Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  Another rule was about exeats. The dictionary definition is ‘permission from a college or boarding school for a temporary absence’, and three times a term we were allowed to go out with our parents, or a friend’s parents. On Saturdays, exeats were allowed after Morning Prep and on Sundays after Morning Service, and the rule was that you had to write to your parents (or your friend’s parents) the next day to thank them, even though you had seen them only twenty-four hours previously. I can see that rule made sense, because it trained us to write thank-you letters, and I still do that because, as well as showing good manners, which gives you a feeling of self-satisfaction, they add a tiny amount to the happiness of the recipient, because who doesn’t appreciate the fact that someone has taken the trouble to find a pen and paper and envelope and stamp?

  But to have a rule about condiments? What was that all about? Why, if you wanted salt with your meal, could you not ask your neighbour to pass it to you? You’d have to say, ‘Would you like salt?’ and she was meant to reply, ‘No, would you?’ but often she forgot the ‘would you?’ bit of the exchange and you’d just have to go without. We were the Young Ladies of Felixstowe College, and correct etiquette was more important than food actually tasting of something.

  There were rules about the number of baths you could take per week (three), and sitting on radiators. Not allowed because they caused piles. What were piles? Some juniors didn’t know. They thought they were ridges on one’s bottom. Washing your own hair wasn’t allowed, either. Some tried, but there was more chance of escaping over the Berlin Wall. No one could hear you fill up the basin, but the water would take a suspiciously long while to drain away. Just before my time, there was a matron who had a lisp. At fire practice she would stand at the top of one of the two staircases in Tyndale, flapping a red cloth and crying, ‘I’m the fire, I’m the fire, go down the other thtairth!’ Anyway, Lispy Matron couldn’t see very well but, as with Bretch, her hearing was compensatorily excellent. She would patrol the corridors, listening for the sound of running water, and pounce. The evidence couldn’t be hidden. Wet hair. The girl and her wet hair would have to stand in the corner. ‘You are vey, vey naughty. Thith uthed to be Felixstowe LADIETH College but that title went when LADIETH went.’

  Our hair had to be washed for us in a ceremony called ‘wigging’, which happened once a fortnight, or weekly if you had greasy hair, but who wanted to admit to that? Wigging took place by the clock tower above the library, in three small attic rooms. They had once been the sleeping quarters of the Cobbold dynasty’s grooms and stable lads, because in days of yore the library had been Cranmer’s stable block, and stifling, airless rooms that had once ponged of horse and reverberated with stable lads’ snores and farts now smelt of shampoo and lacquer and hummed with the sound of giant standing driers.

  Those poor women who had to wash hair all day long! Their fingers were red and swollen, their eyes haunted, their own hair lank with steam. One of the women hurt more than the other. She would push your head forward, drench it with hot water, sometimes much too hot, then scour and scrub, then drag out the tangles. Next came the rollers. Drag, drag, drag again, yank, yank, painfully tight. Pins jabbing into your scalp. Then you’d be shoved under a boiling hot drier and left to bake. You would emerge a red and shiny-faced thing with sausage curls and have to walk through the library, the focus of everyone’s stares, to get back to the classroom. It was known as The Walk of Shame.

  Was there a book of rules? Where was it kept? To this day, I’ve no idea whether they were written down somewhere, whether there was an actual Felixstowe version of Magna Carta, in quill pen, on vellum, enshrined. My hunch is that they were all stored in some invisible filing cabinet, the one in Jonah’s head, where they could be added to as and when, on an ad hoc basis. There’s evidence. According to one Old Girl I spoke to, ‘She told my mother she thought the rules were fairly foolproof but she’d had to fill in a few loopholes the girls had found.’

  Even lovely House Tea had rules. These concerned spreads. Marmite and peanut butter were permitted, and Heinz Sandwich Spread, but not Bovril and Nutella. Nor were you allowed to share your spread with anyone else. Bretch did not leave it at that. She had something against marmalade. Marmalade with your tea was out of the question, because in Bretch’s opinion, which was the one that counted, it wasn’t jam. Della was outraged. She organised a petition and took it to Jonah, who said, ‘Miss Cross is just being stupid. Of course marmalade is jam – orange jam.’

  There were various other banned items and activities, of course. Plimsolls with black soles. Mules (they were sluttish). Babydoll pyjamas (Lolita connotations). All jewellery except crucifixes, and all crucifixes in the shape of the Celtic cross. Watching That Was The Week That Was (it was said to be provocative). And in the 1930s, when the school was under the control of a dragon called Miss Clarke, no sweets were allowed. Nor were cakes, except at birthdays, and birthday cakes – ‘which may be sent or provided locally’ – were subject to a subset of rules. Even when Miss Clarke was long gone, a cake meant a cake. Meringues did not qualify. Janet Copland, an utterly wonderful Old Girl who joined Felixstowe in 1951, once ordered half-a-dozen meringues. On her end of term report, Jonah wrote: ‘I consider her behaviour at her birthday party was disgraceful.’ Janet’s father sent back the report, with the comment, ‘I don’t consider her behaviour disgraceful. Disgraceful is having strange men in your room. Half a dozen meringues isn’t disgraceful.’ The report came back with ‘disgraceful’ changed to ‘unfortunate’.

  This is one of my favourite stories about Jonah and her rules, along with one told to me by another super Old Girl, Alison Ferry, who went to Felixstowe in the late 1950s – we overlapped by a year or so. Alison was in Tyndale, where Maggie always vetted the letters received and checked those sent. When Alison and her friend Hermione were about thirteen or fourteen, they were crazy about Elvis and, on seeing an advertisement for his fan club, decided to join. On receipt of a self-addressed stamped envelope, the fan club would return signed photos and information about the club. What a good idea, thought Alison and Hermione, and no one would know who the letter was from if they sent the envelope themselves. How wrong they were. The letter arrived with a rubber stamp all over it saying ‘Elvis Presley Fan Club’.

  Maggie was furious and called them both into her study for a dressing down. ‘I’m sending the letter to Miss Jones and she’ll be seeing you in due course.’ Sure enough, the summons came and Alison and Hermione trooped into Jonah’s study in Cranmer.

  ‘Why did you do this?’

  Contrite mumbling.

  ‘Young ladies don’t do that sort of thing.’ Blah blah blah. Jonah took the letter off the desk and opened it in front of them. Out fell two signed photos. She picked them up and very slowly and carefully tore them both into shreds in front of them. ‘That’s the end of the matter.’

  While the school banned some things, they made others compulsory. At least twice a year, each of us had to attend a celebrity concert. Celebrity concerts were held at the Spa Pavilion on the seafront and known as ‘celebs’. The arrangement worked two ways. Our presence bulked out what would otherwise have been a rather meagre audience, and our parents could reassure themselves that we were exposed to a regular dose of culture. Not that most of us appreciated it at the time. Parents were charged £2 per ticket and certainly in my case it wasn’t money well spent.

  The notice went up on Ridley noticeboard: ‘Who wants to go?’ Only Helen. She went to every single one. It was such an antidote to being incarcerated, she said – a mental, physical and emotional escape. But Helen was truly musical; her sister was the best keyboardist in the history of the school, and her mother was a pianist (‘I play fistfuls of wrong notes but I make them all sound nice.’). The family DNA was made up of breves and minims and demi-semiquavers joined together in a cadenza. My parents’ idea of a concert was The Black and White Minstrel Show.

  Having to sit passively through any kind of performance i
s something I still find difficult and it would have been better all round, would have engaged me much more usefully, had I been given the job of describing the experience, making it real for people who weren’t there, painting a word picture: walking along the seafront in the rain and dark while the waves slurped and hissed; the way the Spa Pavilion’s entrance doors were at forty-five degrees, as though it were talking to the promenade out of the side of its mouth; how one of the madrigal quartet seemed to be suffering from a stomach upset and kept running off stage, trilling to the very last; how the Lower Fours would have aniseed ball races, rolling them down the auditorium floor. How we fled to cab in the intervals to eat sweets, and slept through Peter Pears singing French folk songs. Four bloody encores. How my bottom got so stiff that I rested my feet against the back of the seat in front. Then walking back to House, in the rain and dark again, with the Upper Fives lagging behind talking about various methods of smooching and the Lower Six shouting at us to hurry, and Erica telling Bretch I’d put my feet on the back of the seat, so that was another ticking off.

  I think now of what we were exposed to. How privileged we were to hear the likes of Julian Bream, Gervase de Peyer, John Ogdon and all those other musicians at the beginning of their careers, who would go on to become fabled names. Instead, celebs were occasions of boredom and discomfort at the end of which would be a row. It was ages before I learned to love classical music. Shame on me.

  What I find strange, now more than I did then, was the rule about books in the school library. Ours was wonderful, the most beautiful building in the school. As it had once been a stable yard, it was huge and roomy, with a parquet floor laid over the cobbles, and well-spaced tables and chairs made of pale wood and, instead of a ceiling, there was a glass dome, so above you was the firmament, filling the place with glorious light. Never was there a better place to engage a child in the joy of reading. You would have thought.

  Gill was not particularly happy at home. She was the youngest of three, her father was a busy, much-loved local GP and her mother absorbed in building up her own life. What a nuisance Gill was, and Mummy wasn’t nice to her at all. She was sarcastic, she put Gill down, and passed up no opportunity to tell Gill that of all her children she liked her the least.

  Gill’s sister was already at the school. This was no advantage. Elizabeth had already warned her about all the scary things and mad teachers before she arrived. She’d heard about petrifying Miss Cawley, and how you were made to play Games whatever the weather, and the rule about how you had to stand up in front of everybody in Chapel and read the lesson once a year. Whereas for other girls these ordeals would have come as an unexpected surprise, for Gill the full terror was already in place. What with that, and the nastiness from her mother, books were her means of escape. In her first week at Felixstowe she was getting stuck into a huge, bound Walter Scott when she was nabbed by a prefect.

  ‘Upper Fours aren’t allowed to touch books in the main school library.’

  How could that ever be a good thing? It made no sense at all. It was one rule too many for Gill, and books were what kept her afloat. So she just ignored the prefects and doggedly went on, developing not only an enduring love for the works of Walter Scott but the skills essential to not being caught.

  On the subject of getting caught, everybody said that the worst thing the powers that be could do to you was send you to Jonah, but this was an absolute misapprehension because Joanna actually received the cane once.

  Joanna was already quite a personality when she first arrived at Felixstowe. She was the oldest of three sisters, and something of a proxy mum to them, because their parents had moved to Kenya, where their father had been offered the plum job of commanding the national air force. It was an opportunity not to be missed, but their mother was concerned that life there might be dangerous and the schools inadequate, so the girls were enrolled at Felixstowe College. It was expensive for three, and the RAF would only pay to fly the girls out to Kenya once a year, but at least the college was close to the Suffolk village in which their grandmother lived, and they could stay with her in the hols. But Nana was more interested in bridge than grandchildren, so the three girls were very close and Joanna was their leader and protector. She had to organise their uniforms, packing and exeats, and it was to her the two younger girls went when they had to choose their O Level subjects.

  But one time, Mummy was going to be home, in Suffolk, and Joanna thought how nice it would be to speak to her. Tyndale, like all the other Houses, was equipped with a pay phone, above which was the rota. Calls could be made only between 6.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. on Sunday evenings, so Joanna wrote down her name and the time she wanted to make the call. She was very excited.

  When it was her turn to use the phone, she rang the local exchange and asked for a reverse charge call, and the operator dialled her mother’s number. And her mother picked up and said, ‘Hello, hello?’ and the operator said, ‘Your daughter is calling from Felixstowe, will you accept the charge?’ And Mummy said, ‘No, sorry, tell her to ring later, I’m having a party.’

  ‘That’s mummies for you,’ Joanna said philosophically, but there were also floods of tears.

  Joanna was very bossy even before she arrived. Their brother was born when she was eleven and, as Mummy had to spend six months in hospital during the pregnancy, Joanna ran the household. She began to feel a bit above her station and thought the restrictions at school unjust. It was like being in prison.

  Joanna’s younger sisters were goody-goodies because they didn’t want to get into the terrible scrapes that Joanna got herself into. She was rude to teachers. She skipped classes. She got the worst ever percentage in the school’s history – two per cent in a Latin exam. She was threatened with expulsion once, when she was in Middle Five, because she talked to the gardener’s boy. In the holidays, while Nana was playing bridge, Joanna and her sisters mixed with the village boys, so she was used to them and felt she could talk to any class of person. She never did anything but talk to him, on the walk to Cranmer from Tyndale. It was innocent. Of no import at all. But Jonah had her spies; she knew everything that went on.

  She was caned in the gym once. On the bottom. She had to pull down her pants. Coulo the Games mistress did it. Coming out of the gym, all Joanna’s friends were there, and they all gathered round her. She was shocked at the whole thing. It did hurt. But Joanna was thrilled as well as hurting because she was now a hero – all those hugs and poor yous! – because the braver you were, the more friends you had, and who wouldn’t have wanted to be Joanna’s friend? She was bold and capable and stout-hearted and optimistic. Everyone adored her, even Maggie. Especially Maggie, who made Joanna her Head of House when the time came.

  She was a very conscientious Head of House. When her sister Rosie brought her shoes to be inspected after shoe-cleaning, they were deemed not up to scratch.

  ‘But . . . but . . . but they’re really clean!’ protested Rosie.

  ‘No! Go back! Do them again!’

  It was a long time before Rosie forgave her, but the last thing Joanna wanted to do was show favouritism.

  And Joanna went on to be a senior prefect. Jonah adored her too. She was made of the right stuff.

  11

  MAD TEACHERS

  Tampax was forbidden fruit. We had to wear sanitary towels, hitched on to those awful pink sanitary belts. The brand used by the school was Dr White’s. They came in Size 1 and Size 2. You wouldn’t want to be Size 2, would you? It was dismal enough to be clomping around with a horrid Size 1 squished under your white linings and grey bags, worried that it stuck out at the back, worried that everyone could see that you had the curse, that you’d got the gravy, that you were on the blob, unclean.

  But Honey magazine regularly featured a small advertisement for Tampax, with a photo of a motherly looking woman, Nurse Anne. Nurse Anne offered a dream of salvation, because she invited you to send off for a free sample. I was volunteered by my fellow Ridleys and, when the sampl
e arrived, I was marched to the first-floor bathroom to have a go while everybody stood behind the door asking how I was getting on. Not a success. We sent off for another sample. This time, Della stepped up to the plate.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ we asked from the corridor side of the bathroom door.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ she said.

  None of this was possible in Latimer. If Bretch knew what we were up to, and she knew most things, she would have turned one of her blind eyes, because Bretch was no control freak; she wasn’t a woman who stopped you doing things just because she could. But Latimer’s anti-Tampax laws were rigid. Miss Pipe, the matron, kept a register of STs to keep track of how many one used.

  The sporty girls in particular hated wearing Dr White’s because of those ridiculous, uncomfortable shorts that showed everything. But the mother of one girl was a nurse, very progressive, and her daughter was the only one of them who knew the facts of life. She brought Tampax back for her fellow Latimers to try. But Pipe, rootling around, found the cardboard applicators in the wapey and scurried away to tell Cawley. Who went ballistic.

  She ordered the Tampax Seven into the common room, shut the door, turned the television off, and screeched and screeched and screeched about the health hazards of tampons. They were to use them under no circumstances! Didn’t they realise they could wreck their virginity? And if one got stuck inside they’d have to have major surgery to have it removed!

  Mad. But when you’re in your teens most of your teachers seem mad. Well, they did in our day. We drove them that way. How easily would any woman deal with rows of beady-eyed girls who almost without exception despise you for your wispy hair, deplorable dress sense and absence of sex life and/or putative lesbianism, every day for what seems like eternity, while delivering the same lesson on William Pitt the Younger or seeds and plants that you gave last year, last decade, and would give every subsequent year until you retired, the sum total of your life’s work a valete in the school mag? Not surprising if some of them went a bit round the bend. Most of us were too young to realise their humanity. And I’ve ended up torn between letting rip and not having the heart to make them figures of fun.