On the Bare Read Online Free

couple of days of hamming it up and showing off to each other, they began to settle into the 1950s routine. They were roused at dawn each morning for breakfast, morning assembly, and then the most tedious lessons Amelia had ever endured. Lunch was barely edible. Games were a joke. And after a vile dinner they were expected to do prep for two hours before going to bed.
    Amelia got on well enough with the other girls, most of whom weren’t boarders at their own schools and were soon homesick. A couple of them were frightfully common and Amelia couldn’t help but grimace at their regional accents, but she was still friendly towards them. The whole country was watching, after all.
    Darcy Pickthorn, from Cheltenham Ladies’ College, was made Head Girl, much to Amelia’s chagrin; she had wanted the position for herself. She found a friend in Hedy Lyttelton-Cole, though, a boarder from Gordonstoun. They shared class notes and helped each other study.
    The boys were generally a scruffy lot and the only one Amelia found appealing was Edward Gascoigne, whose movie-star looks almost made her forget his impenetrable Geordie accent.
    In class they were segregated – boys on one side, girls on the other. And they had all been taken aback by the bizarre teaching style in this ancient regime. One day Mr Franklin had whacked an inattentive boy across the back of the skull with an exercise book. The entire class had frozen with shock. Such a thing would have meant a lawsuit back home; here it was just par for the course. Here they had to suffer the withering sarcasm of teachers who weren’t obliged to entertain them and they had to memorise dates, parse sentences and use tables to figure out the square roots of ridiculously large numbers. The schoolbooks were a rude awakening too, filled with dense rows of text and few, if any, pictures.
    There were also subjects they’d never encountered before. Mr Jones’s announcement that they’d be studying measures and mensuration was met with much giggling.
    ‘But sir,’ Edward said with mock ignorance, ‘surely it’s only girls who do that.’
    The childish joke continued throughout the lesson and Amelia couldn’t resist inflicting it on Mr Lewis when she decided to take a break from history.
    ‘Please may I go to the ladies’, sir?’ In a stage whisper she added, ‘It’s a Female Thing. I need to … mensurate.’
    Edward winked at her over the laughter and she imagined the wild speculation going on in the viewers’ minds back in the real world. Actually, she kind of hoped her boyfriend wasn’t watching.
    Week Two found the pupils getting restless. The novelty had worn off and the lessons were becoming truly tiresome. And while the cameras had been a major distraction at first, now they hardly noticed them. Amelia often had to remind herself that this was a performance, a 24/7 screen test. Thousands of people were watching her at all times. The spectre of corporal punishment hung over them and they’d all been testing the waters to see how much they could get away with. A morbid curiosity simmered just beneath the surface. Who would be the first to push too far?
    Although Amelia usually enjoyed English, swapping notes with Hedy was more fun than writing longhand compositions. They both agreed that Mr Campbell’s obsession with
The Fall of the House of Usher
was slightly disturbing and they spent one lesson filling a page with gruesome speculation about the reasons behind it. However, Hedy’s sketch of a dismembered schoolgirl was too much for Amelia and she blew their cover with an explosive burst of laughter.
    Everyone spun to stare at them as Hedy tried desperately – and unsuccessfully – to hide the note. Amelia was still shaking with suppressed laughter as Mr Campbell read over their efforts, but she sobered up quickly when he set them lines.
    I must pay attention in class. I must learn that, if I am naughty and disrespectful, I will be punished
. Two hundred times. To be