Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  Prospectuses arrived – all those extraordinary, wonderful houses she’d never seen but had read about in Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil books. It was all quite exciting. In the last week in August she was put on an aeroplane under the auspices of an eighteen-year-old girl who said she’d sit next to her and look after her. She arrived in Gatwick and was met by this frightfully smart cousin of her mother’s who lived in Ormonde Gate, Chelsea. Everything seemed very grey. Driving up through the suburbs from the airport, she said, ‘Why are all the houses joined together?’ because she’d lived in Kenya since she was two and had never seen terraces before.

  The frightfully smart cousin handed her over to the aunt, who took her to Harrods for the uniform. Sukie was absolutely flabbergasted. She’d never owned so many clothes in her life. Suddenly she had liberty bodices, which she’d never heard of, and white linings and a grey dress to change into in the evenings. She’d never worn stockings and a suspender belt before.

  The aunt drove Sukie to school for the first day of term. She was a mousey little thing with specs, and quite anxious. It was all so new. First they went to Latimer, but were sent down to Cranmer more or less straight away to meet Jonah. She’d never seen Jonah before. With that great big desk overlooking the sea and that imposing bosom, booming, ‘Welcome! Welcome to England!’ she was just something out of Angela Brazil. Even the aunt was a little intimidated.

  They went back to Latimer, where the aunt arranged for Sukie to be allowed to keep her trunk at school over the holidays because she wouldn’t be going back to Kenya. She was one of the very few girls permitted to do that. She met Cawley, who seemed very old.

  ‘Not allowed to use the front stairs, you know!’ Cawley squawked.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Sukie stammered.

  The aunt couldn’t wait to get away. Sukie was handed over to Mary, and the first thing Mary said was, ‘I was born in Nairobi and I told the others you wouldn’t be black.’

  Not many laughs in Latimer. They were too scared. They didn’t have midnight feasts, as Pipe would have been on them. She wasn’t homesick, because she knew there was nothing she could do. In fact, she only went back to Kenya once the whole time she was there. Her father had no money. Mummy wrote a lot. So it wasn’t too bad. She just got farmed around various relations.

  Not being able to go home for half term, though, that was horrid. She did feel sad then. For her first half term, she stayed with her aunt, but she had to stay in Latimer for her second half term because her aunt’s son had got typhoid from the water while skiing in Zermatt. The school opened the library for her. She read. She walked. And went for three meals a day with Miss Pipe, the matron – in Pipe’s dining room. Pipe was furious because it meant she didn’t have any time off.

  So in Upper Five Sukie got anorexia. It started when Nancy, the American girl, arrived. Nancy had green contact lenses and a boyfriend in Vietnam. Her guardians lived on the Isle of Wight and had a butler, so there was a lot of angling for invitations to stay in the hols. At the beginning of term, at Weighing, Sukie and Nancy were both nine stone. Oh God! So fat! She and Nancy decided to go on a diet. Nancy’s lasted a day, Sukie’s till she left school.

  She was dancing a lot, hours a day. She needed to be thin, because she was doing ballet. She made a list of everything she’d eaten. If she’d had just one roll then she wasn’t allowed to have anything for lunch. If they had semolina, she’d get a great big dollop of jam, say, ‘Mmm, delicious,’ swirl it around and leave it. Her periods stopped for the whole of the three years she was there. The not eating, the dancing, the fright. She had to keep pretending to be off games. She had a stack of STs she had to give away.

  She was always a goody-goody, because she was petrified of being shouted at by Cawley. God, Cawley could shout if you didn’t do something right. You could hear it all over House. Sukie was so scared she didn’t have the chance to laugh. Her little sister came the year after her and cried for three weeks; wouldn’t even eat her birthday cake. She had Sukie’s arms round her every day. Cawley and Pipe were so cruel. Sukie dropped from 9st 2lbs to 7st 2lbs.

  ‘You’re losing too much weight,’ said Sister Berg. And did nothing.

  I wished my own misery had whittled me down so conveniently. Instead I stuffed my face. That summer hols of 1964 I made my first pilgrimage to Biba, which I’d read about in Honey magazine, where a pink-and-white-check dress had been featured. Biba was in Abingdon Road in Kensington and did not look like a clothes shop at all. The outside was painted black. Inside, music played and clothes hung from bentwood hatstands. In the dim lighting, and without my glasses, it was not always possible to tell which garments were wrapped around a human form and which simply hung from the hatstands, particularly as the colours were on the ‘subfusc’ side. Prune. Dead daffodil. Pin-striped mud. Floorboard. Dried blood. Aniseed ball. Neither were they absolutely me, measurement-wise. The sleeves were cut very tight and I would hear little ripping noises if I moved my arms too energetically. But they were a revelation, and I loved them.

  24

  THE BICYCLE THIEVES

  Back to school. We were in Lower Six, and had returned to sensational news. Cherry got the curse. Finally. It happened while Juno was staying with her in the hols. Oh, and Juno’s mother was doing better. Some kind of rehab had been organised through Cherry’s father, the canon. A religious place. Monks involved. Golly. But a corner had been turned. Three cheers for Cherry and Juno.

  And three cheers for Lindy. She was made Head of House. But the dramas and crises that came her way! Burton the maid threatened to walk out because Beth and a Middle Five had left the cloakroom in a mess, so Beth and the Middle Five had to write letters of apology to her. Meanwhile the exterior of Ridley was being given a new coat of paint. The grey stucco was disappearing under a coat of Suffolk pink. Ridley blushed, and you couldn’t blame it because it turned out the new girl in our year, a sweet but rather droopy girl called Geraldine had developed a tendresse for one of the painters, and Bretch gave Lindy a filthy row for not telling her but Lindy didn’t even KNOW!

  And more cheers still. Oodles of cheers. Chrissie and I had passed our O Levels, and were allowed to share a dorm again. Now it was A Level time, and I was definitely going to do Latin. Our teacher was a MAN, a great big scruffy bear of a man, Mr Robinson. Not a fierce bear; Rupert rather than grizzly. He told jokes. He’d turn up with sweet in his pockets and always, always, a bit of food down his front. None of his clothes matched. Most of it needed cleaning. You could while away the lesson by getting him to talk about his travels by car through various parts of the Middle East. And now he was the Physics teacher as well. Cherry was delighted. The last one had been this amazing army commander who made it clear that it was beneath his dignity to teach Physics to girls because they hadn’t stripped down a motorbike by the age of twelve. But now he was gone, and Jonah got Mr Robinson to do it along with Latin. He had this old car that he drove round and round the Games pitches, blowing his horn to teach them the Doppler effect. All that and chocolate too. Just adorable. I never wanted to do Physics but I was definitely going to take Latin. But I hadn’t known what else to do.

  More specifically, I did not know what to do about Miss Williams, our English teacher. Miss Williams was small and dumpy, wore rather tight tweed suits and had muscly legs. She wore her hair in a French plait that was never quite under control, and her eyes gleamed. A very good teacher and an interesting character, with a sort of subversiveness, as if she didn’t care what ‘they’ thought of her. She was tremendously encouraging to me and I did enjoy her lessons, but she was a bit too grown-up for me, frankly.

  It started when I was in Lower Five, and sitting on The Williams Table. I was at one end, and she was at the other.

  ‘Someone on this table got a hundred percent for their essay,’ she murmured.

  I realised it was me she was talking about. How exciting! But I had to appear modest, and concentrated on my chicken mush while she just went on and on about
my essay to the girls at her end of her table. Far better than anyone else in the school could write . . . one tiny grammatical mistake but she couldn’t bring herself to deduct a single mark . . .

  By this time I was blushing and feeling terribly uncomfortable and just wished she’d handed me back the essay in class and let me glow in private.

  My life with Miss Williams continued in this rather peculiar way. She expected high standards from me but I didn’t always live up to expectations. One minute I was being made to feel I was really special, and the next there was a put-down and I’d feel dreadfully silly. Perhaps she was a bit silly herself. Look what happened when Gill’s father died. Gill’s father was a really nice, gentle, kind man, a local GP. He did house calls. Everybody in the community knew him, and he knew them. A gem. He went into hospital to have a back operation. Gill was thirteen at the time, in Lower Five. It was a spring day and she’d woken up in the nine-dorm thinking, Oh, Daddy’s coming out of hospital today.

  Everyone had gone back to House after lunch. Gill heard the phone ring outside Bretch’s sitting room. She was coming downstairs at the time and didn’t really register anything at all. She went into the commie and then someone was sent to fetch her. She walked into Bretch’s room. Enormous Jonah was almost hiding behind the door – a mountain. Gill looked up at its peak. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Jonah said, ‘your father’s died.’ He’d gone for a walk in the grounds, and said he didn’t feel very well. It was an embolism. The funeral was on a Tuesday. Gill and her sister Elizabeth returned to school on the Sunday after. A letter was waiting for her. ‘It arrived for you after you’d gone,’ said Bretch, ‘and I recognised your father’s writing.’ Gill took it and turned round, then ran right into her best friend, Alexa. Alexa’s arms were clamped to her sides because, of course, you never hugged anyone back then. ‘Oh. Hello,’ said Alexa in a clipped way. Gill clutched the letter. She just had to get away, find a cab empty somewhere so she could read it in private, but Alexa was chasing her around the corridors, not realising Gill wanted, needed, to be on her own because she didn’t want anyone to see her crying.

  The next morning, Gill had an English Lit. lesson. Miss Williams brought in a pile of dark-green, A5-sized books of short stories and handed them round. They were books of short stories. She told the class which page to turn to.

  ‘Gillian,’ she said, ‘you can read the first two pages of this story for the class.’ The title of the story was ‘His Father’s Funeral’.

  Anyway, back to Williams and me. She so encouraged my creative writing. She kindly read and critiqued, in her spare time, the poetry I wrote, and it wasn’t a matter of just one or two, there were terms when I couldn’t go half a day without dashing off a sonnet or some multi-page epic in free verse. Beside the margin of one I pressed on her, she’d pencilled ‘sounds sexual’. She was right. It was, and I didn’t even realise. I’d unknowingly written about S.E.X. And I’d heard that one of the A Level set books was A Passage to India, and that meant Williams would talk about S.E.X. In class. ‘Snakes. Caves. You know what that means, don’t you?’ Yuk. So I stabbed Miss Williams in the heart by dropping English and, along with Latin, I did French and Spanish with the glorious Miss Sanford. And Russian. We now had a teacher of Russian! The only girls’ boarding school in the country to have one! Another first for Felixstowe College!

  It was a two-year crash course. Mrs P was a Russian married to an Englishman. Inevitably we called her Rosa Klebb. Her lessons were dreadfully boring. Four consecutive 35-minute periods every Thursday evening. We studied the clock closely. But heigh-ho. What did that matter? Now we knew how to write ‘I love you’ in the Cyrillic alphabet.

  And halfway through Lower Six, I wanted to write ‘I love you’ in every possible language. I had stopped stockpiling boyfriends. I had been hit by first love. He was wonderful. A scholarship boy, swotting for Oxbridge, about to carve his way in the world just as my father had. He made me laugh. He made the sun more brilliant. He made the rain retreat into the sky. And my mother told me I could not have him because he came from the wrong side of town, where all the council houses were. He must be common. I should have more pride. She didn’t love me, but she wanted to stop me having someone who did.

  The soundtrack was Radio Caroline, broadcasting offshore all day. We woke up to its call sign, ‘This is Radio Caroline’. Instead of singing our hearts out in our gigantic new chapel (‘Now Thank We All Our God’; ‘Immortal Invisible’; ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’), we were bopping and swooning in the commie to Unit 4 Plus 2’s ‘Concrete and Clay’, Francoise Hardy with ‘All Over the World’, Jackie de Shannon and ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’. And for me, ‘Poor Man’s Son’ by The Rockin’ Berries. I was not going to give that boy up.

  During the summer term, my mother went into hospital to have a hysterectomy. My father and I went to visit her and, after ten minutes or so of dreary chit-chat, she started crying. It was sudden. A shock. My mother never cried. She only did anger. ‘I feel as though I’m in prison,’ she wept.

  Neither my father nor I moved. Then he said, ‘Er, go and comfort your mother, dear.’

  So I put my arms round her and made ‘there there’ noises – all a bit awkward and perfunctory – while he just stood there. It wasn’t me she needed. Why didn’t he put his arms round her and comfort her and love her? The poor woman.

  But I still carried on seeing that boy.

  It was the last night of summer term, the last night we’d ever spend in Ridley, and the prank was going to be the best ever played in the history of the school.

  As far as Della was concerned, it served Bretch right for telling Della she was going to be made Games captain, which didn’t happen because of some breach of rules. So Della was out for revenge, and as she was leaving at the end of that term she was going to town.

  There had been an undercurrent of excitement in the Lower Six commie for days. After supper (baked eggs followed by pink blancmange, which nobody but me liked so I ate everyone else’s as well), we casually headed off to the dorm, one by one, so as not to arouse suspicion. Bretch had been in a filthy mood with us for days, not talking to us, making us wash our own tea things on Sunday, getting Lindy into floods when she tried to sort it out and saying that we weren’t prepared to give up much for the House when we wouldn’t take the juniors on a walk because we wanted to work. They didn’t even want to go on a walk! Silly bag.

  The raid was scheduled to take place under cover of darkness, but by the time we were ready to go for it a pale sun was already shouldering its way above the horizon. Some of us were in the downstairs six-dorm, so getting out was simple enough. Just open the window and climb out. We’d been doing it for years. A dawn breeze made our dressing gowns flap as we made our way on tiptoe across the patio. Down the stone steps on to the lawn we crept, then scurried around to the front of Ridley.

  Bretch’s bike, the object of the exercise, was propped against the door to Dan Dan The Boilerman’s cellar as usual. It was a boneshaker, a familiar sight during summer term, as Bretch glided on it along Maybush Lane, straight-backed, specs glinting. With the skirt of her shirt-waister flapping, she exuded a kind of innocent gaiety. Little did she know. It was a risky job, but with the attraction that it has never been done before. Operation Boneshaker. Target: to put Bretch’s bike on the cloakroom roof.

  It was just after five a.m. Beth, who was Head of Manoeuvres, pointed silently to the cloakroom, and Cath, Della, Bobbie and Prue crossed the drive and disappeared behind it, giving the window of Bretch’s bedroom a wide berth. Bretch’s bedroom was the potential flashpoint. All part of the thrill. Beth and I glanced quickly at each other. We’d come this far. We could not now give up. We stepped gingerly past her window, taking care that our slippers didn’t crunch on the gravel. We grabbed the bike but had to carry it across the drive because it rattled a bit when the wheels went round. A pedal barked my shin and I bit back a yelp. Hobble, hobble, wince, wince.

 
We joined the others behind the cloakroom. Stage One accomplished. There was a brief pause while Bobbie passed me her hanky – ‘I haven’t used it,’ she whispered – and I blotted the blood from my shin. Now for Stage Two.

  There was no dispute about who should climb on to the roof. Beth stepped out of her slippers, wiped her palms on the sides of her dressing gown and grasped the drainpipe. Planting her toes on the bolt that fixed its lower end to the wall, she hoisted herself up, one foot feeling the lumpy pebbledash for a toehold. There was none till five feet up, where the cab window ledges started.

  Beth dropped to the ground again. We conferred.

  Della bent over into the brace position and Beth climbed on her back. She grasped the drainpipe with one hand and placed a foot on the ledge. We caught our breath. Up the drainpipe she climbed, inch by inch, crevice after crevice. The skin of her bare feet must be sore by now, I thought. She must be getting tired. But there was no question of her doing anything but keep going. She pulled herself on to the roof, to a collective exhalation of relief from those of us waiting below, and reached down.

  Della and Prue hoisted the bike into the air, and Beth grabbed the handlebars and heaved it on to the flat surface of the roof.

  ‘Move it towards the other side or she won’t see it,’ whispered Della.

  And so it was done. Beth slithered back down the drainpipe and we all patted her on the back.

  It had taken the best part of half an hour, long enough for us all to feel hungry. We made a detour to the Ghost Walk where Prue, the designated quartermaster, had stashed apples, a bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints, two sticky willies saved from breaktime, pieces of chocolate crunch smuggled over from Thursday night’s supper at Cranmer, some large crumbs formerly known as fruitcake, and our midnight feast tipple of choice which, now we were in Lower Six, was Drambuie. The paper bag in which the food had been kept had mostly disintegrated in the dew.