by Julie Welch
Even so, Chapel, week in, week out, without let up, got you in its grip. It was God, God, God, all over the place. One continuous sermon. The school chaplain was a plump red-faced reverend whose nickname was Elly-J. In Chapel he droned through the service, blah blah drone . . . sin . . . heavenly host . . . while we shifted from buttock to buttock and passed the time by counting the number of times he said ‘Bible’. The only fun was arranging beforehand which one of us was going to faint. Two of you could escape that way, as one had to carry the other out.
The hymns part was lovely. Three hundred young virgins (and two dozen menopausal ones) singing their hearts out: ‘Love Unknown’; ‘For All the Saints’ (tune: ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’); ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’. But then you had to sit through everything else. Or stand. Or kneel. The Psalm was always embarrassing, because the lines didn’t scan and nobody knew the tune. Up we went when we should have gone down. Most people chucked it in as hopeless after a few bars, and Miss Parfitt, the piano teacher, who looked like a large, mild sheep, would have to parp away on the organ unaccompanied. And sometimes during the hymns she would strike a wrong note, which was as embarrassing as the Psalm rigmarole. I’d go hot and cold all over for her. But it wasn’t half as embarrassing as when one of the verses had a rude word in it like ‘womb’, which no one would sing out loud, so there was this one beat of silence, as loud as a gunshot.
And once a year you’d have to read the Lesson. However frightened you were, it was compulsory. No exceptions. Even the girl with learning difficulties had to do it, and the girl with the Yorkshire accent that got everyone in hysterics. Now, I didn’t mind, because although it gave me a few butterflies beforehand I had a good reading voice – see what Jonah meant about me being conceited? – and there were few things I liked better than showing it off in front of a captive audience. But some found it the most awful thing they had to do in the entirety of school, to be dreaded more than being on The Jonah List or having to sit next to Cawley at lunch.
It would hang over them for weeks. The prospect once made Gill physically sick. All she had ever done in public before that was appear as a jester in her primary school play. She’d had to walk across the stage on her hands but no speaking had been required. If only she could have mutely walked up the aisle of the chapel on her hands and left it at that. But no. The instruction was to leave your pew two lines before the end of the hymn to give you enough time to get to the front, and Gill would have nightmares about it – that she’d got the timing wrong and had to run all the way. Or that she’d get up there and find out it wasn’t her turn to read. And she couldn’t say her Rs properly yet, they came out as Ws, and once she had to read, ‘Thou rulest the raging of the sea’.
And what if something went wrong and the Bible hadn’t been left open at the passage you were meant to read? One poor girl spent the whole Lesson hunting among the Habbakuks and Jehosephats for the right place, turning over page after page in complete silence, apart from the flop each heavy page made, and then the despairing thump at the end as she gave it up as a bad job and finally closed the Good Book.
It wasn’t even as if our chapel was a proper church. It was built of tan-coloured brick, as plain and unremarkable as a pencil box, and the business end inside was plain and simple too. No altar, no cross, just a table covered with a blue cloth. That was the way it had to be. When the school changed its name from Uplands to Felixstowe College, it was because it had been taken over by an organisation called the Martyrs’ Memorial Trust, which belonged to the hair shirt wing of the Church of England. It was a militant army in the Protestant cause. They laid down the rules. No fancy rituals, no paraphernalia filched from Rome. Old Ridley and Cranmer and Tyndale and Latimer had died for that cause. How could we be so ungrateful as to put up decorations?
I’ll tell you a bit more about this Trust, because it has much to do with how our school was run and why they wanted to churn you out as, well, the kind of person the prospectus promised they’d churn you out as. In the 1920s its dominant figure was the Reverend Percy Warrington, a Derbyshire farmer’s son. Squat, sleek and completely humourless, with boot-button eyes and a hairdo that you might call ‘accidental monk’ – he went bald in his twenties, leaving him with a tonsure that most times he concealed under a big black hat. The rest of his outfit featured a black coat, complete with a flower in the buttonhole, and a clerical collar so uncomfortably wide it must have been a small act of martyrdom to carry on wearing it.
Despite his off-putting appearance, he was very good at persuading wealthy widows to chip in to the Trust’s coffers and sourcing weak-willed members of the great and good to serve as trustees and school governors, which he recruited in droves. At one point he seemed unable to learn of a stately home coming up for sale without snapping it up and converting it into a school. Over the course of ten years between the wars he founded fourteen public schools, all designed to propagate his own brand of hardcore evangelism. As his fame grew, he came to be known as ‘the financier in the cassock’, though the pupils at the first school he founded, Wrekin College in Shropshire, were more inclined to refer to him as ‘Pompous Percy’, and those of his next venture, Stowe, as ‘Prancing Percy’, because of the way he walked.
He liked to portray himself as ‘a simple country parson’, although if he was it was one who swanned around in a Daimler. There was nothing simple about his financial arrangements, either. The man responsible for Felixstowe College favoured an accounting system so shady and labyrinthine that it was described by one churchman tasked in due course with untangling it as ‘like living in a Dickens novel’. Warrington bought Wrekin on a loan, and every other purchase was based on a mortgage, guaranteed at first by Wrekin and then by each successive school until, eventually, the Trust was in a colossal amount of debt, at which point came the Depression. In 1932, the Reverent Percy’s empire was headed for ruin, and Felixstowe College along with it.
An organisation called Allied Schools was formed to salvage what it could. Nearly half of Warrington’s schools were closed down but Felixstowe was one of seven to avoid the chop. Off went Warrington to spend the rest of his days in obscurity and paranoia, fulminating against those he claimed had given him his marching orders. The nature of our school didn’t change, though. The 1930s prospectus promised ‘a high moral tone’, and Miss Clarke, the headmistress appointed by Warrington, was high moral tone in person.
‘Miss Clarke was known as MC,’ says Mary Large, a delightful Old Girl who joined Felixstowe in 1937, and who is the aunt of my Tyndale friend, Di. ‘She looked a bit like Queen Victoria. Very dignified, just like a grandmother. The classroom doors had windows, and old Clarkey could go round the hall peeping in. Quite honestly, she was God, really.’
God had iron-hard hair and a penchant for plain but voluminous black dresses. She was said to have been an early member of the Women’s Cricket Association. It’s rather hard to imagine her striding to the crease, but an entry in the Schools Directory of 1933 lists cricket, along with tennis, as the summer sports played. It wasn’t on the curriculum during our time. I was told, ‘They used to play it but it got dropped because someone got hit in the bust,’ but that might just have been one of those myths that did the rounds, like the girl with learning difficulties owing her condition to having been dropped in a coal scuttle as a baby. More likely is that, by the 1960s, it was impossible to find another girls’ school in the area that played it, and with whom fixtures could be organised.
So anyway, Miss Clarke taught Scripture and Classics and was said to be superhuman, formidable, imperious and terrifying. To be fair, that was the way all headmistresses rolled in those days, though Miss Clarke took it to outstanding lengths. She instigated a trophy called the Moral Worth, made the girls do their mending every Saturday in total silence and, on Sundays, when no pastimes were allowed except knitting, had them sit on the library floor and listen to her grimmest of grim evening sermons. From deep in Miss Clarke’s subconscious would come the image o
f a giant Christmas tree. ‘Thousands of babies . . . THOUSANDS . . . sucking milk from bottles attached to the tree by red and grey ribbons and EACH ONE TAKING FROM THE SCHOOL AND GIVING NOTHING IN RETURN.’ Desired result: the more girls crying their eyes out with tears of remorse, the better.
This was the era that forged Bretch and Maggie, when anyone who broke the rules would be handed a black counter, like a tiddlywink in mourning. Each evening the House captain would stand underneath the House noticeboard and the shelf of House cups. Evildoers would form a queue to hand her the counters they had accrued that day. Later on the counters were junked in favour of the notorious Black Book that had to be signed in the Red Hall, which was the entrance to our library. No one thought that was anywhere near as terrifying as the ritual of the counters.
According to Mary Large, ‘You didn’t really talk to her.’ Instead, she talked to you. Or at you. ‘Certainly,’ states The Story of Felixstowe College, ‘her presence was all over the school and many ex-pupils still remember the ideas and ideals which she propounded in her Sunday evening talks.’
Miss Clarke seems to have been a bit of a tub-thumper, the scourge of all slovenliness, untidiness and secret sweet-eating. That was certainly the way she seemed to treat her pupils, as brands to be rescued from the burning. And she had a thing about initials. The initials of train lines, to be precise. She brought them into her evening sermons. L.N.E.R. stood for Let Nothing Evil Remain. L.M.S. meant Love My School. The Great Western Railway transmogrified into Grousing Without Reason. I would have been in fits, but Miss Clarke demanded, and got, total respect from her pupils: ‘We were brought up that way,’ says Mary.
Being a junior, Mary boarded in Ridley, or Vernon Villa, as it was then known. The House mistress was called Mrs Welsh and she was middle-aged and kindly. Mary had trouble with her teeth and Mrs Welsh always accompanied her to the dentist. Miss Marstand was the matron. ‘After our bedtime she always used to play The Donkey Serenade on the piano in the common room.’ Bretch was in the year below her. ‘She was no beauty,’ observed Mary. ‘Brown frizzy hair and cross-eyed, poor girl.’
Mary rapidly became best friends with a girl called Pat, with whom she’s still in touch. She gave me, to keep, the loveliest snapshot of the pair of them, side by side, close together, holding their lax sticks, dressed in their Games outfits. These were called djibbahs, boxy tunics made of heavy, silver-grey linen and far, far nicer than the ghastly divided skirts and Aertexes we had to wear. The photo is more than eighty years old, but happiness – that magical happiness of having a friend, someone you’ve chosen for yourself, not just because you were the last two left – still absolutely shines from it.
‘I grew up on a farm in the fens,’ Mary says. ‘I’d been stuck in the middle of nowhere with no friends. I thoroughly enjoyed my schooldays.’
She enjoyed them even when, in September 1939, the Young Ladies of Felixstowe College went back for the start of term, only to discover it was going to be a very truncated one. Britain at war with Germany! Parental consternation ensued. Felixstowe was on the east coast – why, Hitler might pop over any day. Cranmer’s beach was cordoned off and strewn with tank traps. The sea was mined. The waves broke on rolls of barbed wire. When sentries were posted on approach roads and entry passes demanded, parents cracked. They took their daughters away. The autumn term was over almost before it started, and the following term Mary didn’t go to school at all. Hardly anyone did. So, faced with the prospect of a school so empty that it went out of business, Felixstowe College moved its operations to Norfolk, re-opening for the 1940 summer term in a stately home.
Riddlesworth Hall was off the main Diss to Thetford road and came complete with its own village. Pummelled into shape by the dynamic young Maths mistress, Miss Jones, it became a functioning school. Bedrooms and dressing rooms turned into dorms. The Cricketers’ Wing became the San, the nursery was the staff room and the butler’s pantry a Chemmy lab. They put up blackout curtains on what seemed like the largest windows in England. The billiard room transmogrified into a classroom. Behind it was a little cloakroom that the girls used as an illegal hideout for midnight feasts and sessions with an Ouija board. Mr Cooper, the tennis coach, made a mud court in the piggery yard.
Mary remembers her Riddlesworth days with affection. ‘It was very much a makeshift school but they did very well, to be quite honest,’ she said. ‘All the ablutions and things were very old-fashioned and there were really no extra-curricular things, but the food was all right. It was wartime, after all. They looked after us very well. We had lots of picnics and things. I would think basically it was a happy school.’
Another spiffing Old Girl, a little younger than Mary, is Diana Platts, who joined in 1941 as a nine-year-old, and so went straight to Riddlesworth. Diana was two years below Bretch, and described her as ‘very straitlaced’. Diana’s big sister, Yvonne, was already a pupil and actually had the same birth date as Bretch, 18 June 1928. ‘So they were identical! Though,’ she added hastily, ‘not in looks.’
With Riddlesworth Hall now popping at the seams, Diana boarded at first in Garboldisham Rectory, the annexe the school had commandeered for the little ones and immediately christened ‘Garb’.
‘I was there entirely, for lessons and sleeping,’ she said. ‘Then, when we were old enough for Riddlesworth, there wasn’t enough room, so we Tyndales were pushed out to Market Weston Old Rectory, and it was bleak. We had to go there in a bus, after supper. It was over the bridge, on the Suffolk border, three or four miles away. I was the one who carried the jug of milk for the cocoa. Every room was a dorm except for the House mistress’s bedsit. One bathroom. Forty-odd people wanting the loo first thing in the morning. Then we’d go back to Riddlesworth by bus for breakfast. We accepted it; who knows why?’
It was bitterly cold there. During the winter the water in the washbasins froze overnight and face flannels were frozen stiff every morning. The snow came up to the top of the telegraph poles. They never played Games all one term, they had no coal, and they had cold baths over at Riddlesworth, in the sunken bath. The glass had been blown out of the dorm window and replaced by meat-safe wire.
‘Tiny Greenlaw slept next to the window,’ said Diana, ‘and in the morning snow was all over her bed. I used to wear three vests at a time. I took off the bottom one to wash and the clean one went on top.
‘We had the most awful pudding. It was meant to be steamed pudding but it was just sog. Pumpkin pie, watery. Liver on Fridays, tough as old boots. Puddings – sago, tapioca, bread and butter pudding. I hate them now. In our spare time we always knitted for the services. We knitted like anything: sweaters, balaclavas, sea-boot socks, ordinary socks, scarves. Ridley always won the cup for the most done because Hossie, their House mistress, made them sit and do it.’
Tyndale’s House mistress was a Miss Burrow, who taught Geography and History and was known as Lady B. Diana remembers her as a lovely woman, round-faced and enormous, with dark hair. ‘The only harmless great thing’, as John Donne described the elephant.
‘She was there all the time I was there,’ said Diana. ‘I was ever so fond of her. Huge woman – you’d hear her thundering down the passage.’ Their matron was Miss Fletcher. ‘A bit vicious but quite nice. Well, it’s how you treat people, isn’t it?’
The girls were taught how to put out incendiary bombs and had gas mask practice, and the war was close enough for air raids often to occur twice in a night. Bombs fell on Norwich, which was only thirty miles away. People seriously thought that Hitler might invade through the Wash, that giant square estuary that divides Norfolk from Lincolnshire, putting Riddlesworth right in the battle area. After four years of it, the strain told on Miss Clarke. Something snapped. The Story of Felixstowe College tells of the school being ‘shattered’ by the news. She was stepping down. God was leaving the stage.
There was no need to advertise the job vacancy. All along, there had been only one candidate.
15
JONAH
Jonah used to slide down the banisters at Cranmer. Well, that story could easily be apocryphal but I’ve heard it from so many sources, and it’s such a delightful image, that where’s the harm in putting it out there?
Jonah – Miss Ruth M. Jones – was born in 1906, and grew up on a farm in Llandindrod Wells, where she helped with the calving. She went to the local grammar school and from there to the University of Wales, where she gained a first-class mathematics degree. It was an era when hardly any girls went to university, let alone did degrees in Maths. She’d also had her arm up a cow’s bottom, so you can see she was unfazed by life’s challenges. She was special, a legend, a complete one-off. Any girl at Felixstowe whose surname was Jones had to become double-barrelled, i.e. Something-Jones, because there was only one Jones at Felixstowe College.
The first time I clapped eyes on her was at an Open Day in 1961, the summer before I joined the college. We prospective pupils were given tea in the giant L-shaped classroom to the side of the library, and I can see her now, surveying us with her back to the windows, lit by a shaft of June sunlight. The head at my previous school had been a forbidding old trout known as Coalhole. Coalhole had a deep, well-modulated voice, all the better to rumble, ‘Julia, I am accustomed to people being alert in my lessons,’ in her Scripture class. Jonah, in contrast, looked sort of ho-ho jolly. That may have been a trick of the light.
She had very fine, greying fair hair styled in a sort of pudding bowl ’do, but with a kiss curl held in place by a surprisingly girlish slide. She had always been on the roly-poly side and, by the time I joined the school in 1961, she was absolutely monumental, but I swear she possessed a superpower. She could teleport herself. One minute I’d have my head over my exercise book, writing a scurrilous satire about various staff members, complete with cartoons, and the next the offending object would be tucked between her arm and considerable bosom and I’d have days of that sudden-sinking-of-the-stomach, sweat-trickling-down-my-armpits wait for my name to appear on The Jonah List.
