If I were to say the words ‘white rabbit’ to you what image would they conjure up? The most literal, a rabbit appearing miraculously from within the brushed silk of a magician’s top hat? Or Lewis Carroll’s smartly dressed but anxious bunny, who has no time to stop and talk to Alice as she teeters on the edge of Wonderland?

For me the words immediately evoke memories of my years at boarding school, a necessity of an army upbringing. Creamy White Rabbit sweets, covered in edible rice paper, from China were common currency alongside cola bottles, flumps, shrimps and sherbet spaceships thanks to classmates from overseas. We seemed to exist in a time where awareness of dental care simply wasn’t a factor.

I was recently offered my pick from a splendidly overstuffed jar of sweets from Singapore at my local post office by one of the proprietors. On spotting a White Rabbit I was immediately taken back over 25 years to my school common room purely by virtue of an inch-long candy. I couldn’t contain my delight and the lovely Ting seemed thrilled that I was familiar with them – she gave me three.

For the boarders at school friendships were furiously close. We spent more time with each other than with our own families for weeks at a time and I think it’s no surprise we came up with endless in-jokes, repetitive songs and obscure sayings. At one point we even attempted to create our own language by adding extra syllables into words. I’m still partially fluent.

Like many school children before and after us we played games of jinx with strictly observed rules. I’ve forgotten the exact details, but the more additions after the first cry of jinx the more of a fix the other person was in. I also vividly remember cries of “pinch, punch, first of the month, no returns, white rabbits!” erupting on the given day. Though how we managed to say anything in between mouthfuls of sweets is something of a mystery.

So why ‘white rabbits’? According to folklore saying it wards off bad luck, but were we also influenced by the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland (TV played a big part in our lives)? I certainly don’t think we would have actually read Lewis Carroll, we were far too busy messing around, sliding down banisters, bouncing on spare mattresses and discovering hidden doorways in our Victorian gothic school building. It will forever exist in my mind as a glorious fiction that was actually real.

It wasn’t until my university days that I took a deep dive into Alice Adventure’s in Wonderland, writing an essay taking a Freudian approach to Carroll’s novel for my English Literature course. My enduring recollections are of typing my notes in a soulless computer lab (back when it wasn’t a done deal that everyone had their own laptop) and finding phallic symbols at every turn of the page.

Despite my concerted efforts at serious literary criticism of Alice and her curious friends, the boarding school connotations of white rabbit(s) occupies a much greater part of my memory. We inhabited our own world where loyalty reigned large and we assumed ourselves immune to the interventions of the teachers who looked after us. It was our wonderland, broken only by the bell to make sure we weren’t late.