Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  I’ve told you what her study in Cranmer was like, with that oriel window. It offered the most breathtaking, panoramic view of the sea. Huge container ships would inch past, so close you wanted to wave at the people inside, but as I was usually in there to be given a row that would have just meant more trouble.

  Jonah joined the school in 1931, to teach Maths; it was her third teaching post. By this time, in need of extra accommodation for junior girls, the school had bought Maybush House, up the road from Cranmer. The house came with an exciting backstory; it was said to have been an inn at one point, and the haunt of smugglers. Some of the staff were plonked in Maybush, too, including Jonah. Her room was in the attic, and a wooden slide was constructed outside her window as a fire exit. To fully appreciate the image of Jonah using a slide at fire practice, you need to have seen her in the flesh, but I can understand how the banisters story gained traction.

  She was powerful and energetic. Intimidating. A big character in all senses. There was a public Jonah and a private one, and in that way she was kind of two-faced, and you were never quite sure which Jonah you were going to get. The public Jonah wore a poker face. The private one had a mischievous sense of humour and the ridiculous. Was Bretch giving us a hard time? ‘Takes things too seriously,’ she’d grunt. ‘You ought to give her some gin.’

  Her voice was deep and she spoke, as she did everything else, from eating to thinking, very fast. She enjoyed sport, particularly golf – or ‘goff’, as she insisted it was pronounced – and had been a formidable hockey player in her time. I often thought of her charging down the flank when she entered the dining room, whipping past all the tables at race-walking pace to get to The Jonah Table at lunch. She would start saying Grace before she got to her chair, and galloped through it so rapidly some thought she was saying it in Latin. Her bête noir was the word ‘surely’, as in, ‘But surely, Miss Jones . . .’

  ‘Surely isn’t a fact!’ she would bellow, rat-tat-tat.

  I must have been hauled up to Felixstowe to be interviewed by her at some point before I joined but, strangely, I don’t remember that at all, although I bet she terrified the life out of my parents. I hope she didn’t write ‘L.O.’ beside their names in her files. Because she did that, you know – made notes about prospective parents. A group of Cranmers once sneaked into her study, opened the drawers and pulled out the files. Among the gems they discovered were: ‘father has limp handshake’ and ‘mother’s hat too big’. L.O. stood for Lower Orders. ‘Jonah,’ said one Old Girl I talked to, ‘was a delightful snob.’

  She was not flawless. She taught Maths to the Lower Fours, to find out who they were, and would stride into their first lesson and draw a perfect circle on the blackboard. Just so you know. What a show-off. She could be mischievously mean, too. One girl, a Tyndale, lost her bra. It was such a small bra that it was more a token effort than anything else. 32A. Who wants to be 32A? The girl turned Tyndale upside down in the hunt for it, but it wasn’t to be found, and at the next school meeting, Jonah said, ‘Is there any lost property?’

  Silence.

  Jonah pointed to the girl. ‘I think you lost something.’

  More silence.

  ‘I think you lost a bra. What size is it?’ and that poor girl had to broadcast her tiddly titties shame in front of the whole school.

  As for some of her attitudes, well, let’s just say they were of the age into which she was born. One year Tyndale had a Head of House called Daphne. Her family lived in Esher and her father was in banking. After Upper Six she went on to the LSE, and met a fellow student who was studying Law. He was from Somalia. They became engaged and, at that time, mixed marriages were frowned upon. But they were determined to marry, and the news made the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, where various people were quoted, including ‘Daphne’s former headmistress, Ruth Jones’. Asked what she thought of Daphne getting married and going to live in a village in Somalia, Jonah replied that she didn’t approve, and added that her children ‘would look like streaky bacon’. Oh, Jonah, how could you?

  But in the face of her otherwise wondrousness, the imperfections count for little. You can ask any one of us for our Jonah memories and they’ll be there as though they happened last week; they exist at the very core of everyone’s brain, tattooed on the hippocampus. That curl bouncing as she walked into the dining room while we all stood, almost bowing. Did you catch that naughty little flicker of a smile on her face? The billowing gown as she strode past us, while we stood up straight, like soldiers, bang, bang, bang, backs against the wall. In that musty-smelling gown, she looked inflated. Under it would generally be some businesslike suit, with the jacket flapping in time to her walk, though one Speech Day she broke out and packed her large, manly frame into a beautiful, brightly coloured silk dress. What should happen but the school’s most stunning mother turned up wearing exactly the same one.

  One very nice, very good girl in our year was Jan, who was in Tyndale. As was quite a naughty girl called Marjorie, who one Saturday invited Jan out with her on exeat. Marjorie’s father took them to Thorpeness Meare, where they rented out a rowing boat. They spent rather a long time on the water and, by the time they set off back to Felixstowe, Jan was worried because she had a choir rehearsal. ‘I’m going to be late,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Marjorie airily, ‘we’ll just pretend we had a puncture.’

  All this was being said while Marjorie’s father was in the driver’s seat, so he must have heard every word, but when they arrived back at Tyndale an absolutely livid Maggie greeted her with, ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘We had a puncture,’ Jan blurted out.

  Maggie turned to the father for confirmation.

  ‘What puncture?’ said the rotter. And of course poor Jan was petrified, especially when a prefect marched up to her and said, ‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ because very soon after that her parents were going to see Jonah for a chat about what Jan’s future subjects might be, and she thought she was going to be expelled. But Jonah said to her father, ‘You wouldn’t have done that, would you? You’d have stuck up for them.’

  One of the loveliest things about writing this book was meeting women who had known Jonah at the very beginning of her time as headmistress, who could put flesh on the bones (not that more flesh was something she necessarily needed) of her early years, and give insights and perspectives about a younger Jonah.

  When the war ended, she could not take back the school straight away. Its buildings had been taken over by the army and, although they moved out quickly, the premises were not derequisitioned until the end of August 1945. You can imagine the state the place had been left in. There were air raid shelters and the cookhouse to be demolished, the overgrown Games pitches to be re-turfed and the drives re-laid. Furniture had to be dragged out of classrooms and labs, where it had been dumped, and plywood torn off all the staircases and panelling and fireplaces on to which it had been nailed to protect them. The place was a mess.

  There were long, long negotiations about compensation with the War Department. All this and more was overseen by Jonah, travelling to and fro between Norfolk and Suffolk because, far from losing pupils in its exile, Felixstowe College had plenty of extra ones and, now they were about to return to the coast, they had to find somewhere to put them all.

  In Cranmer, the walls of Miss Clarke’s sitting room came down and the whole of the back of the house was remodelled to provide the vast dining room overlooking the sea. More tennis courts were added, central heating was installed, and the school layout re-planned, which meant Jonah spent a lot of time with Mr Creak, the school architect.

  ‘He was an absolute whopper,’ said Diana Platts. ‘I always thought there was something going on between the two of them.’ What a picture that makes.

  Felixstowe College returned home in time for summer term, 1946, leaving behind a little bit of itself. The junior department at Garboldisham Rectory became Riddlesworth Hall Scho
ol, which, unlike its begetter, still operates today. Diana’s daughters, Philipa and Juliet, went there before joining Felixstowe College. Another pupil was Lady Diana Spencer; she and Juliet were in the same year. Their guinea pigs lived next to each other. Lady Di didn’t go on to attend Felixstowe; she was turned down by Elizabeth Manners, Jonah’s successor, as not being bright enough. Jonah, of course, would have had none of that. An earl’s daughter? She would have taken her in a heartbeat.

  As soon as the school went back to Felixstowe, Jonahville started taking shape. She bought Tyndale from the widow of Sharp’s Toffees, managing to bag a supply of free sweets in the process. Latimer next door was concurrently on sale, so she grabbed that too, because Jonah did not believe in hanging about, wavering. In those days, Speech Day was held on Cranmer lawn, and Diana Platts told me about the one when proceedings were persistently disturbed by a raucous bird, high up in a tree. Jonah conferred briefly with a father. He went to his car, fetched a rifle from the boot and shot it forthwith. ‘Forthwith’ was Jonah’s default state.

  Sheelin Cuthbert went to Felixstowe in 1949, the first daughter of an Old Girl to thus be enrolled. Her association with the school lasted to the very end, as she became what was known as an Old Girl Governor: that is, the board of governors always had a member of the Old Girls’ Association among their number. At this point, though, she was ten years old, the place was still painted yellow from the army occupation, and rationing was on. They ate lots of spam fritters. Sometimes the drinking glasses would blow up, because they were cheap. You would pick them up and then, bang! All over the floor.

  Sheelin was in Cranmer, and she quickly got to know Jonah’s very distinctive tread. You always knew it was her. She strode on her heels, but up and downstairs she went on her toes. One night, Sheelin and her chums broke into the kitchen and were helping themselves to ice cream and golden syrup when they heard the tread, and they were caught red-handed.

  ‘Up to my study and bring all that with you,’ said Jonah. They had to sit on the carpet and eat it all up in front of her.

  ‘What was that like?’ I asked Sheelin.

  ‘Sickly.’

  That was the year Sheelin was in Lower Five, when she was also caught in Prep writing out who should be in the hockey team. Back to Jonah’s study she was despatched.

  ‘I pay someone to decide who’s in the team,’ Jonah told her. ‘You get on with work.’ Because, as Sheelin said, Jonah didn’t use too many words but they all meant something.

  Janet Copland, who also went on to become an Old Girl Governor, was almost Sheelin’s contemporary, being younger by three years, and she too was in Cranmer.

  ‘She was the reason my parents chose Felixstowe for me,’ Janet said. ‘They wrote off for a prospectus and she wrote back saying, “We are delighted you want to send Janet here.” She had actually read the letter, not just chucked it at a secretary to deal with. Other schools just sent pro forma replies but she had the personal touch.

  ‘She knew everything. And she was very sensible. Before A Levels I had two invitations to go to twenty-firsts, one after the other, Friday and Saturday night. My parents said, “No, you mustn’t accept,” so I appealed to Jonah, who said, “Well, if you don’t go, you’ll just sit here and be cross, so you’d better go and when you get back you’ll work harder.”

  ‘And there’s another thing she did, which shows you how shrewd she was about people. There was one child in Cranmer – my father knew hers – whose mother had died. Jonah rang the father to say she had noticed the girl never had letters. She told my father later that she knew his handwriting and she’d quoted him as an example: “Janet always seems to have a letter in her father’s handwriting in her hand.”

  ‘She wasn’t afraid of naming names, though. I swallowed a safety pin once. A girl told matron and I was whisked off to hospital. Jonah called a school meeting, specially to talk about this stupid child who had swallowed a safety pin.’

  But another Old Girl, Anita, reminded me that Jonah had her humane side. The House mistress of Hooper was called Mrs Parker.

  ‘She was a widow, not one of those awful spinsters,’ said Anita.

  Her husband, a retired surgeon, had been one of Jonah’s friends in town and, when he died, Mrs Parker was totally distraught. So Jonah persuaded her to be Hooper House mistress, looking after ten near-adults. These Upper Sixth girls loved her company – if she went out at night, Anita would put a hot water bottle in her bed for her to come back to – and Mrs Parker liked to say Jonah saved her life.

  But women, on the whole, she just tolerated. She liked men better, particularly the fathers, because she knew which side the bread was buttered. And of course we speculated. She was too together, too confident with men, not to have had something going on at some stage. Thinking of Jonah doing the deed was a bit like imagining your parents having sex – you just couldn’t. But as per my earlier observation that she grew up on a farm, it’s obvious that she knew what went where. Joanna met a boy called Ross one hols. His family were very advanced. He called his parents by their Christian names. They were both having affairs. Ross wrote Joanna passionate letters, very open and explicit. Maggie passed them on to Jonah.

  ‘Your mother’s abroad – who’s this chap?’ Jonah said. She was quite nice about it, started to talk a bit about boys. She’d picked all this up in the letters. Very maternally, she said, ‘I really don’t think this is a good idea.’

  What a relief, as Joanna didn’t like Ross much. He was a bit of a pest and she wasn’t strong enough to deal with the situation on her own. Mummy wasn’t there; she was fourteen hours away. Nana was absorbed in her bridge. Joanna felt protected: ‘Jonah’s going to solve this.’ Jonah was her security.

  She whizzed around in a racing-green Jaguar XK140. The Head Girl was the only one apart from her allowed to drive it. Short-sighted, Jonah screwed up her eyes quite a lot, which made them even piggier, and was probably why she misjudged the gateposts at the entrance to Cranmer and inflicted so many scratches on the Jaguar. That and the fact that if she went into town in the evening to mingle with Felixstowe’s great and good, she’d roar back having had a few. She drove terribly fast anyway. One yarn about her passed into school folklore. It concerns a time she was barrelling through town with a sixth-former in the passenger seat when the nearside wing mirror caught the handle of a female pedestrian’s shopping bag. Jonah roared on regardless, arriving back with the shopping bag hanging off her wing mirror.

  I’d heard this so often I began to wonder whether, like the banisters story, it was apocryphal, because everyone who recounted it gave the name of a different girl in the passenger seat, so when I started writing I decided to see if I could put a name to that girl. Then Diana Platts confirmed that it was indeed true, because the sixth-former involved was her older sister, Bretch’s time-twin, Yvonne.

  Then there were the races with Cawley. No speed cameras then. The police used to say they couldn’t catch them because their cars couldn’t keep up. Jonah and Cawley would try to cap each other. Cawley would say, ‘I’ve driven from Ipswich to Felixstowe at so-and-so miles an hour,’ and Jonah would go, ‘That’s nothing.’

  She came from the Gower Peninsula and would go back there every hols to visit her family. In those days, the approach to Felixstowe was through Trimley, so she was obviously very familiar with the journey, as she’d done it countless times for more than thirty years. On one particular occasion, a policeman stopped her for speeding. Beside her on the passenger seat were strewn maps galore, and the policeman said, ‘Oh, I see you are a stranger, Madam,’ and Jonah replied, quick as a flash, ‘Yes, yes, I am! Where am I?’ and she was allowed to get away with it.

  She was a brilliant organiser, which went without saying. Oodles of committees were sat on. At one stage she was President of the Association of Headmistresses of Boarding Schools, to which end off she sped to their annual conference. She had a prang on the way, and was still quite shaken up by the time she arrived. ‘Al
l I wanted was a stiff gin,’ she said later, ‘and all they gave me was a cup of tea.’

  Two fathers were once overheard discussing her at Speech Day. Both war veterans, they had been naval officers. ‘Do you know,’ one said, ‘she’s someone I’d like to see in charge of a destroyer.’

  ‘Hmm,’ observed the other. ‘Give her a good navigating officer and I’d make it an aircraft carrier.’

  He wasn’t far wrong. She must be the most impressive woman I have ever known. Surely. And that is a fact.

  16

  COME TO SUNNY FELIXSTOWE

  Felixstowe, although on the East Coast, faces south and enjoys the bracing properties of breezes from the North Sea. Statistics prove that it has one of the lowest rainfalls and one of the highest sunshine records of any seaside resort in the British Isles.

  The Felixstowe College Prospectus

  In 1962, Felixstowe College opened a special boarding house for the Lower Fours, from which they would emerge like hatchlings to join the main houses in Upper Four. It was called Wycliffe, after a Protestant martyr who, in spite of popping up like a bad penny to denounce the official line on this and that, managed to stay alive long enough to die of a stroke, though he needn’t think he’d got away with it. The Papists declared him a heretic, removed his corpse from consecrated ground and burnt it before casting the ashes into the River Swift. That was him told.

  The Lower Four house he gave his name to was a riot – cosy and cuddly, not nearly as strict as the rest of the school. The House mistress was Miss Jackson – very jowly, lots of extra chins, lots of make-up, but not scary. The dorms were four interlinked rooms along the top, in the attic.