Sex case teacher took pill next day

The teacher accused of having sex with two of her teenage pupils said today that she took the morning-after pill when told she had had sex with a third.

Amy Gehring, 26, said she drank so much at a party that she passed out, but heard rumours next day that she had had sex in the lavatory with the third boy.

In her first appearance in the witness box at Guildford Crown Court, she said: "I don't remember anything like that happening. I thought, 'Oh my God, if that happened and he ejaculated inside me I could be pregnant'. I felt sick."

She sent a text message to the boy in question to ask what had happened the previous night, she told the jury. "I was so shocked. I don't know... I don't remember anything like that happening in the toilet. I just don't know."

The boy's reply to her message was "I think we had sex," said Gehring. She went on: "I said 'I don't remember this'. I think he said that he ejaculated into me or something. I said, 'Are you sure?' And he was like, 'I don't know'."

The supply teacher, who faces four charges of indecent assault against two brothers aged 15 and 14, said she registered with a doctor the day after the party and took the morning-after pill.

However, she denied having sex with the younger brother - called only Boy B in court - in an alleyway near his home, or having sex with the older brother, Boy A, on three separate occasions.

She admitted wearing a seethrough shirt and black bra to the party and to "sometimes" being a flirt, but angrily denied claims from prosecutor Stella Reynolds that she was not prepared to face up to the truth. "I am not lying," she said.

Canadian Gehring, who lives at Hampton, admitted being ashamed of her behaviour with her young pupils in the winter of 2000, saying she wished she had not "treated them like my friends at home".

She admitted having home phone numbers for the brothers she is alleged to have had sex with, and for the boy she was rumoured to have had sex with at the party. But she denied prosecution claims that she only rang the boys' mobiles because she "knew it was wholly inappropriate".

She said: "That is not the case. I rang their mobiles because they always had them on them."

She admitted telephoning Boy A's mobile frequently but said she was not obsessive about her friendship with him and denied wanting to go out with him because he was the most attractive boy in the group of friends, though she said she thought him "nice-looking".

The court has heard Gehring say male pupils made "inappropriate comments and suggestions" and accuse them of "grabbing, touching gestures". Under cross-examination, she admitted to being flattered by the "inappropriate" behaviour but said she spoke to her teacher colleagues about how to stop it. "Anyone at first feels flattered but after a while it wears thin," she said.

She had explained earlier how she was lonely when she came to Britain and became friends with girls she taught. She fought back tears as she told how she fled Canada for England after her boyfriend jilted her on the day they were to have become engaged.

She described how difficult she found life in London compared to her provincial farming background in Ontario. She said: "I came to London alone. I didn't even know where I was staying when I came to the airport. I had never been overseas before."

She told the court she could not make friends outside the school as "I didn't want to go to pubs alone", and though she went out with fellow teachers twice, she found socialising with them hard as they were all of different ages and lived "in different directions".

The jury heard today that in addition to the four charges of indecent assault which Gehring denies, there had been a fifth, against the third teenage boy, but it had been dropped because insufficient evidence meant there was no case to answer.