by Julie Welch
Meanwhile, Maybush Lane was blocked with fire engines and Miss Wrinch, while the wreckage was still smouldering, tippy-toed through the doorway that was no longer there to rescue the A Level work. This wasn’t just duty. Nor was it the desire to be the heroine of her own school story, ‘Miss Wrinch Saves The Day’. This was her goodbye to the building made by her father.
In spite of the encroachment of her illness, the first signs of which were that dreadful faint into the rice pudding, Wrinch had gone on serenely teaching Geography, carrying out her role as Deputy Head, first to Jonah and then to Miss Manners. The Story of Felixstowe College recorded that her one ambition was to see her father’s library restored:
[. . .] and it was with great joy that she installed herself in the new Deputy Head’s room. With the school back to working capacity in its new building, she felt that her task was done and prepared to retire in July 1976, calmly making plans for a future which, in her heart of hearts, she must have known she would never see . . . A few weeks before, she had addressed the school in chapel, speaking bravely of the illness she was fighting, and certain of the divine strength that was supporting her. It had become only too apparent during the last year that this was an heroic struggle.
She died, with typical consideration and lack of fanfare, after the end of autumn term.
At least she got a proper, very Felixstowe send-off, in the big new super chapel: the overwrought holiness, the prefects in billowing robes, the teachers po-faced under their hats, the incantations and recitations. And all the other stuff that, once you’ve escaped from it, makes you think, Oh dear. But Lois Wrinch has always stayed in my mind. A few years ago I took part in the ‘Three Peaks in 24 Hours Challenge’. You might have heard of it. The object of the exercise is consecutively to climb, for charity, the three highest mountains in Britain, linking them all with mad drives from Scotland to the Lake District to Wales. We summited Ben Nevis in a roiling mist, we did Scafell Pike in dawn’s early light, and I thought of Miss Wrinch and my Geography exams all the way up Snowdon. ‘Wales is a very mountainous country with some peaks up to over 3,000ft high’. I would have been awfully grateful if she had appeared alongside me and handed out one of her glucose tablets.
27
VALETE
Or goodbye, in Latin.
Daily Telegraph, 27 June 1994
FALLLING ROLLS MARK END OF PUBLIC SCHOOL
An independent school for girls is to close because of financial problems. Felixstowe College, in Suffolk, which charges £ 3,500 a term for boarders and £2,500 for day pupils, blames falling numbers and the burden of paying for a new sports hall.
The school, founded in 1929, had at its peak 300 senior girls and 90 in its mixed junior school. The number of seniors has fallen by half.
Headmistress Mrs Bridget Patterson said, ‘We thought that numbers for September were going to be enough, but we have had some withdrawals. There are not enough boarders coming in at the bottom end of the school to keep it viable.’
Parents received letters about the closure on Saturday. A group of them are to discuss a rescue package.
Nothing came of the rescue package discussions, Q.E.D. When I went to Felixstowe to interview Elizabeth Manners in 2011, it was to meet a woman who had done thirty years of seething about her successor, Miss Guinness.
‘I was going into Marks and Spencers one day,’ harrumphed Miss Manners, ‘and there she was at the door. “Welcome!” she said. “Welcome?” I said. “You’ve just welcomed me to Marks and Spencers!” ’
The trouble was that Jonah, as that wonderful Old Girl Janet Copland said, ‘got the hell out’. Miss Manners did not. She stayed on in Felixstowe, a figure of note in the town, a personality, serving on the local council, appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, a woman of strong opinions, some of which concerned what was happening to Felixstowe College. Miss Guinness was charming, gentle, devout, and unfortunate enough to be in charge of the school when the decline started.
‘Before I went there, they’d been boarding girls out in the town,’ said Judy James, who arrived in 1989 to be the last House mistress of Ridley. ‘In the early 1980s it was still very difficult to get into. It was burgeoning. Then it went, like a house of cards.’
There was the credit squeeze. Fewer parents could afford it. The reduction in the armed forces meant a draining away of girls on subsidised fees. Felixstowe’s remoteness was another problem; its catchment area was reduced by zillions of gallons of sea and its poor transport links became a problem once greater contact between parents and children became the norm, and many schools allowed weekly boarding. Then there was the kind of education that was being offered. Under Miss Manners’s regime, the school had become more academic, less of the ‘College for Young Ladies’ that Jonah had been so keen on. Miss Guinness had taken it back to its more ladylike days. But times had changed.
‘They weren’t renewing with people coming in,’ said Judy James. ‘Boys’ schools were very active recruiting and promoting, had better facilities and didn’t cost much more. Mothers were now choosing where daughters went, not fathers, and often they’d been at convents and wanted somewhere that was more fun.’
Which, by the 1980s, meant boys. With hindsight, the beginning of the end was one year into Miss Manners’s reign. It was as far back as 1968, when Marlborough College became the first major public school to go co-ed, starting with its sixth form. By 1989 it was fully co-educational; alumnae include the Duchess of Cambridge and political wives such as Samantha Cameron, Sally Bercow and Frances Osborne. Some schools cottoned on quickly to the trend. Boys’ schools began admitting girls first into their sixth forms and then throughout the school. St Felix followed, opening its doors to boys.
Miss Manners capitulated, agreeing to go down the co-educational route. Only one boy was interested and he soon lost enthusiasm when he found he was the only one. Another of Felixstowe’s failings was that it was on the sea, and was difficult to get to from London. Gradually the number leaving became greater than the number joining. Things were grim in the last few years.
They relied more and more on girls from overseas and, in the final years, Felixstowe had more or less become an international school. It was not what some parents sent their daughters there for. Felixstowe was expensive to run, too. Those letterheads – thick grey, red, embossed; indicative of the expense and quality of running the school. They couldn’t change them. People would have known immediately. Whooooa! They’re going to close!
In an attempt to halt the decline, headmistresses were removed and installed and removed again. Time started going backwards, the building up of the school in reverse. Houses closed. Hooper went, then Monkbarns, the Lower Six house bought by the school during Miss Manners’s time. Tyndale became the Prep, which flourished then died, so that was the end of Tyndale.
‘In the last two years, they cut down on cleaners,’ said Judy James. ‘They no longer came in every day. On Sundays we had to clean the house; we had squads. Money got tighter and tighter. The sixth-form house at the end was very wild. There was a pregnant girl there, from Singapore. She was very pregnant when she came to sit her exam. She needed the qualifications.
‘Wycliffe was there for my first two years. Then they decided to bring the young ones in, which was very hard for them. By this stage they had to have mixed-age forms – little ones with the next year up. Would there be enough of us to make a team for House Games? We could see the numbers falling and many of us had been looking for jobs for a long time. Ridley was going to close next.
So the writing was on the wall. Felixstowe had certainly transformed into being a totally international school. ‘In Ridley I had Chinese, Japanese, Kenyan, Nigerian, Brits, Belgians, and an American from one of the bases. One girl’s father died in the middle of everything, which didn’t help. Then they discovered he’d been evading taxes. We had to ask her to leave. She was a very disturbed child. That’s the trouble with a falling roll; you were so pressured by the head to k
eep someone on. But if you do, you’ll lose more than one child.
‘The staff were totally cloud cuckoo: “They won’t close us.” Having come from business it was quite a shock to me to see how unworldly they were. One of the biology staff was made redundant and the staff room virtually disintegrated. A lot of schools were in trouble at that time. It was Felixstowe vs. St Felix. There was one too many, and St Felix stayed open.
‘When it closed, the staff had gone to pieces; it was the House staff who found other schools for the children. Some girls were about to take GCSEs and we had to find somewhere quick. We took a whole busload down to Westonbirt; a big bus of Nigerian and Chinese girls, predominantly. “There are cows! They’ve got a church in the grounds!” One Chinese girl said, “Mrs James, there are dead bodies buried there!” It was a culture shock. Our chapel didn’t have graves.’
Felixstowe College was sold for £6 million. Westonbirt took the contents of the library and Harrogate Ladies’ College the music equipment. Trophies and shields were auctioned off. All that was left were bits and pieces, including some commemorative tea towels left over from the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. Considering how Felixstowe College began, when Uplands School was razed by fire in 1927, there’s a symmetry about what happened next. The bits and pieces went to an Old Girl who ran a prep school. They were lost in a fire.
In 1995, not long after the closure, Helen went over to Felixstowe to see a family friend. ‘I walked into the place and it was as though there had been a bomb dropped on the country, as if everyone had left in the wake of a disaster. I could go everywhere. The gym was covered in graffiti, the wooden floor was torn up and the windows broken. In the Chemmy lab, stools were lying on their sides and work unclaimed by the girls was scattered on the floor. And the music school was all shattered windows and graffiti. I spent an hour there in floods of tears. I could not believe it; it was the sacrilege of it all. After everything it had meant, and everything everyone had done to make it happen. All destroyed.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
When we remembered Zion.
Here on the poplars
we hung our harps.
‘Psalm 137 (I looked it up) . . . one of those beautiful collections of words which Sir William Walton included in his wonderful oratorio, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’. A school friend and I, for two years, used to queue from 2.15 in the afternoon to go and hear it at the Proms. We always ended up on the front rail.
‘The psalm is very apposite, and weep I did.’
28
OLD GIRLS
There’s something about going back to your old school; a peeling away of the layers of adult experience. My mood is ping-ponging between excitement and apprehension: wanting to go back and not wanting to; curious to see all the places I lived and learned in; scared, as if someone is waiting there to pass judgement. Finding myself back in Jonah’s study, staring at my shoes and blushing as Jonah grunts, ‘People are saying you’re conceited.’ I am still that child.
It’s a beautiful spring day, and the train journey into Suffolk hasn’t been much different from the ones I took half a century ago: Liverpool Street, Chelmsford, Colchester. We pass through Constable country and stop at Manningtree, where I almost expect the two blonde sisters, farmer’s daughters, to get on; they did something sexy with their hats. Now here’s Ipswich, where, in O Level year, before we changed on to the branch line, I would make the transition from London teenager in the ladies’ waiting room. Off with the Mary Quant keyhole skirt, black skinny-rib sweater and Mansfield granny shoes. On with the grey afternoon dress. Scrubbing away my make-up at the very last moment.
The near-empty Felixstowe train – single carriage these days – rattles through the flat Suffolk countryside. This isn’t the first time I’ve been back. I went to Jonah’s memorial service in 1985. Much nearer to the moment I’m in now, I visited Elizabeth Manners, in her flat. What remained of the old place was some half a mile away. I retraced my steps to my car without looking. The home I grew up in, the Observer building that was my first place of work, the hospitals my children were born in: all my life landmarks had gone. I hadn’t wanted to see what had happened to Felixstowe College. I wanted it to still be there, at least in my mind’s eye.
Felixstowe station is a husk of its former self, now so hidden among its surroundings the impression is that somebody stole it. But once I find my way outside, everything is familiar straight away: the muted colours of the buildings; the way the roads run in parallel curves to the sea like an auditorium, each house a seat. The Orwell Hotel, where my parents used to stay on exeat weekends, is still on the corner at the top of the high road. Meringues with strawberries on top! Going to the Hamilton Road shops! Watching Juke Box Jury in the residents’ lounge! (Seeing my parents for the first time in a month possibly wasn’t as important as it should have been.)
I set off for the seafront, past the Spa Pavilion and the pretty villas and the municipal flowerbeds still planted on the same steep bank with what may well have been the same red and blue hardy annuals. A hundred yards away, Chrissie is waiting in her open-top BMW. The plan was to have a proper English picnic on the beach before taking a tour round whatever is left of our school, but within seconds comes one of those sudden east-coast downpours. I run the rest of the way and fling handbag and thermos on to the passenger seat and myself on top of them.
The North Sea occupies the entire horizon. ‘It’s exactly the same colour as it was the day we got here,’ observes Chrissie, unwrapping egg and cucumber sandwiches and sausage rolls. ‘Cold cocoa.’
I embark on the task of pouring tea from the thermos without emptying it over my lap, and think briefly of our friendship, the one that started in the first week of our first term, and then I think of us writing poetry and stories together, and swooning over the Beatles, and sharing the terror and hilarity. I remember us being new members of an old club – the other eight Ridleys who had been there for two years already. I can see them all now, in the junior common room on that very first evening, inspecting us. Erica, pretty and charming with a grown-up tinkly laugh, performing the introductions; Bobbie, dark and good-natured with milky skin; Cath, with that gorgeous copper-beech hair; Beth and Marion who were woman-shaped already; little Della and Prue; Lindy, the English rose with a core of steel; Marlee, skinny with enormous glasses. I remember us escaping from the junior commie for a midnight feast on a balmy autumn summer night, and dancing to Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ in the Middle Five commie . . .
The wipers are squeaking against the windscreen. It’s stopped raining and the endless sky of the North Atlantic has turned from gunmetal to a gauzy grey through which the sun is trying to announce itself. Time to get going. I pour the rest of the tea into the road and we set off towards the familiar view of Cranmer on its clifftop.
We round the corner into Maybush Lane and walk a little way up the drive. To our left are some new iron gates and a sign: Ridley House.
‘Ohhhh.’
The Covered Way has gone, obliterated at one side by a large extension that juts out into what used to be the turning circle for parents’ cars. There is a gap where the other end should be, and then a whole new house, an ungainly replica of Ridley, like the plain adolescent daughter of a beautiful mother.
Then we walk a little further along the drive, turn and look to our right. We stare, mute and aghast, at the scene before us. The new chapel is still there, at the end of the old Ridley driveway, but our lovely Art and Dance studio has gone. The rest of our school, too, has vanished. We blink in amazement, as our gaze travels over the altered scene. Housing developments have replaced the school buildings and they stand on top of playing fields where once we galloped around with our lax sticks, the wind whipping up our divided skirts.
More memories. The term Cranmer caught fire. The seat was the little kitchen on the top floor, installed there for the making of tea and a boiled egg before Communion. It was around midnight, a
nd people were lying awake chatting after coming back late from a ballet trip to London when they heard the noise. Crackle, crackle, crackle. And when they got up and opened the dorm door, it was to find the whole corridor full of smoke and the kitchen turned into a fire-breathing dragon. And no one knew where the fire alarm was, so they ran up and down the corridors banging on doors. ‘The house is on fire! This is not a prank. Repeat, this is not a prank!’ They had to wake up Jonah, who stood in her dressing gown, head full of Kirbigrips, shivering on the lawn with everyone, watching the Fire Brigade.
And more memories still. Coming back from Cranmer after lunch and spending most of the time just laughing. And getting into fits in the dorm, and Bretch telling us to shut up, so we did, and just looked out of the window for a while, then went into hysterics again over nothing.
And the hot, hot summer of 1963, when the sky was raining ladybirds. The whole sky. Full. Thousands and thousands of them. Millions. All over the Games pitches. Swarms of the things. You could come out of the classroom and put your hand out and catch them.
And the time the Duchess of Gloucester arrived by helicopter and landed between Ridley and the gym. The whole school turned out, in boaters and Sunday dresses, to greet her. The term when we celebrated bonfire night and the army did the catering and burnt the soup. The time we were banned from using Ridley’s back lawn because some girls talked to boys over the wall. The time we were split up and had to go in separate dorms.
Chrissie, being from Guernsey, always seemed a tiny bit exotic, more French than English. Some years back, on holiday in Brittany, I noticed how many of the women reminded me of her: broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, narrow-hipped. I don’t see her any different now. A smiling face, fine crinkles at the corners of her eyes; they were there even then. I remember the way she pushed her glasses back on to the bridge of her nose when she was discombobulated about something. She laughed when I reminded her about that.
