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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.” Unwanted Food or Drink Products - Once supply conditions are broken, there are a number of factors outside of our control that can affect the quality of a product. Therefore perishable goods such as food and drink cannot be returned.

She now lives in rural Languedoc with her wine-expert husband and two children and runs a vineyard and guesthouse. “Being a head girl was only relevant in my first job interview, when the man interviewing me had been head boy in a similar school. It would be different in England, I think, where Cheltenham would have gone before me rather more.” 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 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.” The American historian Forrest Pogue wrote of the victims that "their look, in the hands of their tormentors, was that of a hunted animal". Colonel Harry D McHugh, the commander of an American infantry regiment near Argentan, reported: "The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off and burning it in huge piles, which one could smell miles away. Also, women collaborators were forced to run the gauntlet and were really beaten." I was embarrassed by being head girl’: Frances Stonor Saunders. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the Observer

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. 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.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.” Elected to the post of vice chairman of the sixth form committee at her new school, she approved of the way such democracy prevented “the usual biased preferential treatment”. A university degree would be a way to bide time. “That should tide me over till I’m 21, which is when I can legitimately stand for parliament. As a Tory. But I realise it’s very hard for ladies to get into parliament. Look at the figures – out of 635 only 23 are women.”