a bed in my parents’ house. My sister was on the other side of the country. The newsgroup, alt.sex.spanking, where my new (read: “only”) friends were, was inaccessible as I had no phone, no computer, and no way to dial into the internet. I felt like I was disappearing, becoming a ghost. These were not times I’ve ever wanted to revisit.

But, reading through them, I remembered that Paul didn’t let me disappear. When I no longer had internet access, he found a way to call almost every night. All I had to do was find a pay phone somewhere, use my 100 minute phone card to call him, give him the pay phone’s number and he’d call back and talk to me, tell me who was doing what on the group, about his life in Scotland, remind me that I only had to make it until the fourth week of August and I could move into the university dorms. He’d tell me he loved me — that I was special and made him so happy, that he felt so full of life. And I’d remember that in our cyber world I was “Mija” and that in that world she/I got to have fun adventures. Live with Pablo Stubbs in our treehouse. He made sure I knew I was loved, insisted on it until I couldn’t help but believe him. He told me I sparkled,  called me “angel” and while we spoke he made me feel like one. I suspect I wasn’t actually very sparkly those evenings, but certainly by my birthday (July 28) I had fallen in love. That much has never changed.3Talking with our therapist the other day, I don’t think it ever will — it’s part of who I am so losing it would require me to cut out too much of myself.

Yes, of course I still have them. Wouldn’t you?

For my birthday Paul sent me a package that magically arrived exactly on my birthday. The gifts included books. They were books that introduced me to two of his favorite authors who then became fast favorites of mine: Terry Pratchett and Bill Bryson4Bryson Bear, who came to live with me at Christmas 1997, was named after Bill Bryson the author.. There were also (on cassette tapes!) recordings of Paul reading the stories he’d written for me, by then Its, Spelling, Safety, Surfing, and Sleeping. 5Despite his feeling super self-conscious, he made those recordings so I could play them through my walkman and listen his voice on nights when I couldn’t get to a phone. And this lovely card, embarrassingly addressed (on an inner envelope) to “The Angel Who Needs to Have Her Bottom Smacked.”6Not going to recount the inside… ’cause we’d all blush.

We were the cutest, really.

 

Yes! Pooh-sticks!

It’s of Winnie the Pooh, of course, our long-time bedtime favorite, something he read to me even over the phone. While he’s read many, many, many books to me, he’s read and re-read the Pooh stories, especially at times of stress and sadness. Pooh and the other animals live in such a cozy, comfortable world. Pooh is safety, a reminder that things gone wrong can be righted. That the best pleasures are small, sweet, and quiet.

Because “Sometimes,” said Pooh, “the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

 

  • 1
    The only ones I received from anyone that year, a fact that scandalized him.
  • 2
    Not “sleeping-on-the-streets” homeless. I’d taken a summer job that required me to sleep in as I was supervising and teaching ESL students, working (or at least on call) 24 hours a day, six days a week. But homeless in the sense of having no fixed address.
  • 3
    Talking with our therapist the other day, I don’t think it ever will — it’s part of who I am so losing it would require me to cut out too much of myself.
  • 4
    Bryson Bear, who came to live with me at Christmas 1997, was named after Bill Bryson the author.
  • 5
    Despite his feeling super self-conscious, he made those recordings so I could play them through my walkman and listen his voice on nights when I couldn’t get to a phone.
  • 6
    Not going to recount the inside… ’cause we’d all blush.
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