by Julie Welch
‘I was the little fat girl with glasses. At my primary school people were mean to me. I was often left out of things because I was fat. There’s a bitchiness current in little girls. It might have been one of the reasons I was keen to go to boarding school, to get out of it.’
‘But there were mean girls at Felixstowe too,’ I protested.
‘I seem to remember people were really mean about some of the fat girls,’ she said, ‘but nobody was really horrid to me. And Marlee was incredibly thin and people were nasty to her as well. I always tried not to be mean because I was aware I was a good target.’
It’s true; in all the years she’s been my friend, I’ve never known Chrissie do anything mean, though she can be deliciously beady in private when her guard is down. By the time we were seventeen, we had other friends as well, but our bond has never gone away. Even though months, sometimes years, go by without seeing her, once I am with her I talk more freely and unguardedly to her than to anyone else.
Looking back, I was really lucky to have found such a friend. We just clicked. She was funny, kind and intelligent. Oh, the fun of having someone to mooch with, sleepy-eyed, over to Cranmer for breakfast; to stagger away from the music school with after Theory of Music with Miss Cornford; to sympathise with when our names appeared on The Jonah List; to comb the dictionary for rude words with (to be fair, we were inclusive on this issue and invited Della to join in. She repaid our faith in her by discovering fart and fornication while Chrissie and I had only progressed as far as catamite and cohabit).
We wrote stories and poetry side by side. I recall an epic of free verse called ‘Catching the Silver’, of which Chrissie said in a letter to her parents, ‘The title was better than the poem’. We watched West Side Story together five times, once in a French cinema (without subtitles) on a school trip to Menton; it inspired our roman-fleuve, ‘Saints and Sinners’, which we wrote in alternating chapters. I took Saints and Chrissie took Sinners. We went swoony over film stars and rock stars and then real boys together. Our friendship featured intense analysis, familiar to anyone who has been a teenage girl, of What He Said and What He Meant; ludicrously tiresome (to adults) running jokes and arcane catchphrases, just the first word of which would convulse us all morning (particularly potent when whispered in Chapel). Reading the diaries she kept from the second term of Middle Five onwards, reliving the times we spent together, is wonderful. People moan now about having been sent to boarding school and come out with all sorts of stories about how their lives were thus blighted, but I could never feel that way because if I hadn’t gone to Felixstowe I would never have had the chance to experience such a glorious friendship.
A while back, I appeared on a BBC Radio 4 programme about boarding school and positively choked up when it came to talking about having her as a friend. I have never liked anyone so much. To have that experience, of having someone who knows exactly what you mean without your having to explain; of trusting someone with all your thoughts and ideas (and some of mine were floridly exuberant and left field), and knowing you would never be made fun of or criticised, was wonderful. Our friendship was my defence against the vicissitudes of boarding school life: the soul-blistering tickings-off; the agonies of being dumped by letter by a boy; humiliations so intense that you only admitted them in solemn vows of eternal secrecy; mean prefects and mad teachers, against whom we were a two-girl fortress.
I’ve never found starting to write a book easy. When it was all beginning, she was the first person I rang, and she promptly emailed me a list of names and addresses of some of our former school friends. While I was reading it, I had the same feeling as I’d had all through our years at Felixstowe: I had somebody with me. I wasn’t alone in the world.
‘You had to have a friend,’ says Chrissie. ‘A friend you’d chosen rather than being thrown together as the last two left.’
‘Yes. You kept me going. I would have drowned without you.’
‘That’s funny,’ she says. ‘I always leant on you as the strong one.’
I try to tell her what our friendship has meant to me, and thank her for all the joy it has given me, but it’s threatening to get a bit weepy. Chrissie’s mouth is turned down at the corners and I’ve got something in my eye. We hurry back to Ridley and the chapel. A woman comes to the door as we stand outside, giggling at the memories, at Cawley and Maggie crossing themselves, counting how many times Elly-J said ‘and’, and organising whose turn it was to faint and be carried out before the sermon.
The door opens and a woman says, very severely, ‘We do computer programming work very quietly in here,’ which just sets us off again and, as we walk along the path below Cranmer, it gets colder, windier and wetter – Sunny Felixstowe at its worst. We think of those cloaks blowing around, letting in the cold air as we trooped down the road from school to Cranmer for supper. We think of Karen, the scandalous matron, bolting out of the dining room to throw up in the tamarisks. We think of Bretch pedalling along Maybush Lane on her bicycle, swaying from side to side.
We are in hysterics.
29
NEWS OF OLD GIRLS
MY RIDLEY FRIENDS
Freedom at last. We went to university or art school, or trained as secretaries or nurses or teachers; we shared flats and went to parties, and wore what we wanted. Some of us found jobs and others travelled. We all got married – those I know about, anyway. I couldn’t track everyone down. Beth was last spotted at London University (as it was known then) in the late 1960s. We think she might have gone to South America. The trails on Bobbie, Erica, Marlee and Marion went cold early on, too. Geraldine, who had the fling with the lad painting Ridley, is just a jaw-dropping memory for everyone.
Della left at the end of Lower Six. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer. I really couldn’t. I still have nightmares about it now. I wasn’t homesick. I didn’t like home much either. I think I was waiting to grow up.’ She went to art school but spent her working life as a librarian. Now she lives by the sea on an unspoilt part of the east coast and is married to one of the nicest men you could hope to meet. She has a son and a granddaughter and looks as attractive as ever. I went to visit her and we were joined by Cath, who lives not far away and whose gorgeous copper-coloured hair is now discreetly blond. Cath had a successful nursing career, which continued until she married. Now she has retired she can indulge her great passion, breeding collie dogs. It was wonderful to see them both again, as it was Lindy and Prue. In some weird way, they all look the same to me now as they did at school. They always will.
Annie
In spite of her misery in Upper Five, Annie did outstandingly well at O Level. She wanted to leave and do A Levels at Chelmsford High, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. Nor would she allow her to take Geography and Biology, her favourite subjects, because she wanted her to go into the Foreign Office. So Annie wasted a year doing Languages, which she didn’t really want to do. She left after Lower Six and went to France to learn the language, and from there she went to live with a marquis and marquesa in Madrid. Theoretically she was studying A Levels on her own. She went back to Felixstowe to sit the exams and spent the night in the San. It was horrible. She was part of it but not part of it. She got two Ds.
Nobody specifically suggested university. They didn’t know what to do with her. ‘There was a feeling that the kind of girls who went to uni were the ones who played golf and learned to drive,’ she says, ‘and I had never had much to do with them. I wish I had. I felt nobody was interested in me, and I sunk.’
So, off she went to train as a secretary. One day her first boss asked her to sew a button on his shirt, and then he said, ‘Well, I’m wearing the shirt, so you’ll have to sit on my lap to do it.’
This would not do. Back to Spain she went, ending up as the dolly bird on the beach teaching fat Germans to water-ski. So different from anything that had gone before. So many things to do. So much fun. She had a ball! You could do anything! She’d been so miserable, and now life was like, �
��Hey!’
‘I ended up working at Ford, in Warley, near Brentford, which was lucrative but incredibly dull. Then I ran the postgrad medical centre in a hospital in Essex. My dad was a GP, so people knew me. There were parties, boyfriends. I’d already decided, I’m used to dealing with doctors, don’t fight it any longer, so I trained as a nurse. Got married, had kids, blah blah blah.’
Sometimes, when I was asking my friends about their Felixstowe lives, they would tell me the funniest anecdotes which, for one reason or another, couldn’t be fitted into the story. One concerns the time that Annie went back to Felixstowe for the day with her three girls, then aged nine, seven and five. It was a beautiful day – the sun was shining, the sea sparkling. Naturally the girls wanted a wee, so she took them to the Ridley toilets. When they came emerged, Bretch was standing outside, eavesdropping. Plus ça change!
Annie sent me a list of what she had taken from taken from school: 1) Am very independent and can cope with most problems. 2) I still enjoy tennis and other outdoor activities. 3) Am very seldom cold. 4) I appreciate the things I actually learned. 5) I will eat anything.
‘They weren’t the greatest days of my life,’ she says, ‘but it made me who I am.’
Helen
It was 1967 and Helen had no intention of being in the school after Jonah left. She wanted to do A Level Music and needed to do it in a music environment so, after spring term, Lower Six, she went to Cambridge Tech before going on to the Royal College of Music. She finished there in 1972. But she had been playing the piano since she was four. She’d had double piano with Miss Cornford every week, learned the timpani and the recorder for school plays, the clarinet because they wanted her in the orchestra, the guitar and the organ because she was the school’s musical Jill-of-all-trades. She’d had enough of music for a while. And she liked straight lines and fiddly bits, so she went to work in editorial and design for the Antique Collectors Club. Then she got married and had two daughters. But she still finds herself waking up from a dream in which she’s been galloping around Ridley, in that cloak with its holes where the pockets should have been for you to put your hands through. In the gales and the wind and the fog for six years.
‘My music and its profound influence in my life – with dear Cornford’s help, of course – has now come full circle. I have a flourishing private practice teaching singing and piano to adults and schoolchildren, which for years I swore I would never do! I love every minute of it. To have an aptitude for music is one thing, but to go to a school where it was nurtured and encouraged so much, where there were endless opportunities to go to two or three celebrity concerts or civic concerts every term, where the teaching was exceptional, that was indeed special. I shall forever be grateful to Cornford, the music school and Jonah.’
Helen’s sister Lydia, who sang so beautifully at the nativity concert at the end of my first term, took up her place at Cambridge. Somewhere along the way her heart took a detour: love, marriage, children. She only got a 2.2 because she didn’t keep her eye on the ball; she’d just got engaged. That didn’t matter really; she always found work she wanted to do. All Cambridge Voices’ recordings, the Rodolfus choir, Herald Records, doing all their CD covers. Every year she held an Epiphany party, to a time-honoured formula, with the family and all the music people she was involved with. Saturday supper, people sleeping on floors. The party started again on Sunday morning.
In 2006 the parties stopped for good, when Lydia died of endometrial cancer. She had flatly refused chemotherapy. Before she died she received hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails. Her sons read them to her. Her memorial service was at St John’s, Cambridge, where her working life had been spent.
I told Helen about the notes of the song, the voice I’d heard at the end of my first term, the one that still sings in my mind’s ear. ‘It was a girl’s treble,’ she says. ‘It was like that right to the end.’
Gill
Jonah might have gone, but she saw to it that ‘her’ girls were all right, and Gill left in 1968 to study English at Bristol University. After that, she wanted to travel. She did not become the first female pirate, the ambition she had confided to Jonah during her entrance interview, but something even better: she became a national windsurfing champion in her adopted country, Australia.
‘The YMCA used to run all these courses,’ she says. ‘I was thirty-three and hadn’t done much sailing. I just did it because I could get a discount on the class. It very quickly became obvious that I was one of the only females in Western Australia who could actually do it, and I won a National.’
She was selected for the 1984 World Championships. They were held in Largs, in Scotland. She did not come back with a medal but found a husband. ‘We were all shivering, and Hugh said, “Who would like to put their hands in my pockets?”, and I was the only one who did.’
Caroline
Caroline, who was so homesick on first joining, was not encouraged by the school to follow her natural bent as a practical, nurturing person. In consequence, she was ‘hoicked out’ after O Levels. Her mother had told her that if she didn’t know what else to do she should learn to cook, so first she went to Eastbourne College of Domestic Economy, where she was taught to just decorate everything with parsley, and then to Cordon Bleu. Being in London, doing what she turned out to be terribly good at and enjoyed doing, was life-changing.
‘It was creative, like lighting a touch paper – the drinking, the smoking, the colours, the fun, the boyfriends – it was just magic, wasn’t it? I’ve never understood how people can say schooldays are the happiest of your life.’
She went on to cook for Henry Kissinger, Agatha Christie and Margaret Thatcher. She lived in with Peter Sellers at weekends, and among the guests she cooked for was Ringo Starr. ‘He was a very well-brought-up lad, and came in to say thank you.’
After that, life was marriage, children and lots of cooking. She worked between each of the kids. Marriage had its ups and downs, and after she was divorced she became production manager of County magazine and organised concerts, art exhibitions and conferences. A few years ago she started a new career as a maternity nurse. She is proud of what she has achieved, considering she was not regarded as bright enough to do A Levels, and thinks that whoever says you can’t qualify for anything over the age of fifty-nine is talking rot.
Cherry
Cherry was offered a place at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to study medicine but turned it down to train at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she met and married a fellow medical student. She has a son and a daughter, both of whom also work in medicine. She was a consultant paediatrician for many years but later fulfilled her ambition to work overseas for Médecins Sans Frontières, an independent humanitarian organisation providing medical assistance to people who would otherwise be denied access to healthcare.
Wisty
Wisty did her degree in Spanish at St Andrews then took a year out to go travelling, which turned into a lifetime. She met and married her husband in the USA, where she breeds and shows Appaloosa horses.
Juno
Juno left after her first term in Upper Six and spent six months in France as an au pair, then returned to England and became a beauty consultant, which she continued with after marriage and children. She was successfully treated for breast cancer in her late forties.
Sukie
Sukie left after Lower Six because her father could no longer afford the fees. Her ambition was to be a lawyer, but a Latin O Level was required back then and she failed it twice. So she gave up that thought in favour of the Foreign Office.
‘Why do you want the Foreign Office?’ asked Bretch.
‘Because I’d like to go abroad.’
‘Well, you won’t go abroad till you’re at least twenty-one.’
Oh God, that’s forever, she thought. So her mother found her a job through The Lady, looking after three little boys in Kent who ate more at one meal than she did in a week. Then she went to St James Secretarial Col
lege, and that got her a job abroad – she worked for a dermatologist in South Africa. She then came home and married a naval officer, and had a daughter and a son. And at the age of forty-three she went to university at last, did an LLb and became an academic lawyer, teaching at Southampton Solent University. ‘It was,’ she says, ‘a lovely ending. I’ve had a lovely life.’
Joanna, Gay and Rosie
Joanna achieved good grades in her A Levels, but no one encouraged her to go to university. Instead she was offered four choices of career: nursing, occupational therapy, teaching or secretarial. She was accepted by a teaching college in Lincoln, a poor exchange, she felt, for her first choice of a life with the undergraduates at Cambridge by going to Homerton, or her second choice, a life of nightclubs in London by going to Roehampton. So she turned it down but did get her wish by being accepted at the ‘Ox and Cow’ secretarial college in Oxford. She met lots of suitable young men and eventually landed her first job, Secretary to the President of Corpus Christi. Mummy was terribly pleased when she married a Guards Officer because Felixstowe’s education in the social graces meant she would know what to do as the wife of a Commanding Officer.
After two years at the Institut Francais in London, Gay qualified as a bilingual secretary and worked with a large American legal firm for a handsome young French lawyer, unfortunately already married. She met Jamie, her future husband, an accountant at Deloittes in Paris. Soon after their wedding they left for Tehran, but after two-a-half years they had to flee the country because of the Iranian revolution. They eventually moved back to England and have three daughters and three grandsons. Gay always loved music, her piano lessons with Cornbags and singing in the Chapel choir, and she has ended up as a piano teacher. She says, ‘I also sing in many choirs!’
Undecided when she left school as to what she should do, Rosie was sent, like Joanna before her, to the ‘Ox and Cow’. ‘My mother never hid the fact that she felt it gave us a chance to find a “suitor”. I met Ashley a year later, when I was nineteen, and he asked my father for my hand in marriage in 1975 but my father refused. My mother had decided he was unsuitable as he was still a medical student and had no means!’
