A SCHOOLGIRL who was permanently scarred after a love rival poured drain cleaner in to her viola case has revealed how the pain was like having a blow torch held to her leg.

Molly Young, 17, said her tights “started to disintegrate” after she reached up to fetch the instrument from a shelf and the acid poured on to her right leg.

The teenager was attacked by Emily Bowen, a fellow pupil at Knox Academy in Haddington, East Lothian, in September last year after Bowen discovered Ms Young was dating a former boyfriend.

Ms Young, speaking yesterday for the first time about her ordeal, said she still cannot feel parts of her leg.

She said: “I came back to school from an appointment and I had music class, and one of my friends said to me ‘oh, you’d better go up and check your viola because I’ve just seen Emily in the string room’.

“I said, ‘let’s go and see what’s happened’ and I got half way up the stairs and I turned to my friend. I had a really bad feeling and said ‘would you be able to come with me?’ “We went upstairs together and as soon as we went in to the room there was an eggy sort of smell. We just made a joke about it.

“I remember looking at my viola and shrugging my shoulders, and I was thinking ‘there’s nothing wrong with it’.

“I just took it off the shelf like I do three times a day, and my tights just started to disintegrate. [The liquid just] fell out the bottom.

“When I saw the holes in my tights I was thinking, ‘what’s going on?’.

“It was like someone holding a blow torch to your leg.

“If you burn your hand on an oven you can take it away and run it under the cold tap and it’s fine. With that I couldn’t really pull it away because it was stuck to me. I didn’t know what to do.

“I just ran out of the room to get help, and it kept burning.”

Ms Young, who was screaming in pain, told how a teacher “dragged me in to the staff base” while calling for an ambulance.

She said: “She took my boot off and I stood in the sink and she just used the teachers’ mugs to irrigate it. “I was saying ‘it’s so hot, it’s burning’.”

The teenager, speaking on ITV’s This Morning, told how her right leg was scarred, while her left leg escaped with “a couple of splashes”.

She said: “It looks like a birthmark now, to be honest, but to start off with it was full thickness burns so I still can’t really feel certain parts of my leg.”

Ms Young said she immediately thought Bowen was responsible and her suspicions were later confirmed by a police investigation.

She said: “I had a feeling when it happened, but obviously I didn’t know for sure because there was no evidence at that point. I’ve seen her twice since it happened.”

Ms Young, who was looking forward to completing her exams, said she suffered from post traumatic stress after the incident.

She said she had been unable to perform simple tasks, such as tidying her room, without help from her mother.

She has had counselling and is looking forward to starting an apprenticeship at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Ms Young said: “I’ve had a wee break from viola, so I’ll probably go back to it at some point soon.”

Bowen, 18, was detained for 21 months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court last week for a crime described by Sheriff Michael O’Grady as “careful and premeditated”.