NO ONE’s suggesting for a single moment that the girls of The Mount School in York aren’t the crème de la crème and thoroughly lovely young ladies, but there’s something about an all-girls school that makes me shudder.

The news that The Mount is to stop taking boys in its junior school, Tregelles, from September, presumably because the school’s powers-that-be see it, for whatever reason, as a good thing, only served to remind me of all the bad things around attending a girls’ school.

I went to an all-girls grammar school, and it was a nest of some 600-plus vipers from day one.

If you wore specs (which I did), had pubescent bumps before everyone else (which I did), had a second-hand uniform (which I did, given that our family wasn’t exactly rolling in dosh) and weren’t at all pretty (which I wasn’t, what with the glasses and everything), then you were doomed from the start.

Bitchiness is not the prevail of teenagers and beyond, for I went to school with 11-year-olds in knee length white socks who were very good at it even then.

“Why is your tunic so shiny?” said one in our first week, sniggering to her new-found friends as she did so. I actually rather liked my nearly-new tunic from the second-hand school shop because it spoke to me of older girls and Mallory Towers-type adventures.

But it made me cross and just a teensy bit humiliated, because my mum and dad always did their very best for me and I wasn’t the only kid at home they had to provide for.

Of course, it didn’t stop there. We might all have been growing up together, but some girls were doing it with alacrity.

These were the ones who flounced in to school on a Monday morning poutingly sporting their new teen bra, which they flashed to their mates at the back of the classroom between lessons.

Others of us might have been wearing such contraptions well before them, but such was our awkwardness at being early developers that we were very happy at keeping them hidden beneath oversized school blouses, baggy cardigans and tucked under rounded shoulders to hide our chest protuberances, thank you very much.

No, these schoolgirl Lolitas played up their female-hood for all it was worth. Skirts with the waistband folded over four and five times so that they were well above the requisite four inches above the knee but could be rapidly unfurled at the first glimpse of the headmistress, handbag drawn at dawn (Margaret Thatcher eat your heart out), which we were all certain contained only a six-inch ruler for her to measure knee-to-skirt length after forcing us to kneel on the floor.

Berets worn precariously on the back of heads in such a way that you couldn’t tell they were being worn when you viewed the wearer from the front.

Odd, though, that from the back girls simply drew attention to the much-hated headgear by cutting a hole where the little sticky-up thing was and pulling their hair through it.

Forbidden make-up to hide an outcrop of spots accompanied by forged notes purportedly from mothers saying it had to be worn as a cure for acute acne/a very rare skin condition/protection from sun or some such other rubbish.

Pacing up and down behind the school railings at lunchtimes, for all the world like lionesses in a zoo, yelling unladylike phwoars at any passing lad who was invariably deemed to be a bit of good-looking rough in workmen’s overalls.

And then when they got bored with doing all that, homing in on those of their fellow pupils they perceived to be nerdy, geeky, plain or fat or just boring.

Girls who didn’t pluck their eyebrows into a pencil-thin supercilious arc or even worse, sported a mono-brow because they weren’t that fussed about tweezing out the hairs that met in the middle; didn’t wear their skirts short enough but conversely had short hair rather than long; got too many A-pluses for homework or more than 85 per cent in exams (swots); liked riding horses rather than boys; had never had a boyfriend, let alone been even “part of the way” with one, or were – well – just ordinary, nice girls from nice families who didn’t backchat teachers, didn’t get in to trouble, kept abreast of their schoolwork and ignored the excesses of some of the more overt members of the school community.

All-girl groups can be nasty, mean, vicious and vindictive and far worse bullies than boys. Growing up in a girls’ secondary school in the Seventies proved that.

No doubt there are those who firmly believe school life in a single-sex school isn’t like that any more. I do so hope they’re right.