The first is that the sight of a girl’s knickers was by no means uncommon in junior school in those days. For game periods in the playground, boys and girls would be separated, and boys would strip to the waist whereas girls would take off their blouses and skirts. So the sight of twenty girls in vests and knickers playing netball was quite common. The knickers themselves were of the traditional design, cut straight across the top of the leg and covering the buttocks completely so that they weren’t in any way indecent. It seemed to be the case that some of the girls would always wear navy-blue knickers and some would always wear bottle-green ones. At that age, too, the girls’ hips hadn’t rounded out, and although some of the girls were chubby, others were quite skinny and their knickers weren’t very tight.