FORTY years and counting… I bumped into someone the other day that I last saw when we were in gymslips. It was the strangest of reunions, completely unplanned, right in the middle of Thirsk cattle market.

Neither of us were buying or selling pigs, or cattle or sheep, for that matter. She was drinking the sort of coffee that comes out of a giant tin and into a polystyrene cup, and I was ordering a bacon buttie.

Despite the years, I would have recognised her anywhere for she hasn’t changed a bit. Nor have I, apparently. And as we yakked away like we’d only seen each other yesterday as we sped between classrooms, it dawned on us that we did far more in our school of yesteryear than you might believe possible.

At the age of ten, for instance, we were wielding Stanley knives, whittling away at blocks of balsa wood to make into puppet heads for our annual school performance. No dressing up in costumes our mums had made for us – oh no. We were making them ourselves, in miniature, including all the pattern-cutting and sewing, with which to clothe our marionettes.

For we and our home made puppets (every one lovingly carved and dressed by its owner) put on a complete performance of Merrie England, an English comic opera written by one Edward German that first took to the London stage in 1902.

It was a patriotic story of love and rivalries in the court of Queen Elizabeth 1 - something our gaggle of ten-year-olds clearly knew all about – and this being our county council’s only all-girls primary school, we had to assume all the male parts too.

I was Long Tom, one of the queen’s two royal foresters, and a handsome chap my marionette was too. He had finely chiselled features (well, they would be wouldn’t they, seeing as he was made out of a chunk of balsa wood), a floppy hat with a rather glorious swooping feather, which kept getting tangled up in the strings, and a clubfoot. I got that bit wrong with the Stanley knife, you see.

He pranced around the stage quite a bit – we made the puppet theatre too, complete with hand sewn curtains on pulleys – because of that foot, and I lost count of the number of times the bellow would go up in rehearsals: “You! Keep Long Tom grounded – he’s not a bird!”

We had to learn not only all the dialogue but the words to all the songs too, because as well as being puppet masters and acting out all the scenes, we were the chorus as well.

All these years later there’s still a line that comes back to me in its entirety, and just at the moment can I as ‘eckers like get the tune out of my head – ‘Long Tom! Big Ben! Stand forth! (long high note), stand forth (another long note) ye merrie, merrie, merrie men!’

Cue jiggling Long Tom who’d clearly been on the mead every time he appeared… We were quite a motley thespian crew back then, but our head teacher – one ferocious Miss Brooks, a spinster of this parish with swept-back wings of grey hair curved into twin buns, one on each side of her head – brooked no quarter and drove us hard.

She was humongously tall – or it least it seemed like it to us – and very, very stern. She rarely smiled and if she had done so, we would have probably yelped and recoiled in terror.

When she walked into our over-crowded Victorian era classrooms – high windows as a barrier to day-dreaming, wooden desks with inkwells, 56 of us to a class – we’d shoot out of our seats like upright human cannon balls and stand stiffly to attention.

If she addressed one of us in particular, the sigh of relief that it wasn’t one of them was audible from those around you, and when you plucked up courage to respond, you did so in a breathy whisper, such was your awe in her presence.

She was a stickler for perfection, and made us strive beyond our self-perceived limitations – hence her highly ambitious notion that a bunch of ten-year-old girls were entirely capable of staging an opera in front of local dignitaries and parents. And not one performance either, but a five-night run…

But for all that, we loved her because she made us believe in ourselves. So you can imagine what we felt when we were told in hushed tones that she had been found hanging from a beam in her garage. And because she was so truly inspiring, so incredibly gifted in what she got out of young people, I still struggle to understand why.