Free The Following Girls by Louise Levene

a pleasure, so satisfying . Mrs Mostyn mused miserably on the ignorance of Miss Combe’s current Fawcett first formers. Not one, not one could read a real, grown-up map and the simpler one tried to make it, the worse it seemed to get. Only last week Mrs Mostyn had sketched a diagram of the Indian railway system and more than half of her upper thirds assumed there were no stations between Bombay and Madras just because she hadn’t marked any. A 32-hour non-stop train journey? Dimwits. Made you wonder why they even bothered with an entrance examination – they’d let in anybody.
    Mrs Mostyn opened the door to the Geography Room and showed Baker to a large desk already laid out with a stack of dog-eared old atlases and three trays filled with trimmed and coloured countries which were to be glued over any anachronisms. The Belgian Congo was Zaire now, Basutoland was Lesotho, Rio de Oro was Spanish Sahara, etc. The biggest change was French West Africa, which used to be a big bad blob of bottle green but was now a picaninny hairdo of a dozen little countries: more border controls; more wars; more capitals to learn.
    Baker stared at the offending outline, as green and random as an English pasture – though much larger. Heaps larger. And should you be in any danger of forgetting how much larger, the publisher had included a scale map of the British Isles in the bottom outside corner of each page (although the double page spread of New South Wales had a scale map of old South Wales – some sort of cartographical joke).
    Africa had undergone so many changes that on some pages the whole continent had to be papered over with the replacement that Mrs Mostyn had drawn and duplicated and which the upper thirds had cut out and coloured in using the poshest possible aquarelles which blended surprisingly well with the old coloured plates.
    Baker picked up one of the atlases, took one of the new Africas, buttered it with the paste spreader and held it carefully above the page before dropping it in place, draping a blank sheet of paper over it and smoothing the whole lot down. Bye-bye Belgian Congo. Bye-bye Tanganyika. Odd how some borders were straight and others wiggly. Rivers? Rock formation? A drunken cartographer? They never told you stuff like that. And why didn’t Ethiopia put up a fight when the French and Italians and Brits came and divvied up their whole coast into private Somalilands? And Lesotho and Swaziland, tiny pimples on the chin of South Africa. Barmy. Like granting political independence to Clapham Common.
    Mrs Mostyn watched Baker stick down her first map (neater than expected) and returned to her marking: thirty-two second year exercise books containing labelled sketches. The previous week’s homework, a cross-section of an oil refinery, had been an a la carte dog’s breakfast of laziness and ineptitude, but they at least had the excuse that oil refineries were hard to draw. This week’s, ‘A Typical Home in Malawi’ (née Nyasaland), was a simple enough assignment: a thatched roof of palm fibre shaped like a giant half coconut on top of a cylinder of wattle and daub. Only three labels and a drawing any toddler could do, yet nearly all of them contrived to make a mess of it. ‘Use a ruler when labelling’ wrote Mrs Mostyn’s red pen for the eighth time. Was it, in fact, typical, this hairy brown igloo? wondered Mrs Mostyn to herself. Or did the modern Malawian live in a concrete bungalow and use their palm fibre for something else entirely? (it had many, many uses after all).
    Baker was actually rather enjoying her punishment. Even the sticking-in business was quite satisfying, fiddly but not difficult. She had a funky little rhythm going: take Africa, butter Africa, position Africa, stick Africa: simple; automatic; mindless (in the sense that it left your mind free to go where it liked). Every duff bit of ‘see me’ C minus homework and they warned you that you might end up stacking shelves in Safeways or