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Jealousy masqueraded as moral outrage, because people envied the food and entertainment these women had received as a result of their conduct. When Arletty, the great actor and star of the film Les Enfants du Paradis, died in 1992, she received admiring obituaries that did not mention the rumour that she had her head shaved at the liberation. These obituaries even passed over her controversial love affair with a Luftwaffe officer. But letters to some newspapers revealed a lingering bitterness nearly 50 years later. It was not the fact that Arletty had slept with the enemy which angered them, but the way she had eaten well in the Hôtel Ritz while the rest of France was hungry. Unfair popular bias suggests head girls are bossy and self-satisfied – and probably swots. It is no surprise to learn that Margaret Thatcher once had the title at her Grantham grammar. Nor perhaps that the wholesome Kate Winslet was head girl at her drama school. And I certainly understood, in the wake of punk, that my success at the ballot box was pretty uncool. It was a victory likely to make me more enemies than friends. This realisation was possibly the most valuable lesson that being head girl ever offered. The head girl who has come closest to grasping the reins of power is Joanna Gardner, who went to Pimlico School (now Pimlico Academy). This mixed comprehensive in London offered her refuge from a previous convent school, as Joanna, the daughter of Tory peer Baroness Gardner of Parkes, explained at 18: “I hated it. I had a lot of bullying. Here I’m a different person. They take you for what you are.” For reasons of hygiene and safety, personal grooming products, cosmetics or items of intimate clothing cannot be returned.

Joanna is now a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and stood against David Miliband in South Shields in the 2001 general election. A qualified solicitor, she has worked on large public projects, frequently dealing with government. In the late 80s she “cringed” when the magazine article came out and she feels much the same seeing it now. “But 30 years on,” she says, “some of the issues remain – for example, the need for more women MPs.” Each of these former head girls sees the blueprint of the person they became in their younger selves. And now, all around 50 years old, they feel the story is not over. As Joanna puts it: “My husband and daughter mean the world to me. I don’t, however, feel I have quite finished in my life’s challenges.” Churchill heard these stories of women snipers during his visit to Normandy on 12 June and wrote about them to Anthony Eden on his return. British officers, however, later became increasingly sceptical of these "latrine rumours". I went on to fail pretty miserably in the things I thought I was going to do’: Anna Wright, in her old place at school. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the ObserverThe young Joanna believed that a husband would have to fit in: “It would have to be somebody who supports me in politics. I wonder what would have happened to Margaret Thatcher if Denis hadn’t supported her. I’m not an out-and-out feminist. I don’t like people who get riled and wear men’s clothes or scream merely to justify their point. We depend on men and men depend on us.” Elsewhere some men who had volunteered to work in German factories had their heads shaved, but that was an exception. Women almost always were the first targets, because they offered the easiest and most vulnerable scapegoats, particularly for those men who had joined the resistance at the last moment. Altogether, at least 20,000 women are known to have had their heads shaved. But the true figure may well be higher, considering that some estimates put the number of French children fathered by members of the Wehrmacht as high as 80,000.

Confronted by the expectations of her teenage self, Anna, who now works in health and social care in Camden, detects she felt pushed in the wrong direction. “I spent quite a bit of time swimming against my natural tide in terms of career choices. I can now see from what I said then that human rights and international development, as well as the social justice stuff, was the way I was actually inclined.” The post of head girl was “a huge boost”, she thinks, because she did not feel like a “star type”. It buoyed her in tough times. “I went on to fail pretty miserably in the things I thought I was going to do – like be a radical documentary filmmaker. But I ended up taking a path that suited me much better.”I have followed a straighter line, not taking career breaks or going part-time with motherhood, but I do relate to the way these head girls tailored their ambitions. And I wonder if the burden of early conscientiousness – surely the sign of a head girl type – means you end up too busy to see the bigger picture, or to do enough to please yourself, and so make your mark. I was embarrassed by being head girl’: Frances Stonor Saunders. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the Observer Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps. During the war, they often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Jünger observed from the luxury of the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, "food is power". The schoolgirl Frances complained about the “insulation” of convent life, but had strong apprehensions about work in the world outside. “I’m ready to leave, but it is a bit frightening to wonder where the next meal is coming from,” she said. From the viewpoint of 2015, she thinks her stint as head girl gave her a sceptical attitude to authority. “I was embarrassed by being head girl then and I still am. It set me slightly apart from my friends at school, who were all naughty.” Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.)