She Was Always the Girl on the Outside

Part One: The Making of Kara — how boarding school, belonging and the search for love shaped a woman who was never quite supposed to fit in.

She was nine years old when she decided she wanted to go to boarding school.

She had read Malory Towers. She was enchanted. Midnight feasts, treasure hunts, adventures down long corridors with girls who became sisters. She went home and told her parents and didn’t stop until they agreed to look into it. The military subsidised it. Her parents took her to view a school in Somerset. The headmistress showed them around and described weekends of ice cream on the beach, donkeys, outings into Weston-super-Mare.

She was sold. She said yes immediately.

By the morning after her first day, she knew she had made a terrible mistake.

The headmistress who had shown them around had retired by the time she arrived. Her daughter had taken over — the first female major in the army to command a whole male troop, married to another major. The school was now run by two majors. There were no midnight feasts. There were no outings into town. What there was, from the very first week, was a sixteen-year-old girl who decided that nine-year-old Kara was going to be her target.

She was there for two years before that girl was expelled. Kara never told her parents. There was no point. There was no going home at the end of the day. There was nowhere to go.

“I was terrified of her. If I said something and she spoke to the head, she’d speak to this girl and then I’m stuck there. So, I never said anything.”

And so, she learned, very early, the lesson that would follow her for most of her adult life: that asking for help was dangerous. That telling the truth might make things worse. That silence was safer than speaking.

She is telling me this over thirty years later, from a sofa in Plymouth, with a warmth in her voice that sits in strange contrast to the things she is describing. She has done enough work on herself — enough healing, enough therapy, enough coaching others through their own reckonings — to hold the past without being destroyed by it.

But the girl on the outside of that school. The girl on the ledge. She is still in there somewhere.

And that’s where this story begins.

* * *

The Girl From Everywhere

Kara was born in Malta. Her father was in the Royal Marines. Before she was one years old, the family had moved to Scotland, where her younger sister was born. Her older sister had been born in Yorkshire before their father signed up. They were a military family — which meant they were a family of beginnings and endings, of packing up and starting again, of being the new girl everywhere they landed.

Eventually they settled near Plymouth. Her mother fell in love with the South West and told her father: if you get posted somewhere else, we’re staying. And they stayed. Her father would go away to different places and come home again. The girls would put down roots.

But Kara arrived at primary school with a broad Scottish accent in a Devon classroom, and children are not always kind about difference.

She got picked on. It was bad enough that her teacher spoke to her mother and suggested something Kara would remember for the rest of her life — that she considers having Kara’s ears pinned back. They stuck out, the teacher said. That’s why she was being bullied.

She was seven. She had the surgery. She spent weeks with what she describes as a massive turban around her head. And then slowly, things got easier. She lost the accent. She made friends. She settled.

And then she read Malory Towers and decided to start all over again.

* * *

The Ledge

The boarding school was strict in ways that bore no resemblance to what had been described on the tour. There were no house parents. No house mistress. Just the headmistress and her husband, the teachers who went home at four o’clock, and the seniors — older girls who were left in charge of the younger ones and who wielded that power with the particular cruelty that unsupervised teenage authority tends to produce.

Validation at boarding school, Kara tells me, was entirely conditional. You received approval by providing something. She discovered she was good at sport. Then she found she could sing and act. She became sports captain. She was entered into competitions. She came home with certificates and shields and she received praise, and the praise felt like oxygen, because there was very little else.

“Everything at boarding school is conditional. So, to seek approval or be recognised, you’ve got to be showing up to benefit other people.”

There were two women who gave it to her without condition. Her drama teacher, Mrs Bodmin — a short, round, deeply warm woman who was the only person at school who offered real motherly affection. And her singing teacher, Ms Ham — tall, proper, encouraging in a different register. Not cuddly, but insistent: you are better than you think you are.

She is still in contact with Mrs Bodmin’s daughter. Mrs Bodmin is gone now. But Kara speaks of her with the particular tenderness you reserve for people who saw you when nobody else did.

And then there was the discipline, handed out like sweets from the seniors. Kara was punished once, she tells me, in a way she has never forgotten. She was made to climb out of a third-floor window. To sit on a small ledge, in her nightgown, in the winter cold, while they closed the window and the curtains behind her.

She has been afraid of edges ever since. Not heights — just edges. The specific fear of having nothing behind you and nothing below.

She tells me this and then moves on quickly to the next thing, the way people do when they have made peace with something they cannot change. But I stay with it for a moment longer. A child, in the dark, in the cold, on a ledge. No one coming.

* * *

What Grandma Taught Her

Before boarding school, before the ledge, before all of it — there was her grandmother.

Her grandmother was spiritual in a way that was unusual for her generation — or at least unusual to admit to. She had what Kara calls visits. She got messages in dreams. She went to Totnes, to a bookshop called Arcturus, and came home with books that nobody else in the family knew how to read. All her friends were thirty or forty years younger than her. She was, Kara says with great affection, a very young old person.

When Kara was around fourteen, still at boarding school, her grandmother sat her down and taught her something she had taught none of Kara’s sisters. The Law of Attraction. How to manifest. Write down what you want. Sleep with it under your pillow. Read it every night as you’re falling asleep. Think about it. Believe it.

Kara has done this her whole life. Her older sister found out a decade ago and was stunned — she said Kara always gets what she wants. Kara told her: I just do what grandma taught us. Her sister hadn’t been taught.

“She’d only taught it to me. So, I then taught it to my older sister.”

Her grandmother also told her, before she died, not to expect her to visit. She said she was only here, on this plane, to learn — and that she was going back to teach other people. She said she’d be far too busy to visit.

Kara passes this along with complete seriousness. And then she adds, quietly, that her grandmother does visit her. When she asks, when she calls on her.

When she cleared out her grandmother’s house, she kept the books from Arcturus. Some of them have her grandmother’s handwriting in the margins, which makes her feel close. She is still working through them.

She has her grandmother’s gift too — or a version of it. She can read rooms, she tells me. She can read energy. She knew from childhood that she heard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, and she chose, at a young age, to put that particular ability to one side. She didn’t want it then. She wasn’t ready for it.

She is more ready now.

* * *

Learning to Belong

She left boarding school at sixteen, the last day counting down like a sentence being served. There are photographs of her from her school days — smiling, but not in the eyes. And then one photograph from the final day, standing in her summer dress, soaked from being thrown in the swimming pool as tradition dictated, and the smile reaches the eyes. She was going home. It was done. She had survived.

What she stepped out into was a world she had never been taught to navigate.

Six years in an all-girls school meant she had no idea how to interact with men. She describes it with a kind of wry candour — everyone else seemed to have received a script she had missed entirely. She couldn’t converse. She blushed constantly. Her older sister was four and a half years older, and Kara ended up spending much of her time with her sister’s friends, watching them be natural with boys in ways that felt impossible to her.

She made mistakes. She describes them as numerous, and she does not spare herself in the telling. The confusion between affection, attention, sex and love. The desperate need to be seen, to be held, to matter to someone. A father who loved her practically — who would re-felt a shed roof rather than offer a hug — and a childhood that had trained her to earn love rather than receive it freely.

“I think a lot of it then came down to self-worth. I’m not good enough. I did a lot of that, I think, back then. Now I can look back and go, of course I didn’t know. And it’s easy to do that through the lens of an adult.”

She doesn’t say this with bitterness. She says it with the clarity of someone who has spent years understanding why she did what she did, so that she doesn’t have to keep doing it.

That work — the understanding — was still years away. First came the marriage.

* * *

Christmas Morning

She was married. They had three children. The marriage had peaks and troughs, she says — as marriages do. She didn’t think they were in a trough. She thought they were just in a quiet spell. She joined an am-dram group. She met a man who gave her attention she wasn’t getting at home. Nothing happened. But something shifted.

And then it was Christmas morning.

Her husband had gone to sleep in the spare room because of his insomnia. The children came running in for their stockings — they had a tradition of opening them on the parental bed. She told them to go and get Daddy. They came back alone. He had said he needed more sleep. They could do it without him.

She says the decision happened in that exact moment. She didn’t debate it. She didn’t take time. She just knew.

“You’re going to prioritise a bit more sleep over Christmas morning with your children. I’m out.”

By Easter, they were in separate houses. She had found a house, put in an offer, had it accepted, and told him — all within weeks. He had not seen it coming. She had made up her mind on Christmas morning and the rest was logistics.

What followed was not clean. It was, she says simply, a mess.

His behaviour became erratic and controlling. He bombarded her with messages. There was a six-page email — full of invented allegations about her family — that he wanted her to edit before he printed copies to post through the neighbours’ doors. Her eldest son stopped going to school. Her son told her, at thirteen, that he was transgender, and she navigated all of that entirely alone. She was running a business. She was trying to keep the children stable. And he kept coming.

Her friend told her to report it. Her father’s police officer friend told her to report it. She kept saying: it’ll get better. He just needs time. I’ve really hurt him.

Eight months in, she took the messages to the police. She couldn’t cope any longer, she was on her knees.

She sat in the station while the officer made a phone call. She heard her say: you need to come down here. We’ve got a really nasty domestic violence case.

Kara looked around the room in shock. She was accompanied by a dear friend, but they were talking about her.

“I was like, what? And I remember sitting there going, what are you talking about? And I didn’t realise that’s what it all was.”

They were given a kidnap line. They had to leave the house for the weekend while he was arrested. A friends took her and the children in. She dropped the charges, she couldn’t cope with the thought of her children’s father being in a cell, there wasn’t enough evidence she was told. There were more solicitors. He was not allowed to see the children for a period.

She tells me she didn’t realise she had been in a coercive marriage until she was out of it. She thought certain things were just part of marriage. The locking out. The control. The way she had learned to manage him, to keep the peace, to prevent things from escalating.

She had spent her childhood in an institution that taught her silence was safer than speaking. And then she had spent her marriage learning a similar lesson.

She was, she says, completely beaten down. Not the version of herself she is now — strong and clear-eyed and unafraid to say no. A different version. One she has had to grieve as well as leave behind.

* * *

The Post Office Lorry

She built a business. She had joined a small care company in 1997 as a wage clerk, worked her way up, and eventually bought her mother and business partner out when they retired in 2020. She had managed the company through COVID — sourcing PPE when there was none, keeping staff and the community safe, working the kind of hours that hollowed her out. She had a small office built in her garden and did really well for a few years after that.

And then the recruitment crisis. The financial pressure. The chest pains that started in the summer of 2023. The accountant who informed her, after she had moved house and spent their savings on the move, that she owed the business a large sum with a deadline she hadn’t been told about. Staff leaving. Shifts she had to cover herself. Seven days a week.

She closed the business in November 2023.

The period that followed was the darkest she describes. The business had been her identity, her security, her purpose. Without it she didn’t know who she was. She took a job that turned out to be toxic — a company that marketed itself as person-centred and wasn’t. She came home and cried. She curled up on her bed. Her self-worth, which had taken years to build, began to collapse again.

She describes driving one day and seeing one of the large post office lorries coming through.

“I remember one day, driving along, I thought: if I just go like that, I won’t feel like this anymore. Because it felt awful.”

She says this clearly and without drama, because she has processed it enough to hold it steadily. She did not act on it. She knew, she says, that her children only had her. Their father’s behaviour had shown her what that meant, he wasn’t reliable. She could not leave them to that.

They were the reason she kept driving.

* * *

The Hinge

There is a moment in every story where the direction changes. Where what was happening stops, and what is going to happen begins. For Kara, that moment is not one single event. It is the accumulation of all of it — the boarding school, the marriage, the police station, the post office lorry, the toxic job — arriving at a point where something had to give.

She woke up one day and decided she was done. Not done with life. Done with the version of her life that had been built on survival rather than choice.

She left the job. She started over. She remembered what her grandmother had taught her, and she began, very deliberately, to build something different.

She is fifty next month. The last eight years, she says, have been the most important chapter of her life. She has changed more in that time than in all the decades before it combined.

And she is not finished yet.

Part Two of Kara’s story — the healing, the coaching, the woman she is becoming — will be published shortly.

* * *

Ascendria Collective celebrates the stories of everyday women. To nominate someone whose story deserves to be told, get in touch.