The next morning Gerald picked my mother and me up and took us through to Edinburgh, to Mrs Telman's huge, grand red sandstone hotel at the end of Princes Street.  Mrs Telman wasn't there herself: she was off doing something important somewhere else in the city.  We went to a big room, where — to my consternation and my mother's embarrassment — I was washed again by a large lady dressed like a nurse, given a medical inspection, and then measured and dressed in a scratchy shirt, skirt and jacket that were the first entirely new clothes I'd ever worn.  Part of my horror at all this was because I thought we were in a public room where anybody might walk in and see me in my knickers; I didn't realise that these rooms were Mrs Telman's, that we were in her suite.

I was taken to another room where a man gave me lots of sums and other tasks to do; some were purely arithmetical, some were questions about lists, some consisted of looking at little diagrams and then looking at others and deciding which one fitted with the first lot, and some were more like little stories I had to complete.  They were fun.  I was left alone with a comic while the man went away.

Mrs Telman came and took us to lunch in the hotel.  She seemed very happy to see me, and she kissed my mother on both cheeks, which made me jealous, though I wasn't sure of whom.  Over lunch, while my mother and I swapped conspiratorial looks as we tried to work out which cutlery to use, I was asked if I wanted to go to a special school.  I recall being horrified.  I thought special schools were where bad boys were sent for thieving and vandalising, but after this was cleared up and I was assured I would get to go home of an evening, I agreed, tentatively.

I started at Miss Stutely's School for Girls in Rutherglen the next day.  I was a year behind the others, but physically no bigger than any of my classmates, and shorter than several of them.  I was picked on for three-quarters of that first day, until I sent a girl home with a broken nose following a fight during afternoon play-time.  I was almost thrown out and had to sit patiently through several stern talkings-to.