They told us “E” stood for Early. But everybody else thought it stood for Experiment, and that is how they treated us. Our parents were told that this would be a remarkable opportunity for us; back then, you didn’t question the authorities. Certainly, nobody asked me. Jerked out of our peer group, we were marked out from our first morning at Kirkcaldy High School.

It might not have been so bad if the authorities had dispersed us evenly through the nine other classes in the year. But we were kept separate for those crucial first two years, designated the E class, distinct from the others.

It wasn’t just our fellow pupils who never let us off the hook. The teachers also hammered home how much was expected of us. We never had the chance to forget we were special. Average was not on the agenda. We learnt early what pressure meant.

In some of us it provoked the need to excel; in others, the realisation that they did not have the right stuff. The E class produced some spectacular high-flyers, but also more than its share of crash-and-burn victims. I cannot help thinking it is what pushed me into being such a driven overachiever. And precocious with it. When I hit 40 it was a real shock to realise that there probably were not going to be many more times when I would be the youngest to hit some particular target.

Academically, it worked for me. I was ready for the intellectual challenge. Emotionally and socially was another matter. By the time we were mixed with the rest of our school year, adolescence was raging and we were struggling to keep pace with kids whose hormones were anything up to 18 months ahead of ours. That is a tough call at 13. When I went up to Oxford I was barely 17. I look back now at the girl I was then and wonder how different it would have been if I had had a little longer to gird my loins for the experience.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think the experiment probably did more harm than good. Attempting to keep bright kids engaged in the class-room was a laudable goal, but treating us like lab rats was maybe not the most humane way of going about it.

Val McDermid’s latest novel, Beneath the Bleeding , will be published in August.

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