by Julie Welch
After that, everything seemed to happen very quickly. Prospectuses appeared so promptly that I suspect they’d been in my mother’s possession for some time and she had merely been waiting for an opportune moment. And, looking back, she had asked me in my Eleven Plus year what I thought about going. My two best friends, both a year older than me, had been packed off with their tuck boxes and lax sticks, and I’m positive my mother felt she had fallen behind socially by not doing the same with me.
I enjoy reading Fleet Street memoirs and, in a particularly entertaining one, Goodbye Fleet Street by Robert Edwards – an editor of the Sunday Express in its glory days of the 1960s – I found this:
Sunday Express readers . . . had been skilfully led to believe that they were a cut above the others. John [Junor, the editor] said to me after one of us had written, under his careful direction, the usual warm, human editorial about children returning to boarding school after their summer holidays, ‘In case you’re wondering, I know perfectly well that many Sunday Express readers live in council houses and send their children to state schools. But they like to think they live in much grander houses and can afford school fees.
Of course, we didn’t live in a council house – home was a six-bedroom Victorian pile overlooking Epping Forest, complete with duck pond, weeping willow, vegetable garden, separate double garage with gardener’s quarters and a conservatory. But the family next door occupied an even bigger piece of real estate. They had a tennis court and a ballroom, a Labrador called Punch and a gnarled old retainer known as ‘Clarkie’. At TV closedown, when the BBC played the national anthem, they stood up in their own living room. Why didn’t we do that? We’d always done our shopping at D H Evans. They went to Harrods. Why couldn’t we? They saw My Fair Lady when it opened in the West End; we didn’t get there for another six months. The daughter of the house went to boarding school. Now I wanted to go too. My mother was thrilled. At last I’d done something to please.
I’m not being snarky. My parents aspired. They wanted to give me the best they could and, at the start of the 1960s, that meant the social graces that would guarantee me a step up the pecking order. Where my mother was concerned, there was a further issue. My father, silly old sausage, dreamed of my marrying a lord. My mother wanted me to go into the family firm. For that, she thought, I would benefit from the public school gloss.
Needless to say, I didn’t want to go into the family firm. It specialised in plant hire. And I don’t mean plant plants, begonias and bay trees and suchlike, which might have been all right, but lifting jacks and pushing jacks and pit-prop pullers and other greasy, weighty, smelly, clanking, northern pieces of machinery that were put to work in the bowels of the earth. Besides, when I was six, I’d had A Vision while lying on the living room carpet. With my exercise book and a pencil, inspired by a dream I’d had the previous night, I had started a novel called The New Riding School. It trailed off after two and a half pages, but I knew at that moment that when I grew up I was going to be a writer. There was bound to be trouble ahead.
My mother had narrowed down the choice of boarding schools to two. Felixstowe’s entrance exam, which I took in a classroom at the City of London, was easy apart from the French paper, which was full of tenses we hadn’t yet covered. The other prospect was Queen Anne’s, Caversham (‘renowned for academic excellence’, according to its prospectus). This had two entrance exams. The first I had to complete at home. I did it at our kitchen table, with my father sitting beside me, which was nice. Then I had to go to the school and take the second exam, following on from which they turned me down because my Maths was ‘lamentable’. So Felixstowe it was. With its mission statement, Felixstowe College style, it couldn’t have filled the bill better:
The aim of the College is to give girls between the age of 11 and 18 a sound education on a religious basis and on modern lines, to stimulate wide interests and to develop individuality. Every attention is paid to the formation of character and the number of girls has been fixed with a firm belief in the importance of the personal interest of the Head Mistress in each individual child. Girls are encouraged amid their beautiful surroundings to cultivate a taste for the natural and unaffected rather than for the artificial and luxurious . . .
We had lived for the first five-and-a-half years of my life in a three-bedroom semi in a cul de sac. My parents married in 1937 and that was their first home. But in 1954 we went up in the world. My mother quickly dropped her embarrassing lower-middle-class rellies and reinvented her background, as befitted a house with a set of bells in the kitchen for the summoning of staff we did not have, apart from George the gardener who, legend had it, had been shell-shocked in the First World War but was quite, quite safe, even when he started chucking flowerpots over the fence into the road.
Anxious that our new neighbourhood might sense her previous house had only one loo, she hid her social insecurity under an increasingly grand manner on the principle that hoity-toitiness was the best defence. Hence, Felixstowe College, with its beautiful surroundings in which my taste for the natural and unaffected, rather than for the artificial and luxurious, would be cultivated, was going to be just the ticket. As well as keeping me safely locked away from teddy boys, juvenile delinquents, bottles of peroxide hair dye, coffee bars and rock ’n’ roll, Felixstowe College was going to turn me into a Young Lady.
Of course, that didn’t occur to me at the time. Neither did I take any notice of all the dull stuff like ‘sound religious education’ and ‘formation of character’. All I saw was midnight feasts, sleeping in a dorm, fun with my chums, scrapes and japes. Too marvellous for words!
And then the uniform list arrived.
3
THE SMORGASBORD
Felixstowe College
Felixstowe
Suffolk
1961
Trunks to be dispatched 2 or 3 days before travelling if sent by rail or British Road Services. This list to be sent back on top of trunk.
Everything must be marked by Cash’s name-tapes and returned to school in good repair. Shoes and regulation uniform to be obtained from Harrods Ltd., Knighstbridge, London SW1. SLOane 1234, Ext. 671 and 541
Parents are earnestly requested to place orders for uniforms as early as possible so that every pupil arrives at School fully equipped.
My uniform list ran to four pages. I had never known you needed so many clothes. Everything was required from gym to hymn. The undies were multitudinous. Five vests, three brassières and two suspender belts. Two white petticoats. Three pairs of grey nylon crepe stockings – they concertinaed around your ankles and the wind from the North Sea always found the gap of bare flesh between their tops and your pants. On which subject, six pairs of white cotton linings and three pairs of grey gym knickers. These were known as ‘grey bags’, and you wore them over your white linings at all times. Two pairs of pants. And all those other wrappings. We were living games of pass-the-parcel.
The accessories took up a whole page. Two pairs of winter gloves – leather for Sundays, grey wool for the rest of the week. One linen bag, one brush and comb bag and contents, two face flannels, one sponge bag and toilet requisites. Six coat hangers, one school satchel, one music case (‘if music taken’), one Bible (‘Prayer & Hymn Book combined purchased at school’), one well-equipped work case for mending, one clothes brush. God knows how many hats, and squillions of shoes – you’d need to be a centipede to get proper wear out of them. But I was entranced. I was going to have my own umbrella.
There were things on that uniform list I would wear only once, or never: black wellies, a white sun hat, a grey flannel coat for Chapel in summer – and white cotton gloves to go with it. Not to mention stuff I thought only old ladies needed. One writing case and contents. A bed jacket.
Off we went in Mummy’s Ford Anglia to Knightsbridge. My mother had passed her driving test five years previously and the Anglia was her second car, succeeding a green ‘Baby’ Austin. It was two-tone, its colours lemon and merin
gue, just like the pie. She loved driving, especially since Jane was still wearing L-plates, having failed her test once already.
We parked in Hans Crescent, behind the store. There were no meters back then, and plenty of spaces. Harrods school uniform department was on the fourth floor. It occupied a huge space between childrenswear and the wonderland that was their pet department. You could order anything from the pet department back then – a monkey, a lion even – and right in the middle was a huge, lifelike stuffed horse, all tacked up and looking ready to go. We walked past a pen where a little group of blue Persian kittens played. I wanted to take them all home.
The uniform department was under the control of a Mrs du Cann. She was the mother of the Conservative MP, Edward du Cann, and had a very poised hairstyle. Her status was too elevated for her to appear on the shop floor, but she would traipse up to Felixstowe from Harrods every year to measure us up for the next tranche of uniform, because not only would we all have grown but something new was always being introduced. But even the bog-standard Harrods assistant was quellingly posh. Our accents went up a couple of registers, as she laid all the clothes on the counter like precious bounty.
Everything looked so expensive and felt so nice – wool, cotton, gabardine, Harris Tweed. My House tie was striped grey and red, patterned diagonally to brand me as a Ridley. I had a grey tunic and three cream blouses. I had a grey afternoon dress – to change into for dinner, like an aristocrat in a stately home. It was made of fine wool and was pleated from shoulder to waist. Girls with big busts opened them up like an accordion. Despite this, the effect (obviously intentional) was to make you look completely sexless. It featured a white Peter Pan collar that had to be attached by tiny buttons. You had to make sure every button the laundry removed was sewn back on. There was always somebody at supper with their collar hanging by a couple of buttons because all the rest had come off. The dress fastened at the side with hooks and eyes. These often fell off too, partly because Cawley (one of our House mistresses) would rip the dress open to check you were wearing a vest.
There was Sunday best, of course. It included a squishy felt hat and tweed coat, to be worn over the A-line dress of carmine red wool, which would turn out to be itchy and, on hot days, would dye your armpits pink. A mac, too. Grey, too. There were Games socks, a cardigan, a thick V-neck sweater. An overall for Art – ringing the changes by being a good plain green. Grey flappy shorts called ‘divided skirts’ for Games. One sanitary belt. Oh God, don’t mention that.
For everyday wear there was a splendid cloak, grey with a scarlet flannel lining, and a hood. I tried it on and was completely shrouded, with my feet sticking out at the bottom.
‘I look like someone hiding behind a pair of curtains,’ I complained.
‘We have to allow for growth, don’t we, dear?’ said the assistant.
‘How does it do up?’ I asked, after flapping the sides for a few moments. ‘Where are the buttons? What happens when the weather gets cold?’
‘I could sew a zip in,’ offered my mother.
‘Oh, you mustn’t do that,’ said the assistant. ‘It’s against the rules.’
Amazingly, in 1960, our uniform had been featured in Tatler, with photos and an article about ‘The new English schoolgirl.’
‘wears a uniform of which, happily, only the name survives to connect it with the drab institutional garments once prescribed by academic elders whose only concern was that everyone looked alike. For one thing, it eliminates jealousy and individual bad taste, discouraging teenage predilections for stiletto heels, winkle-picker toes and frilly petticoats’.
The article featured six schools, all fee-paying, naturally; the others were Sherborne, Riddlesworth Hall (which originated as an offshoot of Felixstowe), St Felix, St James, West Malvern and, lastly, St Vincents, Alverstoke, which was where my friend Lindsey was incarcerated. But they’d chosen us for the cover!
Tatler went on to say that, ‘Felixstowe College has had a complete change of outfit since the war’ and, golly, ‘most of the uniform was designed by the art mistress’. That was Mrs Holditch, who might have been quite a girl in her day, but when we were there was old, stout and tetchy. She tottered around in baggy tops and skirts to hide all the pendulous bits. Who knew she was a secret Schiaparelli?
Our red dress was in the article, along with our winter Games kit, which included a rather natty cricket-type sweater: ‘Long red socks provide a splash of colour. For swimming they can choose their own costumes (bikinis barred). Felixstowe is go-ahead and democratic [if, reading that, hollow, incredulous laughter sounds in your ears, that would be mine], senior girls receive make-up lessons from representatives of famous cosmetics firms and the school employs three permanent hairdressers’.
The star turn was a tussore dress. I gawped at it. Tussore was silk, wasn’t it? The kind of thing you dreamed of owning! Although perhaps not with quite so many tucks and frills and darts and flounces. Frightfully old-fashioned. Almost heritage. But was that really a surprise? Felixstowe College girls had worn tussores since 1929, when the school was founded. They figure in the 1930s section of The Story of Felixstowe College, accompanied by ‘a matching tussore coat, very square and very, very expensive’. Junked, apparently, when one was returned by the laundry labelled: ‘gentleman’s large dressing gown’. Then, even worse, a matching dress and coat in black and white check. Unluckily these resembled what was on offer in that season’s toiletries section at Woolworth’s. As the girls took their Sunday stroll along the promenade, rude boys shouted, ‘Washbags!’ at them. It couldn’t go on.
The tussore had been through the rise of Nazi Germany; it had seen the lights going out all over Europe, it celebrated VE Day, the Festival of Britain and the Coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II (‘with all its solemn pageantry rooted in an abiding tradition’). It was still on the uniform list when the Rolling Stones brought out their first single, in the summer of ’63. The Stones wore gamy T-shirts and their trousers left nothing to the imagination. We were still stuck in our frilly, sashed tussores. Would they never go? At last they did – to be replaced by a grey-and-white-striped shirt-waister. Now we all looked like 1950s housewives. At least we were only ten years out of date.
Around the same time, the panama hats went too. Good riddance to those, too. Dreary in the extreme. At Ridley we danced on the lawn, snipping them to pieces. We cut holes in them and pulled our hair through the holes. Even the Head of House and Games captain joined in, jumping on them and casting them into the sea. Instead, we had boaters. They weren’t nearly as comfortable to wear, but ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle,’ as Miss Sanford, who taught French and Spanish, advised us. Miss Sanford was very attractive, unlike most of our other teachers, who obviously hadn’t suffered enough.
We loved our boaters. When you went on a coach trip you’d wait till you reached the first roundabout and then someone would shout, ‘Hats off!’ and everyone hurled them in the air. And they made our school very distinctive – no way could we have been mistaken for state school girls. Soon Jonah received a call from Mrs Oakley, the headmistress of St Felix, our big rival just along the coast, with a view to introducing them there.
‘These boaters,’ said Mrs Oakley. ‘Are they any good?’
‘No, no, complete waste of time,’ barked Jonah. ‘Keep having to send the boatman out to fetch them when they blow into the sea.’
So St Felix carried on with the dreary panamas. One up to Jonah.
Incidentally we were jolly lucky to have Jonah as our headmistress rather than Mrs Oakley. Mrs Oakley (Mr Oakley seemed to have been disposed of somewhere along the line) was said to be so terrifying that some Old Girls of St Felix refused to send their daughters there while she was in charge. I’m told she died while reading the Daily Telegraph. Her last words were, ‘That’s disgraceful’.
After the uniform had been tried on and paid for, my mother and I took the lift to the restaurant on the fourth floor. It was time for the main event, a smorgasbor
d in the Hans Buttery. Our first ever. Up until then, a mushroom omelette in the restaurant on the top floor of D H Evans had done us nicely. But the woman and her daughter next door had been swanking for sodding months about the Harrods smorgasbord, with tales of smoked eel, mortadella sausage, cold salmon (real, not tinned) and coronation chicken, with mayonnaise not salad cream. It was the hugest, laden-est buffet in existence. It was wonderful. I went for a second helping. And then another. And there was still pudding to come. I ended up so stuffed with food I could barely move. But my mother was happy, and therefore so was I. We were now on an equal footing with the house next door. And their daughter only went to Wycombe Abbey. Which hadn’t been in Tatler.
4
THE SCHOOL TRAIN
Mrs O’Sullivan took the twins to London. They taxied to Paddington Station, and looked for the St Clare train. There it was, drawn up at the platform, labelled St Clare. On the platform were scores of girls, talking excitedly to one another, saying goodbye to their parents, hailing mistresses and buying bars of chocolate at the shop.
ENID BLYTON, The Twins at St Clare’s
Liverpool Street station reverberated with the rattle of porters’ trolleys and smelt of diesel the way all London’s termini did, but it was different as well because of the accompanying dead cod whiff, it being where trains from the eastern seaboard unloaded their cargoes.
The school train left from a platform at the far end. It was known as the boat train because it eventually ended up at Harwich, where you caught the ferry to the Hook of Holland. A famous railway poster of the time stated: HARWICH FOR THE CONTINENT, under which an even more famous piece of graffiti had been added: FRINTON FOR THE INCONTINENT. Finding the platform was easy because of the crowd of girls in grey gabardine macs over grey afternoon dresses, with grey felt hats and long grey socks or grey stockings, surrounded by suitcases and shrieking and jabbering, everybody so excited and full of news.
