Four Marys, The

How come the Four Marys are still in the Third Form at St Elmo’s? Have they really been kept down for nearly half a century? How thick do you have to be to achieve that?

A-ha. The truth is more sinister. It all goes back to the Fifth Mary scandal of the late sixties, when Mary Cotter, Mary Radleigh and . . . er . . . the other two Marys were revealed to be Communist spies attempting to pervert the nation’s girlhood, and kept in thrall to the charismatic Mary “Blunty” Blunt.

However, in the epic twenty-part storyline Sports-Day of Judgement, “Blunty” was savagely beaten to death by “nasty” Agatha of the fourth form, who was revealed to be a 14th Dan hockey-stick kendo champion and a member of MI6.

The remaining four Marys were forced to plot a convoluted escape from St Elmo’s inside a hollow vaulting horse and returned to the USSR, leaving in their places four android replicas built by “Raddy” as her second-term physics project.

Of course, the robot Marys could never age, so they’ve been stuck in the third form ever since, acting like the 70s idea of “normal” schoolgirls while actually waiting for someone to pronounce the codeword which would unlock their deep programming, and unleash the cybernetic killing machines that they really are under the surface. (Fortunately, as long as no madman tries to utter the line “David Cassidy is really something else!” the world is safe from their plans)

A propos, does anyone know if the Three Imps are still around? Or have they succumbed to rampant bulimia and malformation of the feet due to sloppily executed pointe work?