Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  ‘You’re very original!’ cried Erica, with a peal of very grown-up laughter, at which I felt rather an idiot.

  But Danny I was to be, and I didn’t really mind, as it reminded me of the person I’d been able to be before I came here. I knew I’d have to put that person aside for the moment, but she would be there waiting for me to come back to after I had finished being JULIA WELCH (R).

  My first night in a dorm! A strip-wash in front of three strangers! Everyone knew what to do except me, and I stood there trying not to look as they peeled their clothes off. They weren’t quite starkers – you could keep your knickers on – but still. Embarrassing, embarrassing! And they all had more bosom than me. I faced the wall so no one could see I only merited a Rosebud starter bra, and removed my big pants and slightly less big pants under my dressing gown to prevent any flash of the lower department. Anyway, I got that over with. Then I jumped into bed. It was an unfamiliarly hard landing. And then came the exciting moment when Bretch took Lights, or switched the lights off, as the rest of the world would have put it.

  ‘Settle down now. No talking.’

  I was expecting all the fun of talking after Lights Out, as per Darrell in First Term at Malory Towers but, although everyone whispered for a bit, after a while came silence and then the sound of deep breathing. The old house creaked, the trees in the Ghost Walk sighed, the plumbing gurgled. I tried to get comfortable on the horsehair mattress. My demands weren’t outrageous – I accepted there was no soft place – but could it not at least afford me somewhere level to place my body?

  I said my prayers, putting my hands together under the bedclothes and muttering a quick request to look after Mummy, Daddy, Jane and Rebel. I was pretty sure my big sister was well able to look after herself, but I included her just to be on the safe side. After that I moved on to the main agenda, which was a request for seven horses, listed in order of colour preference: strawberry roan, blue roan, palomino, piebald, dun, red chestnut and a bay with a white mane and tail.

  Sleep didn’t come for ages. There was a deep hollow right in the centre of the mattress – was the last occupant of this bed a hippo? I folded the thin, mildewed pillow in half to make it more comfortable. I didn’t feel a bit homesick but it was all strange: having to be careful what I said, not quite able to be myself, not sure how to go along yet, and having to go to sleep next to three people I didn’t know. But I must have eventually dropped off because the next thing I heard was the clang-clang-clang of a handbell, a bring-out-your-dead noise. Ten to seven in the morning! It was the rising bell.

  ‘Oh no,’ groaned Cath. ‘I’m here again.’ And then we all scrambled out of bed and there was a race to get to the washbasins and cab and then into our cream blouses and red and grey ties and tunics and thick grey stockings, and it took me ages to fasten my red girdle and arrange it on my tunic the right way, with the knot at the back so it hung behind like a tail.

  We congregated in the drive to go to Cranmer for breakfast. ‘You have to walk in pairs,’ said Erica. ‘It’s a rule.’ Everybody seemed to be in couples already, crocodile-style. I looked round for Chrissie but she had gone on ahead with Beth and Cath, so I asked Erica and Bobbie if I could walk with them.

  ‘You mustn’t ask a couple if you can walk with them,’ Erica said. ‘You have to wait to be invited.’

  ‘Oh! OK.’

  ‘Here, Danny, walk with Prue and me,’ said Della, and after that it was just another big whirl.

  Cranmer’s dining room was very big, long and narrow, and had several French windows opening on to a terrace and lawns and, beyond them, the sea, so it was very light. It had a beautiful parquet wooden floor and the most enormous Victorian fireplaces at either end, complete with Tudor folderols carved in the oak surrounds. One incorporated a mural in oils. It must have been at least seven feet long. I couldn’t really decide what it depicted, but there seemed to be lots of sweeping garments and waving swords and back ends of horses. Of breakfast itself, the toast was cold, the cornflakes limp and the bacon greasy and accompanied by a huge blood clot of tomato, but it was set out very formally with toast racks and china plates, teacups and saucers, and our own table napkins.

  After breakfast, another trek – this one to Morning Prayers, and a bit of a jolt that turned out to be, too, because at my last school we just had Assembly in the big hall that doubled as the gym, so we were surrounded by wall bars, the buck and the vaulting horse. Not exactly what you’d call numinous. We’d have one hymn, accompanied by the music teacher at the piano, Lord’s Prayer, bish, bash, bosh, then back to our classrooms. Here we had our own church in the grounds and the service was really religious, with kneeling and praying and a hymn accompanied by a real organ, and a lesson. And we’d have to go back at the end of the day for more. And would do the same every day, with a proper service on Sunday – with more kneeling and praying and singing and a sermon. So this was what they meant by ‘sound religious education’. I’d be at it hammer and tongs.

  The whirl continued. We went back to Cranmer for ‘Weighing’, which was conducted on the top floor, in the San. Everyone seemed so skinny and I wasn’t. I rued that smorgasbord and put my feet at the very edge of the scales, hoping that all that would be weighed would be the air between my legs. It didn’t work. Eight stone 5 lbs. Almighty God!

  I then fled back to Ridley for ‘Unpacking of Trunks’. These were scattered all over the Covered Way, invading common rooms, spilling out into the drive. Up and down the stairs we went with armfuls of clothes, up and down, up and down. Walking past the Upper Five commie with another load, I heard hoots of laughter and a plump, pink-faced Ridley nicknamed Balloon bounced out. ‘I say, is your name really Lester Piggott?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong man,’ and hurried away. I was pleased with my wisecrack but I had to shut myself in cab for a little while to regroup. I longed for my best friend at day school, a lovely, demonstrative Jewish girl with a Helen Shapiro beehive hairdo. We would speak on the phone every night, pretending to be jockeys. She would be Lester Piggott and I would take the part of a less successful one called Johnny ‘Kipper’ Lynch or Scobie Breasley who, for some reason, we both regarded as a romantic hero, even though he looked like a walnut wearing a cap.

  But I had to get a grip, because next on the schedule was a House meeting. As I belted towards the common room, something damp flicked against my calf. I felt behind me. My girdle was wet. I had gone to cab and forgotten to hitch it up. Panic, panic. I had weed on my girdle! What could I do?

  You must rise above it, I told myself sternly. House meeting over, I was whirled away again for ‘Timetabling of Extras’. Oh dear, oh dear. What a lot of whirling was involved. We went all around the school, up, down, along, over, through – we ran the gamut of prepositions so, by mid-afternoon, I had turned into an automaton, eating something, being told something, being pulled up for not doing one thing, and then being corrected because I was doing another, and I didn’t come to until late in the day, when I found myself sitting in Lower Five A classroom.

  It was in what was called the Modern Block. Huge cold windows filled it with that melancholy September light that lets you know you’ve come to the end of summer. The view through the windows was of half-a-dozen tennis courts with wet, sagging nets. Old desks, varnished dark brown, with a hole in the top right corner for the inkwell, were ranked across the room. Lines of strange girls dressed in grey. A partition painted sickly green, the sort of colour that milk turns after it’s been on a windowsill in the sun for a very long time. It divided our classroom from the next one along and I could hear Maggie, House mistress of Tyndale, shouting from behind it. Apart from that, everything was very, very quiet.

  My last school had been in the heart of the City, in Carmelite Street. It was narrow, Dickensian almost, sandwiched between office buildings. There had been a mean little fireplace in one corner of our classroom. In winter the porter would shamble in and light a fire, which we threw our biros on. It was fun
. The burning biros made a terrible smell that lingered during Geography. The porter was called Stringer, and he would place bets for you if you asked him. We were so high up that there wasn’t much to see out of the windows except the top third of other buildings and a lot of sky, but you could hear exciting things, because we were so close to Fleet Street: the newspaper lorries with their screeching brakes, laden with huge rolls of paper for the presses, like Brobdingnagian loo rolls. The Observer had its offices nearby in Tudor Street. On the wall beside its front entrance was a display case with prints of that Sunday’s photos pinned up inside. You could buy one for ten shillings. I would go there when school finished. That’s where I bought the photos of Lester Piggott and Danny Blanchflower.

  I came to, to hear our form mistress, Hewitt – who, possibly because she was married and lived out, was relatively sane – call out the register. Every surname was Anglo-Saxon, and a few were double-barrelled. I again thought back to my last school, and all the names there. Not just Maskell and Mackay and Wilkes, but Bhattacharya, Constantinides, Eastefield, Szamek, Wiener.

  Suddenly I had this out-of-nowhere, waking-up-from-a-coma moment, as if I’d been whisked away by a tornado or washed up by shipwreck on an unknown shore. Where was I? How did I get here? I was on my own, and now I would have to survive.

  6

  INSHALLAH

  Luckily I wasn’t able to spend much time feeling sorry for myself because, no sooner than all the rough books and textbooks and blotch and ink had been doled out and our timetables filled in, than we were all sent fleeing back to our Houses for tea. You’ll see I’ve used a capital ‘H’ there. You hardly ever called it Ridley. Where we lived was referred to as ‘House’. Furthermore, it was neither a house nor the house, it was just House. For example, after morning lessons and lunch, in order to change for Games (another capital there), you went back to House and then, if you hated Games, hid in a wardrobe (which was not capitalised).

  Before I go any further, I must give you a Ridley guided tour, because it was the backdrop to my formative years and almost everything of fun and import that happened to me at school happened there. Now, this is all stuff I found out about years after I left. I didn’t have a clue at the time what a fine, historic house it was, nor that it had once been the abode of a famous poet. Quite honestly, life was so absorbing and jolly (usually), that I cared not a whit about when it was built or who lived there but, now I am of mature years, I find it so interesting, of course.

  It sat on the corner of Undercliffe Road and Maybush Lane and, before Cranmer sprang up and flaunted itself alongside, was said to be ‘the grandest house in the place’, with a carriage drive, orchard and, bang at the front where it got all the sea views, a tower room. By the time of our era, it had been turned into a two-dorm and was much sought-after because it was accessed by a set of creaky stairs and, if you were up to anything, you could hear Bretch coming and could get rid of the evidence before she burst in.

  It was built in the nineteenth century by Sir Roger Harland, Bart., whose Italian wife was homesick for the shores of her native Mediterranean. It was her seaside retreat, and beautiful it was too, even in our day, surrounded as it was by flagstoned terraces, balustrades, urns and buttercup-strewn lawns, although, when the northeast wind blew and the winter fogs formed, it wasn’t very Mediterranean.

  In fact, that was the one downside of Ridley’s being so close to the sea. Stationed three miles offshore at Cork Bank was a lightship. This looked a mild-mannered little vessel, with CORK in large letters stretching almost the length of its hull, and topped by a jaunty glass cylinder of a hat. The hat was actually the seat of its evil, because – especially in November, the month of peak lightship – it became an invisible monster, obscured by sea fog and intruding into our nights, its beam reaching into every dorm along the front and side of the house, feeling its way around the walls, accompanied by the plangent bleat of its horn every half-minute or so.

  When first built, Ridley’s name was Tamarisk Villa, though not for long. Under a later owner, Lady Login, one of those intrepid wives of Empire (her memoirs, Court Life and Camp Life, can be perused online), Tamarisk became Vernon, her maiden name because, so she thought, Tamarisk was too exotic. Lady Login doesn’t seem to have spent much time there herself, but used it as a holiday let. One tenant was the poet Edward Fitzgerald, who wrote the first and most famous English translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness . . .

  Ridley’s gardens were wonderful, not a wilderness but an absolute riot nonetheless. The Ghost Walk was its special secret place where we could go for midnight feasts. Secret, ha ha. Bretch knew all about it. Bretch knew everything there was to know about Ridley and Felixstowe College because, back in the mists of time, she had been a pupil there herself. In this Ghost Walk were huge dens, amazing elaborate things built by Annie and her chums. They would set up camp there, blagging cooking chocolate from the funny old boy who regularly hung around the perimeter fence. They’d only let you in if you said the password. Everyone knew it was Inshallah, but we didn’t want to spoil it for them, so we kept away.

  And you’d have little Lower Fours collecting ladybirds as pets and keeping them in their dressing table drawers. Or Gill and her best friend Alexa taking their pet grasshopper, Long John Hippity-Hoppity, for walks. They kept Long John Hippity-Hoppity in a matchbox in the commie – at least they did until the others decided it was cruel and let him out into the garden again.

  Another piece of folklore about Felixstowe’s gardens was that when you reached Upper Five you would play rounders on the front lawn, with the object of hitting the ball over the wall because then you would have to go outside and retrieve it and you might meet a member of the opposite sex. Boys and walls together were a terrible combination. Some came into the garden once, which sent Bretch sprinting round Ridley locking doors. What a fuss!

  ‘You’re not to go into the garden till further notice!’ she ordered.

  Just because three people spoke to boys. The girls ended up in Jonah’s study at seven at night, with Jonah giving that basilisk stare over the top of her glasses. ‘What would your mother think of such wanton behaviour?’ And Helen – for on one occasion one of them was Helen, who grew up in a fabulously talented and eccentric family of musicians, who was told the facts of life aged nine by her mother while stirring food at the Aga – Helen thought, My mother probably wouldn’t think very much about it at all.

  Ridley, or Vernon Villa as it was in prehistory – and carried on being called until after the war – came into the school’s hands in 1933. Our generation might have moaned about its lukewarm radiators and bleak cabs, but these earliest settlers, the 1930s girls, had to make do with one cab in the whole house and chamber pots under each bed. No washbasins, of course. Every morning, maids would heave jugs of hot water upstairs and into dorms for the strip-wash, although later – probably in a cost-cutting exercise, because at one point early on the school nearly went bust – the girls themselves had to take over the job.

  According to The Story of Felixstowe College:

  Watering-can monitors were appointed to each dormitory; a thankless task, one would have thought, since it involved getting up earlier than the rest and queuing in the corridor for enamel cans of warm water. These were carried into the dormitory and poured into china bowls on marble-topped washstands. If the monitor succumbed to the temptation to linger in bed, the water was cold before her dormitory was served and everyone screamed at her.

  What amazed me, though, was back then your House wasn’t your home for all the time you were there; you were peripatetic. It was almost like musical chairs. Lower Fours lived in Vernon Villa; Upper Fours and Lower Fives were in School House – which became Cranmer – and the rest of the girls pinged every term between another two school properties, Maybush and Highrow, with the overflow
being accommodated in a rented pile called Happisburgh House. It wasn’t until after the war, when the school bought Tyndale and Latimer, that Ridleys stayed in one place. And were proper Ridleys.

  As you walked up the drive in September 1961, the first thing you saw was the front door. Trying to enter the house there would have been a mistake. The front door was locked and barred, a dead end. The vestibule it led onto, had it been a normal house, was turned into a library. You were supposed to have a book out of the House library all the time, but I didn’t take out a single one. It was full of schoolboy adventure tales by Willard Price and really tedious serious books and sod all else. The only interesting titles were on the top shelf, like girlie mags at a newsagent’s. These were the ‘Angelique’ books. They were banned till Upper Five, presumably because they might give us ideas. The Angelique series consisted (at the time) of seven adventure books set in seventeenth-century France. The eponymous protagonist was a provincial aristocrat forced to live on her wits after her first husband (a count, naturellement) was executed by Louis VIV. The books featured the Paris underworld, the court of Versailles, war, rape, sex, childbirth, capture by pirates – everything, in short, that a thirteen-year-old banged up in a bear pit of old crones could wish for, so there was a huge trade in contraband copies.

  On the right was Bretch’s bedroom. Up until a couple of years before I was there, she hadn’t had one. Not a proper one. Her sitting room had been a bedsit, so if you went in there to be given a row you’d see where she slept. This must have added an awkward element of intimacy to the occasion, because wouldn’t you stand there imagining her in her pyjamas? This said, having her own bedsit was a step up from what went before, because the teachers at one point had to live on site, in the same house. Spinsters of indeterminate age all bitching away at each other – whoever thought that was a good wheeze?