by Julie Welch
We ate and sipped to the soundtrack of a gentle rustling, as summer rain landed on leaves. A few drops fell lightly on our bare ankles and the tops of our hands. The sea was beginning to sparkle, and the air so clear that we could see the portholes of the ships heading for Harwich and Europe. We waved at whoever was behind them. Then we crept back to the dorm and, through the window, tumbled inside.
The following year Annie’s form put a scarecrow in Bretch’s bed. One could not be anything but impressed by how they overcame the logistical difficulties involved in capturing Worzel Gummidge and sneaking him into Ridley undercover. Was their prank superior to ours? Decide.
25
THE LAST HURRAH
Well done, Chrissie! She had worked awfully hard in Lower Six and now she had won a sixth-form scholarship. Super for her not to be in Jonah’s bad books any more. I didn’t mention it to my mother, who would have wanted to know why I hadn’t been awarded one.
How grown-up going into Upper Six seemed at first but, as the weeks went by, it wasn’t as thrilling as I’d hoped, because though we were in our own Upper Six Houses, and had bicycles to ride and could wear our own clothes at weekends, we were still at school. We could go into town whenever we wanted, but I didn’t want to go into Felixstowe, with its dreary shops and flat horizon. I wanted London – Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, and lunch at Cranks health food restaurant. And we still weren’t allowed to talk to boys because, if we did, the old bags who spied for Jonah would get on the phone to her about it and you’d have your home clothes taken away till the end of term and be put back into your grey afternoon dress.
But still. There were advantages, no denying that. We had our own kitchen and fridge. And bedsits, not dorms. Chrissie and I shared a room in Coverdale. The beds had sprung mattresses, which was bliss after four years of horsehair pallets. The common room was more like the sitting room in a flatshare, with coffee tables, comfy chairs, a Dansette record-player and, in one corner, a treadle sewing machine. We had our own cheque books; our parents were instructed to make us an allowance, which was meant to last an entire term. There was a good fabric shop in town, and I ran up mini-skirts with the material I bought, so I soon went through my allowance, what with the accompanying purchase of a pair of white calf-length boots. I had seen a photo of Jean Shrimpton wearing them. On me, they didn’t look the same.
I was forever trying to keep to a diet, but it was so difficult. That fridge was my downfall. I believed that yoghurts contained no calories and could therefore be consumed six at a time. We could cook our own meals at weekends, and we took it in turns. Chrissie and I dished up cod steaks with tomato and onion sauce, mushrooms, fried onions and sprouts. It ended up on the soggy side, but no one died. What a relief!
The House mistresses were genteel widowed ladies. Mrs Parker was Hooper’s. She had bandy bow legs, poor darling, and livened up her sponge cake with whisky in the butter icing. She drank quite a lot. But she was a lovely person, a cut above. So was Mrs Swain, a sweet, very unobservant lady who was nominally in charge of Coverdale. Her son worked for the Daily Telegraph, and there was great general excitement when he came to visit. She had lank, greasy hair and would shuffle around in the evenings in a scruffy dressing gown and slippers, and waft in and out discussing knitting patterns. ‘Now, dear, I need to talk to you about something. Dear, would you come and see me.’ Otherwise she’d listen to the radio in her room. If you offered her a cup of tea, you’d think you’d offered her the world.
Oh dear. How some of us took advantage of that poor woman. You could get away with anything. I would hang out of the window smoking Gauloises, then spray talc around to mask the smell. There was a pay phone in the hall, and two girls broke into it with a hairpin. There was a lot of money in there. They couldn’t possibly take it. They went to Mrs Swain and told her what they’d done. She was absolutely flummoxed. What should she do? She sent them to Jonah. Jonah was flummoxed too. Why did they do it? ‘We wanted to see if we could,’ they said.
I filled in my UCCA forms. Next year I would be free. But I wanted to be free now. I felt I was stuck on a station platform. I was waiting for Life, but the train was delayed. I had a portable typewriter, which must have been a nightmare for everyone on our corridor, as I bashed away at it all hours, finishing my second novel. I skipped lessons and didn’t once go to Communion.
Our new chapel was at least four times as big as the old one. It had chandeliers and altar rails and hanging baskets. And a giant cross, plumb centre at the end of the aisle. The biggest, most splendidly decorated school chapel ever built, surely. Old plain-and-simple Reverend Percy Warrington must have been looping-the-loop in his grave. It was a statement. Just when the world outside was getting sexier and ruder and much more fun, here was this hangar of a place to pack in even more virgins singing their hearts out. Meanwhile, the old chapel became a lecture hall. And it was where we held the Sixth Form Dance.
The Sixth Form Dance had traditionally relied on boys being bussed in from nearby schools such as Felsted and Framlingham College, and had been held in the library, but this year was going to be different. Jonah had consented to us having our own invitees. A very sophisticated Cranmer had also arranged for a rock band called the Wild Oats to supply the music, and another Cranmer’s daddy supplied beer and wine. The bar was where the altar had once been. Meanwhile, Jonah established herself in the porch to make sure there was no hanky-panky.
The day before the dance, I’d had an interview at Bristol University. I was on a high. I’d been offered a place. I only needed two Bs. We spent all afternoon getting the lecture hall ready and then primping ourselves. I’d invited my boy from the wrong side of town but he wasn’t able to come. I was a bit disappointed but some other boys from home stepped up. Chrissie and I waited at Coverdale for ages for them to arrive. They didn’t come and didn’t come, and then Jonah rang to tell us to go down to the lecture hall, so we did. What a haze of noise and drink. Did Jonah know that someone was already throwing up in the shrubbery? My boys eventually arrived in their car around 10 p.m. They’d got lost. Or so they claimed. The one I had earmarked for myself promptly went off with a stunning Tyndale, but I was so relieved they’d turned up and my face had been saved that I didn’t mind in the slightest, and I found another partner. We had to say goodnight to Jonah at the end and thank her for letting us have the dance, and then some of us jumped into one of my friends’ cars and went roaring around Felixstowe for a bit. It was after two in the morning when we climbed back into Coverdale through a window. But it was Cherry’s night, really. She got off with a boy. A real boy. And he was going to take her out in the Christmas hols.
‘He’s a bit spotty,’ she said. ‘But, well, been asked. Held a sweaty hand. And now I’ve done some French kissing. I am a real woman at last.’
If you were going to try for Oxbridge, you were meant to stay into Third Year Sixth. For some reason Jonah decided I should take the exam for New Hall, Cambridge, a year early. ‘They’re bound to like you because you’re mad,’ she said. So around the time I had my interview at Bristol, I took New Hall’s entrance exam as well. And now they wanted to interview me.
The Bristol interview had been great. My mother had written to Jonah insisting she be allowed to accompany me. Jonah stopped me in the library to tell me. I explained that I was going out with a boy of whom my mother didn’t approve, and that she probably thought if I went on my own to Bristol I would somehow arrange to see him on the sly. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I just wanted to go on my own. Jonah understood immediately. She wrote back to my mother. I don’t know what was said but I was allowed to go unaccompanied the night before with my overnight case, containing the outfit I had bought for the occasion – a green and black checked shirt from C&A, a lovely sludge-green miniskirt from a new boutique called Foale & Tuffin, and a pair of black kinky boots. I stayed at a place called the Clarendon, half hotel, half service flats, which was close to the Wills Building, where the interview was go
ing to happen.
Sitting down to supper and ordering on my own felt stupendous. I had liver and bacon with mashed potato, followed by steamed pudding with custard. Not quite up to Mrs Kahn’s standard, but delicious all the same. The next morning, I was interviewed by the professor of philosophy, Stephan Korner, and an assistant professor, David Milligan. Stephan Korner was small, with grizzled hair, very courteous. How lovely it all was. The high-ceilinged room, the stained-glass windows, and two MEN. Men who were interested in what I was saying, who treated me as someone on their level. Not scary old biddies picking me up for this and that and telling me what was wrong with me. This was where I wanted to be. This was where I was going to be. When they finished interviewing you, you had to go and sit on a bench outside and wait while they deliberated. And the door opened moments after I had sat down and I was called in again to be offered a place . . . and then I went home bursting with happiness and all I got was, ‘Don’t say yes till you’ve been to Cambridge.’
No chance of my being able to do this one on my own. This was the big one for my mother. As my parents drove me to Cambridge, I felt as if I was dragging an enormous weight behind me. She had such hopes of me. Of being able to say, ‘My daughter, who’s at Cambridge . . .’ The trouble was that having been told I was clever from a very early age I assumed that was all there was to it, and thought I didn’t actually have to work – which was not a clever conclusion at all. My chosen degree course was Moral Sciences and I had been given three books to read over half term. I flipped through them. They were deadly dull, so I’d given up and decided I’d wing it, as usual. Not preparing properly; it is still my fatal flaw.
The interview was a complete disaster. I remember being told at one stage I was very young and wouldn’t it be better to wait until next year, which was their way of letting me down gently. Back at school a few days later, in the library, Jonah brought me the letter with the New Hall crest on the envelope and stood there while I opened it. ‘I’ve not got in, Miss Jones,’ I said. She sort of grunted and hurried away.
Psychologically it was a huge moment for me. I had disappointed the two most significant women in my life. I felt I was no longer of interest to Jonah. My mother was foul to me, as was I to her because, of course, I was more like her than I would ever want to know. I wanted to break things. Chrissie and I fell out. She had told her mother about me and my Poor Man’s Son, and about my mother’s disapproval.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said.
Yes, I did mind. I was furious. It wasn’t that I minded her telling her mother. What made me angry was her telling me she’d told her mother. Rubbing it in that hers was nice and mine was nasty.
I couldn’t stay at odds with her for long, but then I was dumped by my Poor Man’s Son. And the novel that I had dispatched to a publisher landed back with a thump through the letterbox. I thought I was going to be a writer. Now I had another rejection. I was ragingly angry, morose and completely self-centred. The boys I’d invited to the Sixth Form Dance wanted to make a return visit. Chrissie was far too sensible to get involved but two other girls came with me.
Oh what a night! They had booked hotel rooms. Did they actually think . . .? How could I have been so naïve? (Very easily, is the answer, given that my teens had been spent in a closed single-sex society.) I was in above my head, and I made one of the boys drive me back around midnight. I don’t know what happened to the other two, because we never talked about it. There was a terrible school meeting the next day, at which Jonah asked the three girls who were seen out the previous night to stand up, and we were rounded up and despatched into the Red Hall.
‘You’ll all be expelled, of course.’ I hadn’t been on the end of Jonah’s full fury before. She wasn’t someone who shouted and raved. It was controlled fury. Far more terrifying. Would I be put in the San like the jam-eating nymphomaniac, waiting for my parents to come and take me away? But a few days later she wavered. I wasn’t to be expelled. I could stay on to take my A Levels. She would not have me back for Third Year Sixth, though. She would arrange for me to take Cambridge entrance at a London day school.
So off I went to take an entrance exam for yet another school. And did not do well. A few days after I returned to Felixstowe, Jonah intercepted me in the library.
‘Don’t shout the place down, but you haven’t been accepted. They didn’t like your French paper.’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that it was really that they didn’t like me.’
Good. I was off the hook. I wouldn’t have to go to a day school to take Cambridge entrance. Bristol, here I come.
I was wrong. Jonah did another about-turn. I had come to see the error of my ways at last, she thought. I had realised I wasn’t a nice person. The first step to reform. I could return for Third Year Sixth and try for Cambridge again. My mother phoned, crowing with delight at the news.
But I dug my heels in. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I wanted to get out into the world, have fun. I didn’t want to go to Cambridge. I didn’t want to spend three more years of rules and curfews and formal dining, of living with other women and being taught by old biddies. And even if I did stay on at school and take the entrance exam, it would all be a waste of time. There was more chance of the sea turning to tomato soup that my being offered a place.
So I took my A Levels, the end of summer term approached, and I was back in Jonah’s study for the last time.
‘Goodbye, Miss Jones.’
‘I’m sure your mother would be a lot happier if you got a first,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’m sure she would be if I gave her the moon in a golden carriage drawn by unicorns as well.’
I didn’t really say that.
Off I went to Bristol, with my mother shouting that I was a failure. But I wasn’t. In my third year I won a prize, the Daily Telegraph Young Writer of the Year Award. Entrants had to produce an article about ‘Britain Today’, and I wrote about student life and love and sex and drugs and abortion, and my entry was the winner. It was published in their colour supplement and it so happened that, not long after it appeared, Chrissie went to an Old Girls’ Weekend.
‘Did you see what your friend wrote?’ Cawley screeched at her. But what did I care? She was a mad old bag and I was a writer.
26
THE GREAT FIRE
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that above our library was a clock tower, reached via a set of stairs that led from the Red Hall. On the way you would pass Jonah’s daytime office, where her P.A. would sit busily typing out The Jonah List and all the rants about hair, and from whence Jonah would make her lightning hit-raids to quash any misbehaviour in the library. Further up was a maze of little rooms where we went for Elocution, Shorthand and Typing and wigging. You could hear the whirring of the clock mechanism. It was the Hogwart’s bit of the school and, one night in September 1973, it all went whoosh and whump.
It was so easy to get into our school and set fire to it. There was no security to speak of in the grounds. The Great Fire of Felixstowe College was front-page news: ‘Arson Probe After Girls’ School Blaze’. Second lead in the East Anglian Daily Times, only conceding prominence to ‘Guerrillas Shoot Arab Jet Hostage’.
The photo that went alongside the report showed the library after the fire had done its worst. The doors to the Red Hall had been blown out and metal frames and roof girders exposed. Where windows had been were gaping holes and everything that hadn’t been turned to cinders was peeling or hanging. It was horrible, horrible, our beautiful library, just gone. All because some young lad had kicked off after a row with his girlfriend.
Strictly speaking, the Great Fire doesn’t belong to our school story because by then we’d all left and were already scattered round the world. In another way, it belongs absolutely, because it was the end of our school, our memories. And in any case, in a place where the biggest drama to date had been the time Mrs Kahn burnt the curry and we all had to eat it anyway, this was it, the ur-drama, th
e ultimate Big Thing (apart from closing down) that happened to Felixstowe College.
It was early September 1973, a week before the start of term, and Miss Manners, Jonah’s successor, had just returned from a holiday in Austria with her great friend, the historical novelist Mary Stewart. When she wrote about the fire in the school magazine, the prose took on something of the fraught, swoopy tone of romantic fiction.
‘Long before I reached the gate,’ she wrote later, ‘I could see the angry glare in the sky beyond the science block. Panting and out of breath, silly tears dazzling my eyes, I came round the corner from the music school on a nightmare scene.’
The library block was beyond saving. The parquet floor turned into a flame carpet, the glass dome disappeared in a brief shower of hot crystals. Six thousand books went, five classrooms, the Upper Six commie, the office that was Jonah’s lair, the wigging rooms, the drama room with all its costumes, the sixth-form studies, Bretch’s typewriters, eight cabs, the complete school records, hundreds of textbooks, piles of A Level work, all the stationery.
I had no idea that it had happened. It was just after the start of the 1973–74 football season, my first as a reporter. Saturday 8 September, Crystal Palace vs. Middlesbrough. The day is engraved on my memory because after the match I was given a lift back to Fleet Street by my childhood hero, Danny Blanchflower, who by then was a journalist on the Sunday Express.
