Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  ‘You’re looking great,’ I say.

  ‘Fillers, dear,’ she says. ‘And I’ve got a plastic boob.’

  ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ says the person behind me in a no-nonsense voice. I turn to see a diminutive woman in a smart suit. She has a tiny waist and salt and pepper curls, and greets me with delight, by name. My mind goes a complete blank but fortuitously we are enveloped by a swell of new arrivals crying, ‘Cherry!’ and now I do remember. Cherry was another of the Cranmers, an engaging moppet with tangled fair curls. She was a canon’s daughter, and tried so hard not to be naughty, but was always being led astray by Juno.

  I head off to find Chrissie, who has been my friend since we were small, tubby, bespectacled newcomers, and is now a lovely, quirky granny. She’s the only person from school I have kept in touch with. She’s a drummer. Proper African drums, not Ringo Starr things. On the other hand, she’s also chair of her parish council. All the other women have been fixed in my mind as they were half a century ago, in grey tunics and House ties, with frightful hairstyles. There is warmth in everybody’s welcome but, even so, I feel awkward and don’t want to offend anybody else by failing to recognise them. They, it seems, don’t have that problem.

  ‘You’re exactly the same,’ is what everyone says to me.

  Is that a compliment? Or do they mean I’m still weird and a terrible show-off?

  We were the generation who wore the first miniskirts; the girls sent out into a world about to be changed by the pill, feminism and the 1967 Abortion Act; a world suddenly full of choices that our education either hadn’t seen coming or had chosen to turn its back on. We represent a fair cross-section of upper middle-class girls of that era – daughters of mothers who didn’t have to earn a living, of fathers who were gentleman farmers, the officer class, execs of multinationals and the ambitious bourgeoisie. An outsider looking at us would assume that our lives have gone in straight, privileged lines: marriage, children, a gradual upgrading of real estate, a decent private pension, granny duties, travel and voluntary work. I would place a sizeable sum of money on my being the only member of the Labour Party present.

  Of course, being from a comfortably off background doesn’t inoculate you against widowhood, illness, financial insecurity and divorce, or simply the depredations of advancing age. Indeed, in the wrong frame of mind you might feel depressed by the number of years that have passed; by crow’s feet, corded necks and carefully tinted hair. But no one here seems anything but happy and energised, as we feast on salade tricolore, jamon, olives, French cheese and summer pudding, and our voices rise in pitch and volume the way they used to in the school dining room.

  After a few minutes have passed, faces suddenly become familiar. Reflexively, decades after it might have been relevant, I classify everyone according to the House they boarded in, because to each other we’re still Cranmers, Tyndales, Latimers or Ridleys and in some odd way always will be. I can see it on my gravestone: Here lies Julia Welch (R).

  That R in brackets stands for Ridley, the stuccoed villa on the seafront in which Chrissie and I boarded. Our House mistress, Bretch, was a peculiar-looking woman – as well as her frizzy-hair, she had a severe case of strabismus. One eye went this way and the other eye went that way. It equipped her to spot miscreants at either end of the room simultaneously.

  ‘Do you remember Bretch lining us up in the Middle Five commie?’ says Gill, who is on a visit from Australia and still enviably leggy and boyish-looking. ‘One big line, all fourteen of us in front of her. No idea what we’d done, but it must have been bad. And she fixed an eye on each end of the line and said, “And what have YOU got to say for yourself?” And Carrie, who was at one end, said ever so politely, “Please, Miss Cross, which one of us are you looking at?” ’

  ‘I remember Bretch discovering one of our first midnight feasts,’ says Annie, who is tall and elegant with a mane of streaked brown hair. Who could imagine that she once wore bunches and had sticking-out teeth and was known as Rabbit, the naughtiest girl in Ridley? ‘It was in Lower Four. We kept ourselves awake because it had to start at midnight, naturally. Goodness knows why, but we decided to go down to the junior common room and have it there. We were having a merry old time when the door opened and in walked Bretch. For some reason, we all stood up!’

  ‘We had various ones in various dorms and later on we got quite brazen,’ says Helen.

  She seems barely to have changed, with her dramatic dark eyebrows and glorious, thick, honey-coloured curls. ‘I spent the entire time twitchy with fear that we were going to be discovered. Bretch’s shoes squeaked and we got frightfully good at hearing her. We’d wait, listening out for her walking away. But she was obviously quite crafty because sometimes she didn’t actually walk away. We’d start again and then she’d fling the door open. “WHAT do you think you’re doing?” ’

  ‘Do you remember when Alexa brought back the little camping stove after the holidays?’ says Gill. ‘With a saucepan and lots of packets of dried chicken noodle soup?’

  ‘No!’ we all chorus. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was when we were in the five-dorm opposite the kitchen, and one of us would steal some bread, and the plate of butter from the fridge. Not long after Lights Out we’d get going on the routine of lighting up the camping stove on the floor by the washbasins in the former, and emptying the packet of soup into the saucepan and cooking it up. There was nothing instant about them in those days – they would take about ten minutes to get them to an edible consistency – but we couldn’t wait that long. After a couple of minutes, if that, we’d be delighting in our crispy noodle soup drunk out of plastic tooth mugs.’

  ‘How come Bretch didn’t smell it?’

  ‘No idea. Maybe it wasn’t cooked long enough to release any aromas. But finally came the fateful night . . . the door was flung open and the light turned on and there was Bretch, framed in the doorway. We’d already eaten and I was by the basins, washing out tooth mugs. But my bed was the one by the door, right beside Bretch. I dropped everything, she stood there staring, and I scrambled over Biddy’s bed, landed my bare right foot squarely in the plate of butter and leapt nonchalantly into bed . . . but I don’t think she even saw it. There were no repercussions; she had no idea what we were up to – unbelievable! Maybe her eyesight was even worse than we thought.’

  ‘You remember so many things but not that YOU nicked our House mistress’s sausage!’ declares someone else I haven’t seen for fifty years, but whose tones I identify straight away. Lindy was our Ridley form-mate. She had been a lovely girl, determined, helpful, very into school life. Now she’s in designer clothes (I recognise a skirt from Anthropologie that I coveted but couldn’t afford) and has a hairdo like a gorgeous steel chrysanthemum.

  ‘What? When? I can’t have!’ I reply. ‘No, I certainly don’t remember that.’

  ‘From the fridge,’ says Lindy inexorably, holding out a small, dog-eared Letts diary.

  There it is. Monday 10 April 1965. ‘Bretch v. cross etc.’, is written in Lindy’s schoolgirl handwriting.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I say weakly.

  ‘I wish Jonah could see this book you’re writing,’ Lindy says. ‘I’d love her to be able to hear you defending it all on the radio. If she looked over all her girls, she wouldn’t have picked you to write about it, I’m sure of that. NOT part of the establishment.’

  Della is a Ridley too. She is still fair and slim, and intelligence still shines out of her. ‘Do you remember the term of bed-hopping?’ I say, when we are out of earshot.

  ‘I have a theory,’ says Della, when I remind her, ‘that if you segregate people, the sexuality still comes out but you don’t have any choice who receives it.’

  ‘Has the head of the table got all the right things?’ says a lady who looks very county, tongue-in-cheek. It’s Caroline, another Tyndale from my year. She had sung in the chapel choir, the silvery-grey robes and little ruff sweetly set off by her creamy skin and dark hair. ‘Make s
ure the teacher’s got everything. Never start eating before she does. That training’s stayed with me.’

  ‘Preparing for our coming out as debutantes!’ exclaims someone. ‘Walking down the main staircase in Cranmer. You had to put your hand on the banister and glide down.’

  ‘I think of our mother as Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, with all these daughters to launch into society,’ says Joanna, the oldest of three Tyndale sisters. ‘Jonah said, “It’s a college for young ladies,” and that clinched it for Mummy. She thought she was sending her daughters off to be finished, so we could all find suitable husbands. It was the social graces.’

  That triggers off more reminiscences. The nightly stripwash (‘I could strip off in TK Maxx right now and it wouldn’t bother me one bit!’). That time the Upper Fives put a scarecrow in Bretch’s bed. Our first night in the dorm.

  ‘Beth told me the facts of life,’ says Chrissie. ‘And a joke with “fuck” in it, and I didn’t know what that meant.’

  ‘It was shock horror for me,’ says Caroline. ‘I’d been dumped. I was eleven, couldn’t really understand. It was hell. Absolute hell. The filthy supper beforehand. The smell. The horsehair mattress. I couldn’t find anywhere to turn in the hollow. The bottom falling out of my stomach. Complete terror. Everyone ticking me off because I kept crying. I cried and cried.’

  ‘I wasn’t very sympathetic,’ admits Di, her fellow Tyndale. ‘I’d been at boarding school since I was four. I couldn’t understand what the matter was.’

  And then there was Jonah.

  ‘Jonah,’ sighs Cherry. ‘Ruth Jones. Huge body, small eyes. Terrifying headmistress. She was powerful, full of masculine energy, she walked with a stride. Always on the job, never smiling.’

  ‘She lived on site, imagine!’ says Juno, marvelling. ‘One term, we were in the eight-dorm next to her bedroom. Sleeping in a room next to your headmistress – how weird is that?’

  ‘Yes, I think that was the only room in Cranmer I never managed to look into,’ says Cherry. ‘I was awfully nosy. I once walked into the matron’s room without knocking. I felt so at home – she was rather like my mother. She had her dressing gown open. I saw her bush! Her face was frozen in horror and I dashed out. Nothing was ever the same again.’

  ‘Oh God, do you remember being sent down?’ says Juno.

  If you talked in the dorm after Lights Out, your House mistress would make you get up and go downstairs to stand in the corridor for twenty minutes, trying not to giggle. It was the boarding school equivalent of being paraded as hostages.

  ‘It struck me as a very odd punishment,’ says Della. ‘Keeping yourselves awake by talking after Lights, then they kept you up even later.’

  ‘We used to have to wait for Jonah to walk past,’ says Cherry. ‘She would grunt disapprovingly to show she’d noticed. She was so big . . . do you think she ate cream cakes secretly? I think she did.’

  ‘She always ate very fast,’ says Lindy.

  ‘She always moved very fast,’ says Sukie, a merry, pretty Latimer wearing Roland Mouret. ‘She led by her bosom. It swerved round corners before she did.’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t wear a bra,’ says Juno. ‘If she did, it wasn’t a boulder-upholder.’

  ‘The Jonah Table!’ someone shrieks.

  The headmistress’s table occupied a raised alcove in the school dining room. It was in a prime position, with a view over Cranmer’s manicured, sweeping lawns and sunken rock garden. You had to sit at it once a year, moving up one place a day till the dreaded moment arrived when you were actually next to her and had to make conversation.

  Joanna makes a face. ‘That was so difficult. You were always worried the food was going to be something you didn’t like. The first time I had to sit next to her it was stew. Lumps of stringy beef. I was so nervous I couldn’t swallow. I spat them out in my napkin and moved them to my tunic pocket. All the while continuing the conversation with a pocketful of half-mangled meat. It’s taken me years to enjoy stew. For years I could only eat mince, not joined-up meat.’

  ‘I picked up my knife and fork,’ says Sukie, ‘and a whole pile of peas shot out over her lap. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Jones,” I said, and she said, “Good shot, Susanne,” and she picked them off her lap and put them on her plate.’

  ‘Who remembers The Jonah List?’ someone else asks.

  There are groans of recollection.

  ‘It was a slip of green A5 paper,’ remembers Chrissie. ‘I can see that typing now: “Girls to see Miss Jones”. Her PA would pin it up on the noticeboard outside the Bilge lab on Thursdays and, if your name was on it, you knew you were in real trouble. You wouldn’t see her till Friday, so you had twenty-four hours of dark foreboding. Like Christmas Eve in reverse.’

  ‘And then you’d have to sit on the bench outside her study with all the others on her list,’ says Joanna. ‘Just waiting, waiting, then–’ she shudders ‘–your turn. My sisters and I would fly out to Kenya in the Christmas holidays, where we would rub olive oil on our skin to get brown. The uniform covered every inch of your body because you were a Young Lady, but of course I wanted to show off my tan, so I wore it with my sleeves rolled up and the collar of my blouse open. “This is not a college for washerwomen!” Jonah barked. “This is despicable! The next thing I’ll see is you with your hair in a scarf!” ’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ scoffs Lindy. ‘What about the girl who got caught climbing back through the window after she’d spent the night with a boy? Jonah called a special meeting in the library and made her stand up in front of the whole school. Then she said, “Now take off every single item of clothing you took off in front of that boy.” ’

  The nicest part of the reunion takes place after lunch. Juno has assembled our items of memorabilia and arranged them in her garden room, and we have a mini-museum tour. Here’s Sukie’s boater, in the school colours of grey and red. With its faded straw and frayed ribbon, it seems as remote in time and exotic as a severed head brought back from the tropics. Lindy has produced every school magazine from 1960 to 1994. I skim through ‘Events & Outings’ for 1961–62. WIMBLEDON, because some of the parents were debenture holders. ALDEBURGH FESTIVAL, because our Head of Music had connections with Benjamin Britten. A LECTURE ON SKINCARE AND MAKE-UP BY LANCÔME, and A DAY AT HARRODS and THE LONDON FESTIVAL BALLET and goodness knows what else, all in one single year, all wangled by cunning old Jonah.

  And the houses we boarded in! Practically Millionaires’ Row! We Ridleys gaze at a black and white postcard-sized photo of our old house that Della has brought along. Its tower, which contained the very sought-after two-dorm (you could have secret sessions in there, trying out make-up), does rather resemble a sentry point from the outside. ‘It looks wonderfully bleak, doesn’t it?’ says Della.

  ‘It came on the market a few years ago,’ says one of the younger Ridleys, looking over our shoulders. ‘Some of us pretended we were potential buyers and went to have a look. The only thing that hadn’t been changed around and done up was that cab on the first floor, the one with the frosted glass window in the door.’ She turns to one of the sixth-form students. ‘Cab was our name for the loo. You didn’t go to the cab, you just went to cab.’

  ‘With that awful hard paper,’ says Juno. ‘It was crisp and crackly, and the sheets either had IZAL printed on them or PROPERTY OF HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT.’

  The sight of a lacrosse stick brings forth a chorus of fluting cries as we mimic Coulo, the Games mistress. ‘Shoooot! Bend . . . your . . . kneeees!’

  ‘Do you remember one year there was that assistant Games mistress?’ says Juno. ‘She was actually young and pretty. Didn’t last long. Jonah sacked her for having sex with her boyfriend on the beach, under an upturned boat.’

  ‘How did Jonah find out?’ says someone with wonder.

  ‘Oh, Jonah had her spies everywhere.’

  There are programmes from nativity plays and gym displays and the classical music concerts we had to attend at the Spa
Pavilion on the seafront, which were thoroughly appreciated by the musical girls among us and a source of intense, life-depleting boredom for everyone else. Someone has brought along her girdle, the red one we tied around our tunics. A uniform list, four pages long, is next to my own rather nugatory contribution, some Cash’s name-tapes bearing the legend JULIA WELCH (R). I found them not so long ago in my mother’s dressing table, when I was clearing out her house after she died, and remembered her sitting by our living room fireplace before my first term, sewing them on to my new school clothes. It took her ages because there were so many things. It never occurred to me to help out.

  The photos are wonderful: tennis and hockey teams, and girls swallow-diving from the high board at the inauguration ceremony for our swimming pool; a girl with a face rather like the horse she was sitting on at the school gymkhana; Songs of Praise when it was recorded in our chapel. The camera had focused on the staff in the front pew, and I feel about fourteen years old again, gazing at my favourite teachers – stylish Miss Sanford, nice, harmless Miss Wrinch, and peppery but caring Miss McNulty.

  ‘There’s Pollard and Williams!’ someone whoops.

  Miss Pollard and Miss Williams shared a bungalow in town, so their relationship was the subject of endless speculation.

  A student looks at us as if we’ve unearthed dinosaur skeletons. ‘Two of my daughter’s staff in a same-sex relationship have just had a baby,’ explains Juno. She turns to the student. ‘And none of you batted an eyelid, did you?’

  ‘We were so innocent,’ says Caroline. ‘Till I left school I used to think you took a pill and a baby came. I’d never seen a willy.’