Katrina Rivers

Katrina Rivers [OB Class of 1985] Writer, researcher, occasional model, and mentor by turns, Katrina Rivers has experienced a life full of variety. In this profile, she looks back on her time at Bedales as a truly formative one, helping prompt her exploration of insecurity, integrity, and what it means to belong. In turn, Katrina is intent on initiating conversations with young people that address the extraordinary demands of growing up in the modern era.

While she was still a student at Kensington High School, Katrina Rivers notes the beginnings of what she thinks of as her first loves. “There was this annual reading competition. Entrants had to read something prepared, and something blind,” she says. “It was also at Ken High where, in Mrs Wall’s classroom, I wrote my first story. Both experiences were terrifying, and compelling, and in their own way both transported me.”

When the time came to move on from Kensington High, a new and tantalising prospect was already beckoning on the horizon. “My father and John Charlton were old friends, and the Charlton family had a long-standing relationship with Bedales. Before I was born, Dad and John bought houses in Chelsea a door away from each other and our families were pretty woven together. I was especially close to Anna, John and Susan’s eldest daughter. When she went off to Block 1 (Year 7), it opened up the idea that I might go to Bedales as well.”

Before she could apply, Katrina had a year of schooling to fill. In her mind, she hoped it would only be a year. “Lincoln, my brother, started Block 3 (Year 9), and I went to Putney High where I slightly stumbled through. I think I kind of held my breath and didn’t let myself consider what would happen if I didn’t get into Bedales. Finally I went for the weekend entrance exam, was amazingly offered a place, and I think it was my grandparents who helped make sure I could go.”

Katrina took her allotted place just as the 80s were getting underway. “It felt imposing, and unique, and I so wanted to belong to the school and for it to belong to me. There was the orchard, and the library, and this feeling of being in the company of people who were extraordinary, and yet I had a prevailing sense that everything I wished for was out of my league. So often there’s this disparity between how people seem to be, and how they actually feel. I don’t think I felt like I belonged there until it was time to leave.”

In her mind, memories of Bedales are like scenes in a flip book; John Rogers teaching how to prune the apple trees; making toast with loads of butter on flat on Sunday nights; Daniel Day Lewis’s snakeskin boots when he came back for Le Mans; Ruth Whiting forcefully striding to class, her arms stacked with files; full library immersions; the shambles of a DJ set with Anna, Mira, and Saskia at an end of term dance; long afternoons pulling gold wire in the jewellery room; last-minute scrambles to find clothes to borrow for the next day; swooning over Graham Banks; Jessie’s presence of mind when she couldn’t reach her mother on the phone; John Batstone’s rage when she was late for a Sunday play rehearsal; his compassion when she had to go to London because her mother was unwell.

Recalling these moments, Katrina reflects on what strikes her about them now.

“Ruth and John Batstone both had this unparalleled presence. To me, they were thoughtful, energetic, never pat, and utterly committed, and they were both merciless and unrelenting in their expectations. What a thing to have been held to such a standard. The time I was late for rehearsal, John was furious. And rightly so. It was upsetting, but it was a real lesson in how I chose to show up, and I am so grateful he taught me how much that mattered.”

“Really, I let much of what I now recognise as a richness pass me by. The times I have the opportunity to prune today, I think of John Rogers’ almost severe insistence on where and how to cut. There was a standard he demanded, and I can’t imagine how it must have been for him to be teaching someone who simply wasn’t as present to the tree, or the land, or the depth of the moment as he.”

After A Levels, Katrina returned to Bedales for seventh term Oxbridge and secured a place at Newnham College, Cambridge to study English. 

Newnham, as it turned out, would not be without its compensations for Katrina. “It was quite something being at Cambridge,” she says. “The feeling of being somewhere steeped in thought and history. I’d constantly marvel at how I was walking the same streets Milton and Marlowe once walked as well. I loved having my own room, its huge bay windows directly on the gardens, and I was ‘well met’ by people who became close friends, including Anna Charlton who went to Pembroke at the same time. Jean Gooder [a former student at Bedales and subsequent governor] was my director of studies. She was, and remains, a fiercely potent inspiration and ally.”

When asked if she always knew she would write, Katrina explained that back then it was acting that drove her. “Having acted so much at Bedales and having loved it, I went to my first audition at Cambridge in the first week or so. I read, and was then asked what showed I wasn’t yet another over-privileged product of the public school system. I spoke of my mum’s near suicide, broke down amidst an awkward silence, and never auditioned again.”

The emotion in Katrina’s voice is palpable. “To answer your question. No. I don’t couch what happened in terms of my passion being ripped from me. I didn’t have to stop acting. No-one held a gun to my head. I made that choice to shut down this thing I loved, though I know it wasn’t a conscious one. If I can glean anything from that experience, it’s the recognition that it might have been helpful to have someone I knew I could have talked to. Someone who might have suggested I get back up, note the lesson, and grow deeper roots.”

“There are other times I think back on and wonder whether having access to different perspectives than my own might have helped. When I arrived at Bedales, I had no idea how to navigate the attention I was getting from boys, or, for that matter, my own sexual energy. It’s that age when you’re expected to just figure the sexual and relationship territory out.”

“At Bedales, pretty much like everywhere else at the time, sex wasn’t talked about. If you were caught having sex at school, you were expelled. The subject was pretty shameful, and taboo, and back then it’s not surprising there was really no guidance. I was involved in sexual situations where I was completely out of my depth. By the same token, I don’t think I would be writing what I’ve been writing about without them.”

Shortly after leaving Cambridge, Katrina headed to America, her mother’s native land. After a stint working in a coffee house and as a cocktail waitress in New Orleans, she went to San Francisco and began her professional life in the film industry. “I got a job in the low budget division of Francis Ford Coppola’s company Zoetrope, and eventually came to work on his Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s what initially took me to LA. I was mostly a production assistant, and also assisted Francis’s researcher. This was way before the internet and I’d be writing to the British Library for information about what a shipping import stamp looked like in the late 1800s. After that I worked as a freelance researcher, and then wrote treatments for directors of commercials.”

Still writing in LA when the new millennium rolled around, Katrina helped found the Garden Nursery School, and then had a three-year stint near the Shawangunk Mountains in upstate New York. Upon returning to Los Angeles, her focus was drawn to matters to do with the human spirit and heart. Witnessing her three children and their friends trying to make sense of the world in an all too familiar haze of self-doubt initiated a deep and long-term engagement with the younger generation that has continued to the present day. She has recently finished her Y.A. novel, Stella Sky, and continues to work on her non-fiction project, All Manner of Things: perspectives for young people on Sex, Relationship, Self, & Life [www.allmannerofthings.org]. 

“Looking back, I can see how influential Bedales has been in shaping the path I’ve been on. It allowed me to be curious, and showed me the importance of being able to speak to anyone. Not everything there was perfect, but without imperfections how would any of us grow?” Katrina gives the impression of one who is at ease in her own skin these days. What does she imagine her teenage self would make of her now? “I think,” comes her careful reply. “I think we would have fun hanging out."